The ESCO Secretariat would like to kindly remind all interested stakeholders about two ongoing calls for expressions of interest: the ESCO-NACE Crosswalk and the new ESCO Skills Clustering. These calls were previously communicated in the ESCO December Newsletter. If you wish to participate, please complete the surveys by 20 January 2025. Further details are provided below.

In Timisoara, Romania, the Geras project, funded by the European Social Fund, tackled isolation among elderly people with tailored support and community-building initiatives.

On 12th of December 2024, ESCO Secretariat offered a session that provided a comprehensive introduction to ESCO, covering its structure, how is it updated, and key use cases. Participants also learned how ESCO incorporates green and digital labels within its classification and how it can be used to link the learning outcomes of qualifications to ESCO skills.

On December 12, 2024, the European Commission organised a workshop focused on the transmission of labelled data to EURES. The session provided guidance on how to send ESCO codes to EURES and highlighted the most common errors encountered in the process.

This webinar organised by the OECD will explore effective policies, programmes, and initiatives to support volunteering. Tune in on 5 December for fresh insights on the topic, followed by a dynamic panel discussion with international experts and practitioners

ProFem 2.0, a centre for survivors of domestic and sexual violence from Czechia, is the winner of the 2023 REGIOSTARS award for the category ‘A social and inclusive Europe’. A total of seven EU-funded projects received REGIOSTAR awards, a label of excellence recognising their innovative, inclusive, and inspiring approaches to regional and social development.

Job titles form a cornerstone of today's human resources (HR) processes. Within online recruitment, they allow candidates to understand the contents of a vacancy at a glance, while internal HR departments use them to organize and structure many of their processes. As job titles are a compact, convenient, and readily available data source, modeling them with high accuracy can greatly benefit many HR tech applications. In this paper, the authors propose a neural representation model for job titles, by augmenting a pre-trained language model with co-occurrence information from skill labels extracted from vacancies. JobBERT method leads to considerable improvements compared to using generic sentence encoders, for the task of job title normalisation, for a new evaluation benchmark was released. You can access the full paper via the portal.

In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help the researchers to get insight into the labor market demands. In this work, they are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, they link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. The researchers tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention– skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human annotated skill-linking benchmark. You can read more about the findings via the portal.

The paper highlights the need for digital skill development in non-ICT professions, addressing challenges like lack of frameworks and AI acceptance. It suggests strategies for future-proof skill development to thrive in the digital economy. Drawing from a range of reputable sources, including the OECD and CEDEFOP, the paper underscores the need for digital competencies across sectors and outlines strategies for future-proof skill development. One primary challenge in addressing digital skill needs is identifying specific requirements across various occupations, organizational levels, and stages of job maturity. The rapid pace of digital technology acceleration further complicates this effort, making it difficult to create feasible HR tools that effectively combine frameworks such as ESCO and others for the new digital age. If you want to find out more about the paper you can download it via the portal.