5.4.6 Occupational profiles

Occupational profiles

A bridge and a common language between education and labour market

Occupations are an engine of the labour market and demand for skills. Descriptions of occupational profiles have been on demand among all groups of stakeholders of skills development and labour market information systems. Occupational profiles based on agreed terms and taxonomy serve the fundamental purpose to connect education and the labour market.

Most countries have renewed their classifications of occupations, bringing them in accordance with international standards, such as the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), and have deployed efforts to develop occupational profiles – of a national or sectoral dimension. The diversity of approaches to develop occupational profiles reflects differences in:

• Types of labour markets, organisation of work
• Policy priorities and objectives
• Stakeholders’ interests
• Internationalisation of business and supply chains

Occupational profiles fulfil multiple purposes:

• The role of occupational profiles in developing qualifications standards and aspects of educational standards (curricula, assessment) has nurtured long-standing debates, and underpinned reforms in vocational education and training. This matter is discussion specifically in another chapter of this toolkit.
• Employers need up-to-date and credible occupational profiles to support Human Resource management functions: recruitment, internal mobility, training and comparability with competitors.
• Career guidance services use occupational profiles to design user-friendly information on tasks, occupations, and related skills.
• For job centres, occupational profiles are essential tools for matching job vacancies with candidates’ profiles.

New Big Data techniques applied to large volume of online job vacancies, allow fine-grained analysis of skills and diverse interconnections with occupations. The wide and growing possibilities of Big Data for LMI can be used to support renewal of existing occupational profiles.

Internationally recognised systems providing information on occupational profiles: examples

Users avail of varied sources of information on occupations and profiles, more or less specifically tailored for certain institutional target-users, such as job centres, or operable by the wider public (employers, education and training providers, career guidance).

ESCO: European Skills / Competences qualifications and Occupations

ESCO is composed of three pillars, containing:

• Pillar Occupations: 2,942 occupations
• Pillar Skills / competences: 13,485 skills / competences
• Pillar Qualifications: 9,458 qualifications from 10 countries (Belgium, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia)

ESCO pillar “Occupations”: in ESCO, each occupation is mapped to exactly one ISCO-08 code. ISCO-08 can therefore be used as a hierarchical structure for the occupations pillar. ISCO-08 provides the top four levels for the occupations pillar. ESCO occupations are located at level 5 and lower. These “ESCO occupations” can be easily accessed browsing the structure of occupations at: https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/occupation.

The ESCO occupational profile typically contains the fields indicated in the Table below. Information on transversal skills and competences is organised under ESCO pillar “Skills”, to be consulted separately.

Example of ESCO Profile – Synthetic materials engineer (below ISCO 2145 “Chemical engineers”).

ESCO skills pillar distinguishes between i) skill/competence concepts and ii) knowledge concepts by indicating the skill type. There is however no distinction between skills and competences. It also includes an explanation of the concept in the form of description, scope note and definition. The skills pillar of ESCO does not contain a full hierarchical structure but is structured in four different manners:

• Through their relationship w https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/occupationith occupations, i.e. by using occupational profiles as entry point;
• In the part of the transversal knowledge, skills and competences through a skills hierarchy;
• Through relationships indicating how knowledge, skills and competences are relevant to other knowledge, skills and competences (in particular in cases of skill contextualisation);
• Through functional collections that allow to select subsets of the skills pillar.

Information in ESCO pillar Skills

In 2019-2020 ESCO Pillar Skills / Competences is undergoing important new developments:

• Development of skills hierarchy
• Improvement of transversal skills

New ESCO Skills Hierarchy aims to:

Search for and retrieve systematically the 13,485 ESCO skill and knowledge concepts to facilitate

• Compilation of CVs and job vacancies
• Annotation of qualifications
• Mapping national classifications to ESCO
• Creation of skill (self-)assessment tools
• Provision of targeted career guidance
• Matching jobseekers with job vacancies based on skills

Overview of the new ESCO skills hierarchy (draft)

ESCO – extract of Skills section: codes, group titles, and definitions (draft)

ESCO - new hierarchy Attitudes and values (draft)

O*NET

The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a comprehensive database of worker attributes and job characteristics. As the replacement for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), O*NET information is the United States primary source of occupational information. O*NET OnLine has detailed descriptions of the world of work for use by job seekers, workforce development and HR professionals, students, researchers, and more.

O*NET is a rich and unique database that centralises large volume of information on occupations and disseminates it for the wider public, using a simple application. This information is developed in partnership with the Department of Labour and the VET authority.

O*NET “Find Occupations” provides easy user access to occupational information and occupational fiches. Users can browse Find Occupations by:

• Bright Outlook occupations
• Career Cluster
• Green economy sector
• Industry
• Job family
• Job zone
• STEM

The example below illustrates the wealth of information that end-users can obtain in just three clicks in “Find occupations”.

O*NET occupation

O*NET is significantly easier to use and richer in occupational profiles information than ESCO, which is partly explained by the different nature of both instruments: ESCO is a taxonomy, while O*NET is a comprehensive occupational and labour market information system.