Over the last several years, the Inter-American Development Bank [IDB] has carried out a set of projects, initiatives, and partnerships to better understand how the demand for different skills and occupations is changing across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The efforts to identify, track, and measure both occupations and skills have led us to a central challenge that the Inter-American Development Bank, and other organizations, have encountered: the lack of a common language and set of standards for comparing and analyzing skills across the region. Occupational and skills taxonomies a
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Over the last several years, the Inter-American Development Bank [IDB] has carried out a set of projects, initiatives, and partnerships to better understand how the demand for different skills and occupations is changing across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The efforts to identify, track, and measure both occupations and skills have led us to a central challenge that the Inter-American Development Bank, and other organizations, have encountered: the lack of a common language and set of standards for comparing and analyzing skills across the region. Occupational and skills taxonomies are structures developed to help provide this common language and set of standards for understanding and comparing skills. In its very simplest terms, a taxonomy is a classification scheme used to name and group related things based on discrete sets. Taxonomies often, but not exclusively, represent hierarchical relationships. A Skills Taxonomy, thus, provides a way to name and classify the variety concepts that we refer to when we say 'skills' in standardized way that also expresses their relationship to each other. Such taxonomies also provide a base for analyzing which skills are foundational or transversal across many occupations, those currently most in demand for specific occupations, and how these skills needs are evolving over time. This analysis, in turn, can facilitate better career management, better coordination and articulation of training and recruitment needs (WEF), and empower more informed educational and career transitions.
The objective of this note is to bring together lessons from the IDB's and other institutions' efforts to adapt a skills taxonomy for Latin America and the Caribbean countries. These efforts have focused primarily on the ability to gather and make use of labor market information on skills demand from non-traditional data sources like online job vacancies. Most of these efforts have used the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy to underpin the identification and classification of skills. This note is intended to be a starting point and set of considerations for policymakers who may be considering, or already embarking on, similar efforts to use ESCO or other taxonomical structures to help better analyze, understand and use skills-level information for decision making. It also seeks to motivate the need for additional classification systems that help governments take stock of its citizen's skills in increasingly complex and rapidly changing labor markets.
Excerpt from publication.
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