European Skills, Competences and Occupations (ESCO) is a multilingual classification system that identifies and categorizes skills, competences, and occupations relevant for the EU labour market and education and training.

The ESCO skills pillar (https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en/classification/skill_main) contains more than 13,000 concepts and the ESCO occupations pilar contains more than 3,000 occupations.

This system is in a continuous process of improvement, and our EQVEGAN project has contributed with the following proposals which will be implemented soon:

• The occupation “food and vegetable preserver” will be eliminated due to its redundancy with other occupations;
• 3 new knowledge topics will be added: food ethics, food fraud, food authentication techniques;
• 3 new skills will be added: manage ethics issues in the food industry, ensure responsible sourcing in food supply chains, promote ethical eating;
• Knowledge and skills associated to different occupations will be updated:
  • Food production operator: 13 knowledge topics and 8 skills
  • Food technician: 13 new knowledge topics and 10 skills
  • Food technologist: 17 new knowledge topics and 18 skills

The EQVEGAN partnership is very pleased to contribute to the improvement of this outstanding European tool which is becoming increasingly relevant for the labour market and education and training.

Imagecredit: ESCO