ESCO / ISCO-08 (cross-country role comparison spine)
MethodISCO-08 · ESCO · occupation classification
ISCO-08 is the international classification of occupations; ESCO is the European classification built on top of it, mapping each occupation to exactly one ISCO-08 code. It is the glue that lets you assert a role in Spain and the same role in Germany are the same role.
Without a classification spine, six national salary figures are not comparable: they are six loose figures with similar names. ESCO/ISCO-08 solves equivalence — not title translation — by assigning each occupation a unique hierarchical code, with crosswalks to SOC (US) and O*NET. For a per-country AI Operations dataset this is the precondition of any honest comparison: before publishing "Spain pays X and Germany pays Y" you have to be able to show that X and Y measure the same occupation. Reading ESCO/ISCO-08 as a prerequisite for a multi-country salary dataset is Implementa's editorial position; the classification itself is a public standard from the European Commission and the ILO.
How it differs from
- Title translation
- Translating the name does not guarantee the job content is the same in both markets.
- A job board's own taxonomy
- Every board invents its own; with no public crosswalk there is no defensible comparison.
Examples
- Checking that a Spanish source's "AI Engineer" and a German source's "KI-Entwickler" map to the same code before comparing them.
- Discarding a figure because the source aggregates three distinct ISCO occupations under one marketing title.
FAQ
- Is there already an ISCO code for AI roles?
- Not at the granularity of today's market: new titles get filed under existing codes, and that is exactly where false comparisons slip in.
- Do I need it to publish one country's salary?
- No. You need it the moment you publish two and put them side by side.
Related terms
Sources & further reading
- ESCO — ISCO · 2026-09-28
ESCO — International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) · 2026-09-28 · E3