The European Skills Index (ESI) is Cedefop’s composite indicator measuring the performance of EU skills systems. The ESI measures countries’ “distance to the ideal” performance. This ideal performance is chosen as the highest achieved by any country over a period of 7 years. The ideal performance is scaled to be 100 and the scores of all countries are then computed and compared to that. The ESI consists of three pillars; skills development, activation and matching, each of which measures a different aspect of a skills system. Basis of the ESI are 15 individual indicators from various international datasets. The scores are calculated across countries at the indicators’ level. The scores are then averaged at the various layers and finally the Index score is formed. To illustrate, an Index (or pillar, sub-pillar etc.) score of 65 suggests that the country has reached 65% of the ideal performance. Thus, there is still 35% (100-65) room for improvement. A score of 100 corresponds to achieving the ‘frontier’, that is an aspirational target performance for that indicator. A score of 0 corresponds to a lowest-case performance. The shaded part in the graphs below shows how far (in %) a country has scored in comparison to the ideal, while the dotted line shows what is the remaining distance to cover until the best performance is reached.

For more information on the European Skills Index please visit its project page.