The ICATUS Taxonomy
Assuming that everything can enhance one's human capital, we are working on integrating ICATUS activities in our inclusive taxonomy.
Last updated
Assuming that everything can enhance one's human capital, we are working on integrating ICATUS activities in our inclusive taxonomy.
Last updated
ICATUS stands for International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics (ICA-TUS). It classifies "all the activities on which a person may spend time during the 24 hours that make up a day" (UNSTATS). Therefore, it allows for nation-wide and cross-country comparisons of time-uses.
ICATUS activities are meat to partition the univserse of conceivable daily activities in an exclusive maner: each activity can only fall into one ICATUS category, and one only. Therefore, Tabiya and Harambee chose to rely on the ICATUS taxonomy in order to channel it's strong conceptual structure into their work on the unseen economy.
However, ICATUS activities are not meant to be consistent with ESCO or ISCO. Namely, they are not directly associated with ESCO occupations, nor skills. The objective of Tabiya's work on ICATUS activities was to match the latter to ESCO skills. This would allow Harambee's users to select their main time-uses and be presented with candidate skills to highlight on their CVs and inform our matching algorithm.
In order to match ICATUS activities with ESCO skills, the team was presented with two options: matching ICATUS activities directly to ESCO skills using natural language processing, or matching ICATUS activities to ESCO occupations to derive candidate skills from these matches. Given the scarcity of the readily available data on platform users' description of their daily tasks, the second option was selected.
ICATUS activities were thus each matched to up to 4 ESCO occupations manually by a team of 3 researchers. These matches then allowed the team to derive a candidate list of skills for each ICATUS activity by the ESCO taxonomy.
Assigning ESCO occupations to ICATUS activities was based on similarity between their definitions. For instance, "preparing meals and snacks" in ICATUS involves - according to its definition - tasks that are those of "cooks" and "kitchen assistants" in ESCO. Therefore, the complete list of ESCO skills associated with "cooks" and "kitchen assistants" was assigned to "preparing meals and snacks" in ICATUS.
The taxonomy obtained following this method is hardly useable. Indeed, each ICATUS activty ended up being associated with numerous skills. In order to provide a manageable list of skills to job seekers on the Harambee platform 0.1, the team decided to reduce this temptative list of skills. reucing this also allowed to addressed the transferability and signalling issues inherent to the unseen economy. To do so, an approach based on a Panel of professionals involved in the South-African labour market and in intermediation instances (among which Harambee) was chosen. The panel approach is meant to gain context-specific insights from a wide range of stakeholders. This would make it possible to overcomestake holders' biases pertaining to the transferatility and credibility of skills. In order to test this approach, we first implemented a panel at the scale of Harambee.
For the panel to happen efficiently (in a time limit of 5 hours for the pilot panel), the Tabiya team proceded to a first round of skill selection in order to delete skills that were deemed obviously not consistent with the definitiona nd description of ICATUS activities. To do so, the team followed 4 easily applicaable rules.
The ESCO classification distinguishes between "skills" - that all describe an action - and "knowledges". For instance, the occupation "cook" is asociated with the skill "use cooking techniques" and the knowledge "cooking technique". As a first step, we chose to isolate knowledges and to mainly focus on skills. However, we chose to let the panel decide to keep certain knowledges when they brought important new informations. For instance, "common children's diseases" may be deemed an essentio
The decision to isolate knowledges also relies on the observation that knowldges assigned with ESCO occupations are usually redundant with skills, i.e. their presencde in the list does not bring new information content. For instance, if a young job seeker "uses cooking techniques", this implies that they to know "cooking techniques".
Delete irrelevant skills:
In ICATUS, each activity is associated with a definition, and explicit list of tasks included in the activty, a list of tasks that are not included, and one or more examples. ESCO is built similarly. However, IACTUS activities are typically not only broader, but conceptually different from ESCO occupations. For instance, "Budgeting, planning, organizing duties and activities in the household" is not a formal sector activity that is included in ESCO. Therefore, to assign ESCO skills to this ICATUS activity, it was matched to "Office clerk", "Accountant", "Bed and breakfast operator", three ESCO occupations that encompass all tasks involved in "Budgeting, planning, organizing duties and activities in the household". The issue is that they encompass more. For instance, because of "bed and breakfast operator", the skill "serve beverages" endded up being associated to "Budgeting, planning, organizing duties and activities in the household", even though serving atsks are not included in the description of the ICATUS activity. When we came across such cases, we decided to exclude the skills that had been unduly associated to the ICATUS activities.
The difficulty when applying this rule came from our expectation of how youg job seekers would use the Harambee platform. Indeed, when selecting the ICATUS activty "preparing meals and snacks", one might mean that they prepare meals, serve them, and clean after. In ICATUS, those are three different activities, that are associated with different tasks, and thus skills. For version 0.1 of the Harambee platform, we chose to strictly fit the descriptions of each ICATUS activity, and to expect users to chose all relevant ICATUS activities. This choice was moivated by the observation that a more flexible approach would make a taxonomy inoperative, and make it more difficult to match job seekers to relevant job offers.
Delete skills that are deemed too formal: some of the skills associated with ESCO occupations directly refer to situations or tasks only imaginable in the seen economy, whether it is formal or informal. For instance, "maintain customer service" cannot be appropriately associated with "serving meals and snacks", as it describes serving meals and snacks to one's own children/family members.
Applying this rule is entails having a very literal interpretation of ICATUS activities and the skills involved. For instance, one may argue that ensuring the satisfaction of family memers when serving a meal or a snack may allow someone to develop customer service skills.
Delete redundant skills: ESCO occupations are typically associated with numerous skills, and each ICATUS activity was associated with mutltiple ESCO occupations by Tabiya's team. The lists of skills from each ESCO activity was added to a list of skills for each ICATUS actity, with deletion of skills that appear multiple time (where we only kept one appearance). Therefore, the temptative lists of skills associated to each ICATUS activty contain skills tht may be deemed redundant. For instance, "Outdoor cleaning" was associated with both "prune plants" and "prune hedges and trees". We considered that asociating both skills to "outdoor cleaning" did not bring new information.
Applying this rule proved tricky, as it highlighted the complexity of the ESCO taxonomy. For instance, "prune plants" does not contain the subsoil "prunde hedges and trees", even though hedges and trees are obviously plants. However, it contains the subskill "perform hand prunning". This shows that the organization of ESCO itself is not straighforward, and that cases exist where two skills conceptually very similar.
