Comparing European skills and competences: prospects and challenges

Transcription

1 Comparing European skills and competences: prospects and challenges Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber Senior Consultant for multilingual taxonomies, education and labour market information InGRID conference Brussels,

2 Content EU initiatives focusing at skills/competences The vision behind General challenges Challenges addressed by DISCO and ESCO DISCO I and II facts and figures ESCO facts and figures ESCO main challenge 1: maintenance ESCO main challenge 2: formulation/translation ESCO main challenge 3: skills/competences as common denominator EURES, Europass CV ans Texas A&M Univ. examples of competences Intelligent software and internet data Crawling and text mining software However challenges remain (Jobtour example) We need transparent crawling and text mining

3 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)...

4 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

5 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...

6 Challenges addressed by DISCO and ESCO 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

7 DISCO I and II facts and figures DISCO I: 1 st non-sector-specific multilingual taxonomy of skills/competences Duration: 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: Duration: 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'

8 ESCO, European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations facts and figures ESCO portal: 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 2015

9 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/competences While: 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

10 ESCO main challenge 2: formulation/translation 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...

11 ESCO main challenge 3 skills/competences as 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

12 EURES examples of skills descriptions Skills: Key words, nominalizations, phraseological expressions with verbs Skills: programming languages Work context info Responsibilities: phraseological expressions with verbs

13 Europass CV examples of personal skills

14 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

15 Intelligent software and internet data...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 -...

16 Intelligent crawling and text mining software 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...

17 However challenges remain 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...

18 Example Jobtour: divergent skills expressions

19 We need transparent crawling and text mining 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 softwareblackbox >> 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)

20 Thank you for your attention! Mag.a MAS Heidemarie Müller-Riedlhuber Senior Consultant for multilingual taxonomies, education and labour market information Mail: Coordinator of the reference projects: