A Skills Taxonomy for LAC: Lessons Learned and a Roadmap for Future Users

This note brings together lessons from the IDBs 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 citizens skills in increasingly complex and rapidly changing labor markets.