The tools presented here were established in several research and development projects at various academic institutions involved in survey research.

The project “Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud” (SSHOC), Work Package 3 “Selected Ontologies and Vocabularies” Task 3.2 expanded an inventory of outputs (datasets, translations) regarding occupational titles, educational categories, sectors of industry, geographical regions, cost of living, and religions. Most of these coding sets were developed in previous projects. 

The project “Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences” (SERISS), Work package 8 "A coding module for socio-economic survey questions", picked up work in mid-2015, running until 2019. It funded the bulk of the development, the results of which will successively be added to this site. This work package developed a cross-country harmonised, fast, high-quality and cost-effective coding module for the core variables in many socio-economic and health surveys. The module consists of survey questions and answers. For the answers it uses a large multilingual dictionary of occupations with tens of thousands of entries about job titles, with a few hundred industry names, many fields of education and training, and a set employment status categories. Additionally, the module includes country-specific, structured lists of educational qualifications, building on the ones developed in the CAMCES project (see below). For all these variables, the module provides high-quality codes for standard statistical classifications.

The project “Computer-Assisted Measurement and Coding of Educational Qualifications in Surveys” (CAMCES) was funded by the German Leibniz Association from 2013 to 2017 via the Leibniz Competition conducted at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Department Survey Design and Methodology. It contributed the initial educational qualifications measurement and coding tools, with the database covering mostly European countries. Further funding for the addition of specific countries was received from DIW Berlin, Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP, Berlin) for the measurement of education in the BAMF-IAB-SOEP sample of refugees and, from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) in Bamberg for the study “Refugees in the German Educational System” (ReGES).

The database of occupational titles initially is derived from the WageIndicator occupation database with 1,700 multilingual occupational titles. Since 2000 the Netherlands WageIndicator web survey on work and wages uses a database of occupational titles for respondent’s self identification (Tijdens 2015). Gradually this database developed into a multilingual database, when from 2004 onwards more countries joined the survey. Translations were typically prepared by a national labour market expert in the national WageIndicator team. In 2008 the coding of the titles was adapted following the update from ISCO-88 to ISCO-08. In 2015 the SERISS project facilitated the expansion of the database to 99 countries, to enlarge the number of occupational titles to approx. 4,000 and to provide the API to the research community on https://www.surveycodings.org/home. In 2019 the SSHOC project facilitated a check of the translations, for some languages additions of male and female versions of the occupational titles, and the preparation of a database with translations of the 4-digit occupational titles ISCO-58, ISCO-68, ISCO-88, and ISCO-08, see ISCO 4 digit 1958, 1968, 1988, 2008 with translations.

The database of industries is derived from EUROSTAT’s NACE Revision 2.0 revision with translations for European languages. Both WageIndicator and SERISS facilitated the translations into non-European languages.