Summary points arising from the first three regional workshops Oslo, 7 th June 2005 Lisbon, 15 th September 2005 Piraeus, 23 rd September 2005 Peter Elias and Margaret Birch

Portugal – critical of structure of major group 6 Spain – strong desire to identify supervisors and foremen and distinguish between them Italy – problems distinguishing between managers and professional and technical occupations in major groups 2 and 3 Belgium – dual language coding clearly illustrates cultural and linguistic problems of comparability – evidence of job title inflation

France – national classification has different conceptual basis from ISCO 88, doubts about the comparative nature of occupational information Sweden – evidence of job title inflation for managers and technicians Norway – difficult to distinguish between professional occupations and managers – supervisors are identified at the fifth digit level Lithuania – concern about the large number of jobs classified to major group 2

Latvia – concern about the classification of managers in small enterprises Finland – comparison with the Swedish classification practice revealed various anomalies Estonia – problems of distinguishing between managers and supervisors and between managers and professionals Denmark – desire to identify supervisors but difficult to distinguish from junior managers

Switzerland – keen to have a classification that can be implemented from job titles alone – French and German language versions of ISCO considered non-compatible in some areas – request for new IT occupations to be identified Germany – interest in identifying a high level supervisory category in major group 1 Greece – interest in identifying supervisors in ISCO but concerns about the practical implementation of this Cyprus – a request to identify working proprietors – strong support for identification of supervisors in specific areas