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Comparing European skills and competences: prospects and challenges
Heidemarie Müller-RiedlhuberSenior Consultant for multilingual taxonomies,education and labour market information
InGRID conference Brussels, 20.10.2014
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
Content
EU initiatives focusing at skills/competencesThe vision behindGeneral challengesChallenges addressed by DISCO and ESCODISCO I and II – facts and figuresESCO – facts and figuresESCO main challenge 1: maintenanceESCO main challenge 2: formulation/translationESCO main challenge 3: skills/competences as common denominatorEURES, Europass CV ans Texas A&M Univ. examples of competencesIntelligent software and internet dataCrawling and text mining softwareHowever challenges remain (Jobtour example)We need transparent crawling and text mining
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
EU initiatives focusing at skills/competences
● EQF, European Qualification Framework● ECTS, European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System ● ECVET, European Credit system for Vocational Education & Training● Europass (CV, language, mobility pass, Certificate, Diploma Suppl.)● ESCO, European Skills, Competences, qualifications and Occupations● Information portals: European Skills panorama, EQF portal...● Inventory, guidelines for validation of non-formal & informal learning● European Area of Skills and Qualifications● Europe 2020 initiatives New skills for new jobs and● Digital Agenda for Europe (Grand Coalition on digital skills and jobs)
.....
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
The vision behind
● Free mobility of workers and learners within Europe:
- Common EU labour market: cross-border recruiting & job placement
- Comparable education systems and qualifications within Europe
● Better analysis, forecasting, controlling of LM & ET developments
- Improved common data basis/statistics (e.g. LM demand, ET supply)
- Collection of European data
- Development of common description formats and standards
● Lifelong learning to keep European labour force competitive
>> Transparency and comparability of skills/competences as focus
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
General challenges
● Different educational systems and descriptions of qualifications within Europe > missing comparability of qualifications & OCC
● Changing approach to descriptions of qualifications > educational attainment- instead of skills/competence-orientation
● Different scope of occupations, professional specialisations, division of labour within Europe > divergent scopes of occupational profiles
● Different understandings of concepts such as „competence“, „qualification“ etc. and different focus on „relevant information“ within Europe > different approaches to main concepts
● Different classification systems of occupations and skills used at sectoral, national and international level, in public and private sector > different classification systems in use.....
● Absence of a common multilingual vocabulary for describing SC in different contexts (e.g. CVs, job vacancies, ET offers, qualification descriptions) >> common terminological standard
● Absence of a common approach in describing OCC and Q in labour market and education >> skills/competences as a common denominator
● Absence of a common reference framework for mapping other classifications (international comparability) >> reference framework
● Absence of reliable, peer-reviewed translations of SC (ESCO also OCC, Q) in multilingual Europe >> translation tool
● Absence of an open taxonomy standard to be used by intelligent software e.g. to improve the matching of EU job offers & vacancies, learning opportunities & learners >> open taxonomy standard for software
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
Challenges addressed by DISCO and ESCO
DISCO I and II – facts and figures
DISCO I: 1st non-sector-specific multilingual taxonomy of skills/competencesDuration: October 2004 – February 2008
Coordination: 3s Unternehmensberatung, Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber
Partnership: 9 operative, 11 supporting partners
Results: Thesaurus of skills/competences: approx. 70,000 terms, 7 lang.
Website: term search/translation, document profiling Europass CV
DISCO book in 3 languages (EN, FR, GE)
DISCO II: www.disco-tools.euDuration: November 2010 – October 2012
Coordinator: 3s Unternehmensberatung, H. Müller-Riedlhuber and P. Ziegler
Partnership: 12 operative, 9 supporting partners
Results: Updated thesaurus: 104,000 terms, 33,000 phrases; 11 languages
Website: term&phrase search/translation, profiling of 5 doc. types
Lifelong Learning Award 2013 Austria: 2nd place in category 'products & results'
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
ESCO, European Skills, Competences, Qualifi-cations and Occupations – facts and figures
ESCO portal: http://www.escoportal.eu/esco/home
ESCO v0:● launched in October 2013● available in 22 languages● contains more than 200,000 terms
- 4,761 occupations per language- 5,000 skills/competences per language- a number of examples of international qualifications
● will be implemented in the EU job portal EURES, the EU Skills Panorama and the Europass CV
● offers free data download in rdf, csv and xml formats
ESCO v0.1 (v0 further developed by Sector Reference Groups for up to 3 sectors): launch currently scheduled for early 2015Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
ESCO main challenge 1: maintenance
Keep a complex and overarching multilingual classification up-to-date with trustable/reliable and correct data for 3 types of data:
- occupations (links to ISCO, national classifications of occupations)- qualifications (links to EQF portal, national registers of qualifications)- skills/competencesWhile:● new occupations (not job titles!) show up on the labour market (e.g.
in AT: modular apprenticeship electrical engineer)● outdated occupations disappear (e.g. AT: miller > process engineer in
the grain industry) ● New qualifications and certificates appear (must be evaluated with
regard to relevance and legal status: e.g. Commercial Pilot Licence is well-known; Certificate for internal energy auditors is not)
● SC are differently understood/formulated in different contexts
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
● Handling the ambiguity of terms and handling language differences● Defining terminological guidelines for the formulation of terms in
each pillar (OCC, Q, SC) – in each language● Defining guidelines for the translation of terms:
- occupations (preferred terms and synonyms; transsectoral OCC)
- skills and competences (preferred terms and synonyms; soft skills, job-specific skills, transsectoral skills, learning outcomes etc.)
● Qualification titles are seldomly translated (only authorized bodies)● Instead of 1:1 word translation equivalent concepts have to be found ● Maintenance effort of multilingual taxonomies: each small change
requires updates in all language versions
...
ESCO main challenge 2: formulation/translation
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
ESCO main challenge 3 – skills/competencesas common denominator
Competence-based descriptions of occupations (LM) and qualifications (ET) deal with different focuses and formulations of skills/competences● Labour market:
- stronger focus on „concrete“ skills or abilities, e.g knowing/ handling/dealing with specific machines, programmes, tools, products- key-word approach (e.g. nominalizations)- often: listing of product names, tools, programme languages etc. - for responsibilities in job ads: task-oriented small phrases
● Education and training:- focus on learning outcomes & units of learning outcomes that can be assessed, validated and recognized - elaborated descriptive phrases approach- differentiating levels of proficiency- simple, specific basic action verbs to support assessment
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
EURES examples of skills descriptions
Skills:Key words, nominalizations, phraseological expressions with verbs
Responsibilities:phraseological expressions with verbs
Skills: programming languages
Work context info
Europass CV examples of personal skills
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
Texas A&M Univ. learning outcomes examples
>> Learning Outcomes are formulated more general, in phrases and use simple, specific action verbs to describe what learners are expected to demonstrate
BUT: still no established homogenous approach in describing learning outcomes
...may help to overcome some of the above mentioned challenges, e.g.
● Maintenance of OCC, Q and SC classifications- searching relevant web sources for additional terms (e.g. synonyms) and comparing them with already covered terms (text mining)- indicating the relevance of terms: quantity of usage, source, context
● Translation of occupations and skills/competences:- searching in relevant web sources for suitable terms/equivalents- indicating the relevance of terms: quantity of usage, source, context
● Supporting the search for new qualifications at national/internat. level:- searching in relevant web sources for new qualifications- indicating the relevance of Q: quantity of usage, source, context
● Offering tools taking advantage of using such common terminologies: - ontology-driven semantic matching solutions- CV, job ad, curricula etc. profiling tools- .....
Intelligent software and internet data
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
● to support the maintenance of complex multilingual classifications● to provide background information (e.g. for matching), translation support etc.
● to provide data for analysing specific texts, e.g. job vacancies
- how many and which jobs have been searched in a region, branch...- which skills are mentioned in connection with a specific OCC, Q, ...- which skills are often in demand for a single or a group of OCC, in a certain region, timescope, branch etc.- which new skills are increasingly mentioned in job ads- which e.g. general IT skills are often in demand- how often are soft skills stated in job ads of a specific occupation- which qualifications are in demand .....
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
Intelligent crawling and text mining software
● Semantic ambiguity of terms and phrases (esp. skills/competence)● Having sufficient amounts of data that can be processed to provide
meaningful and statistically relevant information● Find the right sources and select relevant URLs ● Recognize relevant content correctly ● Store relevant content in the correct structured format ● Code job titles correctly to occupations ● Recognize skills/competences correctly● Recognize qualification titles correctly● Avoiding exponential growth of failures ....
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
However challenges remain
● Clients such as public institutions, enterprises, researchers etc. need „reliable“ data
● High degree of correctness of the delivered data and analysis is especially important for public insitutions and researchers who might want to process or publish the data
● Those clients do not trust in results delivered by a „software-blackbox“
>> When dealing with crawling and text mining software● Clients should be given the opportunity to test the quality of the
(interim) results● Crawling/text mining results and analysis must be traceable ● Feedback loops for users must be offered that might lead to
readjustments of the software (learning software + human input)
Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber, [email protected]
We need transparent crawling and text mining
Thank you for your attention!
Mag.a MAS Heidemarie Müller-RiedlhuberSenior Consultant for multilingual taxonomies,education and labour market information
Mail: [email protected]
Coordinator of the reference projects:www.disco-tools.euwww.disco-tools.orgwww.gehaltsrechner.gv.at
