State State-of-the-art report - WageIndicator.org

10. Summary
Some conclusions can be drawn. First, the he amount of information available on the National
Occupational Classification, its revisions and the concordance with ISCO vary per country.
Countries like United Kingdom and the Ne Netherlands therlands have extensive literature on the theoretical
backgrounds, the revision processes while in countries like Belgium this kind of information is
hardly available. For some countries no explicit information is available on why certain detailed
national l occupational information is converted to one ISCO group instead of another. This makes it
difficult to use the, scarcely, available detailed national and cross-national national occupational data in
comparative cross-national national research because no uniform method of converting NOC data to ISCO ISCO-
88 data was maintained.
Second, the latest versions of the occupational classifications can roughly be divided into
two periods: ISCO-88, 88, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and Spain updated their classifications at
the end of the eighties, early nineties; United Kingdom, France, and Poland updated their
classifications more recently, beginning of the 21 Century. Variations in the detailed occupations /
occupational groups in the NOC’s are therefore not only the result of economic differences in the
various countries, but also the result of differences in time period when the last version of the NOC
was updated. New occupations (like occupations in the ICT sector) can not be coded into ISCO ISCO-88
unit groups because they are not availa available, ble, while some NOC do have new unit groups in their
classifications (UK, FR, PL). Others have added these new groups to their classifications yet.
Therefore, the assignment of these new occupations to existing groups in the various NOC’s can
differ dramatically.
Third, NOC’s are primarily constructed for the national data collection and secondly for
international comparison. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that none of the NOC’s was available
in the English language. This, combined with the problems di discussed scussed above, hampers the use of
the detailed occupations classified in the NOC’s for the EurOccupations database. The use of more
up-to-date classifications, like the draft version of ISCO ISCO-08, the SOC2000, and the US Dictionary of
Occupational Title (DOT) ) to construct the EurOccupations database was therefore chosen (See
Deliverable D01a for the underlying principle principles of the database).
11. References
Budlender, D. (2002). Wither the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88)?
Working Paper per No. 9, Bureau of Statistics, Policy Integration Department, ILO, Geneva
CBS (2001). Standaard Beroepenclassificatie 1992: Editie 2001. Centraal Bureau voor de
Statistiek, Voorburg
Elias, P. (1997). Occupational classification ( (ISCO-88): Concepts, methods, ods, reliability, validity and
cross-national national comparability
comparability. Labour market arket and social policy Occasional papers - n°20,
OCDE, Paris
Elias, P., & Birch, M. (1994). ISCO ISCO-88(COM): A guide for users. Retrieved May 10, 2007 from
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/ier/isco/isco88.html
Elias, P., & McKnight, A. (2001). Skill measurement in official statistics: cs: Recent developments in
the UK and the rest of Europe. Oxford Economic Papers, 3, 508 – 540
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