The data in this domain provides information about the skills requirements of jobs and the distribution of jobs by skills requirement within the labour market. The charts below cover two types of indicators:

1. the absolute number of jobs requiring certain skills (education) level;
2. the relative distribution of jobs by skills (education) level as well as the distribution of workers within occupations by sex.

For further information about definitions and sources and methodology please see below at the end of the page.

Please make use of the interactive filtering options to highlight data by country, years, age groups, and gender.

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Definitions

A job is defined in ISCO-08 as “a set of tasks and duties performed, or meant to be performed, by one person, including for an employer or in self-employment”.

Occupation refers to the kind of work performed in a job. The concept of occupation is defined as a “set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterized by a high degree of similarity”. A person may be associated with an occupation through the main job currently held, a second job, a future job or a job previously held.

Skill is defined as the ability to carry out the tasks and duties of a given job. For the purposes of ISCO-08, two dimensions of skill are used to arrange occupations into groups. These are skill level and skill specialization.

Skill level is defined as a function of the complexity and range of tasks and duties to be performed in an occupation. In this data, high skilled jobs refer to such occupations as managers, professionals and technicians, medium skilled jobs refer to such occupations as Clerical, Services/Sales, Craft/Trades and Operators/Assemblers, while medium-low skilled jobs refer to such occupations as Agricultural and Elementary occupations.

For more information, refer to the ILO concepts and definitions page as well as the dedicated page covering skills at: https://ilostat.ilo.org/resources/concepts-and-definitions/classification-occupation/

Sources and methodology

The data for the charts below is sourced from these data tables:

(1) “Employment by sex and occupation -- ILO modelled estimates, Nov. 2020 (thousands) | Annual”, table code “EMP_2EMP_SEX_OCU_NB_A”.

The data can be accessed here: https://ilostat.ilo.org/data/.

Warning about data quality: some of the data may be based on imputed observations. Imputed observations are not based on national data, are subject to high uncertainty and should not be used for country comparisons or rankings. For more information about the estimation and, where relevant, projection methodology, please refer to the ILOSTAT page on modelled estimates and projections.