ESCO is a big European list of jobs and the skills each job needs. It's written in lots of languages so everyone can use the same words.
ESCO is the European Commission's free classification of about 3,000 occupations and nearly 14,000 skills. Each occupation lists the skills that are essential and the ones that are optional. It's useful for describing roles in a way that's comparable across teams and countries.
ESCO links occupations (mapped to ISCO-08) to essential and optional skills and knowledge concepts, in all EU languages. Use it for skills-based role descriptions, gap analysis and crosswalking to O*NET for task detail.
What ESCO is
ESCO stands for European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations. The European Commission maintains it. It's free to browse and download, and it's published in all the official EU languages and a few others.
It has two main parts that matter here:
- Occupations, around 3,000, each mapped to the international ISCO-08 classification.
- Skills and knowledge, nearly 14,000 concepts, from "use spreadsheets software" to "assess risk factors".
How they connect
Each occupation lists skills as essential or optional. An essential skill is one you'd expect anyone in the role to have. An optional one depends on the specific job. That split is useful when writing role profiles or spotting where training is needed.
ESCO and O*NET compared
ESCO is strongest on skills and knowledge. ONET is strongest on tasks and work context. For mapping decisions you usually want both: ONET's task statements to find where decisions happen, and ESCO's skills to describe what people need to make them well. The European Commission has published a crosswalk between the two.
Using it for UK roles
The UK uses its own Standard Occupational Classification (SOC 2020). ESCO occupations map to ISCO-08, and there are published mappings between ISCO and UK SOC, so you can move between them with some care. In practice, start with the closest ESCO occupation, check its skills against your job descriptions, and note the differences.