Here's a brief comparative analysis of 2 most important public taxonomies related to skills and occupations.
O*Net
|
ESCO
|
|
Summary
|
Aligned with US standards;
RDBMS compatible;
Interests profiler tool and other tools that may be embedded in a custom
solution;
API to open training, certification and job opportunities in the US;
Covers general skills, abilities, interests, work values, work styles,
tools and technologies and relates them with occupations.
|
Aligned with EU standards;
Covers skills, but not Deep and wide hierarchy of skills;
Doesn’t cover abilities, interests, work values and work styles;
Multilingual.
|
Description
|
The O*NET (The Occupational Information Network) program is the US's
primary source of occupational information. Central to the project is the
O*NET database, containing information on hundreds of standardized and
occupation-specific descriptors. The database, which is available to the
public at no cost, is continually updated by surveying a broad range of
workers from each occupation. Information from this database forms the heart
of O*NET OnLine, an interactive application for exploring and searching occupations.
The database also provides the basis for Career Exploration Tools, a set of
valuable assessment instruments for workers and students looking to find or
change careers.
O*NET is being developed under the sponsorship of the US Department
of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) through a grant
to the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
|
ESCO is the multilingual classification of European Skills,
Competences, Qualifications and Occupations. ESCO is part of the Europe 2020
strategy. The ESCO classification identifies and categories skills,
competences, qualifications and occupations relevant for the EU labour market
and education and training. It systematically shows the relationships between
the different concepts. ESCO has been developed in an open IT format, is
available for use free of charge by everyone and can be accessed via the ESCO
portal. The first version of ESCO was published on 23 October 2013. This
release marks the beginning of the pilot and testing phase, including the
ESCO mapping pilot. Until end of 2016 the classification will be completely
revised. The final product will be launched as ESCO v1.
|
Data coverage
|
974 occupations from Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)
system used by Federal statistical
agencies described using 277 „descriptors“ organized into „The Content
Model“. The model contains: required abilities (e.g. speech clarity, near/far
vision), occupational interests, work
values, work styles, basic skills
(e.g. walking), cross-functional skills, domains of knowledge (e.g. Psychology),
items related to prior educational experience required to perform in a job,
items related to experience requirements, items related to occupational
requirements and items related to occupation-specific information, „job
zones“ that describe how much preparation for the job is needed, tasks for each
occupation. "Tools and technologies", related to United Nations
Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) taxonomy.
|
5380 occupations, 5737 skills (e.g. C# programming), 20
qualifications (just POC for narrow domain at the moment, not useful) and
their relations. Occupations, skills and qualifications are organized into a
hierarchies, e.g. „nurse“ is a part of following occupation hierarchy:
Technicians and associate professionals->Health associate
professionals->Nursing and midwifery associate professionals->Nursing
associate professionals->Nurse, medicine/surgery
|
Download format
|
The O*NET database is provided in five formats:
·
Microsoft Excel (XLSX)
·
Tab-delimited text files
·
SQL files for MySQL, PostgreSQL, or compatible
relational databases
·
SQL files for Microsoft SQL Server
·
SQL files for Oracle Database
|
The ESCO classification is currently available for download in three
data formats:
·
SKOS/RDF format: Full dataset with all
concepts and relationships in all languages;
works fine with Virtuoso triplestore
·
CSV format: Partial dataset with relationships
or with concepts from one ESCO pillar in one language, e.g. for import into
Microsoft Excel
·
XML format: Partial dataset with relationships
or with concepts from one ESCO pillar in one language
|
Additional tools
|
RESTful web service API (XML response format) with end-point for
occupations search by a keyword, industry, with bright outlook etc. It also
provides embedding „O*NET Interest Profiler“ that suggests careers based on work activity
preferences (acquired by a questionnaire).
|
-
|
Usage scenario:
|
Each user gets „job interest“ profile based on:
- explicit selection of „descriptors“ (abilities, skills, values etc.)
from GUI,
- implicit detection of interests using O*Net profiler,
- implicit detection of „descriptors“ using NLP against textual
profile.
Assuming that each job is assigned with occupation from Standard
Occupational Classification (SOC), „descriptors“ are implicitly assigned to
the job using data from O*Net database. Jobs are recommended to the users by comparison
of descriptors assigned to the users and descriptors assigned to the jobs'
occupations.
|
A set of skills is stored for each user by explicit selection from a
hierarchy of skills using GUI or by implicit detection/recommendation of
skills using NLP against textual profile. Each job is classified into ESCO
occupation, manually or using NLP. Jobs are recommended to the users by comparison
of users' skills and skills required for the occupations assigned to jobs.
|
