Tesseract Foundational Research: Skills & Labour Market
Where England’s occupational standards meet Europe’s skills vocabulary
To read English apprenticeship and skills data against the reference vocabulary the rest of Europe uses, you need a crosswalk, and you need to know how far to trust each link. This is that crosswalk, built openly, stated honestly as a lexical baseline, and published with its gaps rather than around them.
The direction of travel
ESCO is the reference classification of occupations and skills across Europe, used for labour-market analytics, matching and cross-border comparison. England’s Skills England maintains a separate, nationally specific set of occupational standards behind apprenticeships and technical education. As skills policy leans harder on data (bootcamps, adult-skills funding, local skills improvement plans), the need to translate between the national taxonomy and the international one only grows. A crosswalk is the join, and it is only useful if it is honest about confidence.
The method, and its honest label
For each of the 1,269 Skills England occupations, we compare its name against every ESCO candidate’s title and English alternative labels, keep the best normalised similarity (sequence ratio combined with token overlap and containment), and band it. This is a lexical crosswalk, stated as such: a candidate-generation and triage asset, not an authoritative equivalence. Every link carries its similarity score and match method so a user can set their own threshold, and the unmatched set is published in full.
exactMatch114label identity (similarity ≥ 0.95)
closeMatch281strong lexical match (≥ 0.82)
relatedMatch270partial lexical match (≥ 0.62)
unmatched604no lexical match ≥ 0.62
The gap is the finding
Just over half of England’s occupational standards (52%) find any lexical match to ESCO, and only 31% match strongly. The 604 unmatched occupations are not a failure of the method; they are a measurement of how far England’s occupational language sits from ESCO’s, which is exactly the surface a semantic crosswalk or a national extension to ESCO has to cover. A lexical method sets the floor and names the work; an embeddings-plus-adjudication approach would recover more of the related and unmatched tail, and that is stated as the next step rather than quietly assumed.
Where this goes
The crosswalk builds directly on our Skills England occupational maps ontology (the 1,269 standards modelled as a graph with the SOC crosswalk), and pairs with our open PIAAC skills-mobility research. Together they let English skills data be read against SOC for national statistics and against ESCO for international comparison, from one open, reproducible base.
Independent, self-initiated open research. Skills England names under the Open Government Licence v3.0; ESCO © European Union, CC BY 4.0; this crosswalk CC BY 4.0. Endorsed by neither body.
View the open crosswalk
Banded SKOS mappings, the full unmatched set, and the reproducible build.
