What is EurOccupations?
In the project EurOccupations, 10 European universities and research institutes are developing an occupations database, including information on approximately 1500 – 2000 occupations in a variety of industries (from care & welfare to technology & manufacturing, from service occupations to agriculture & fishing). These occupations will be described within the context of 7 countries, namely: the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. The occupations database will include information such as occupational title and required educational level. Please note that the required educational level for the same occupation may differ between countries. Therefore, the database offers an insight into the comparability of educational structures within Europe.
Additionally, 150 occupations will be described in more detail. For these ‘key occupations’, the database will include task descriptions and required core competences, whereby each country will specify which are appropriate. By doing so, the database offers an insight into the comparability of occupational structures and occupational content within Europe.
The database is developed for occupations, not jobs. The concept of ‘occupation’ differs from the concept of a ‘job’. Occupations are groups of jobs with similar sets of tasks, independent of their corporate context. Jobs, on the other hand, are groups of similar tasks that are contingent on the division of labour within a specific organisation, where the features of these bundled tasks are mainly determined by the corporate context of the organisation involved. A job indicates a bundle of tasks, but also the location of these tasks within an organisation. For example: the occupation ‘machine operator’, in company X, may be sub-divided into the jobs ‘machine operator A’, ‘machine operator B’ and ‘machine operator C’.
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