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The purpose of this article is to evaluate a method for measuring work activities and skill requirements of 160 occupations in eight countries, used in EurOccupations, an EU‐FP6 project. Additionally, it aims to explore how the internet can be used for measuring work activities and skill requirements.

For the 160 occupations, work activities were described in approximately ten tasks. Occupational experts and jobholders were invited to rate these tasks and to indicate the skill requirements, using a multilingual web‐survey. Experts were recruited through the networks of the project partners and jobholders through frequently visited websites in the eight countries. The effectiveness of the drafting of tasks descriptions, the recruitment of raters, and the measurement of skill requirements is evaluated.

The project showed that tasks descriptions for a wide range of occupations and countries can be drafted relatively easy, using desk research. Conducting a web‐survey with a routing for 160 occupations and eight countries is viable. Recruiting experts used more resources than recruiting jobholders using the internet. Measuring skill requirements would need much more resources due to major variations within and across countries.

The article addresses a number of areas that are potentially worthy of further empirical investigations for a Europe‐wide library of occupational titles, work activities and skill requirements.

The paper outlines the potential of a future method for a European library of work activities and skill requirements for occupational titles, thereby facilitating European industrial training efforts.

Insight in the work activities and skill requirements of occupations will facilitate labour mobility and related training across EU member states.

This paper explores the potential for a Europe‐wide empirical underpinning of work activities and skill requirements, using a web‐survey and the internet.

Do similar job titles refer to the same work activities, as assumed often, but hardly empirically tested? The purpose of this paper is to analyze the similarity of 160 occupations within and across eight European countries using interrater agreement statistics (rWG).

Using a multilingual web survey, experts and jobholders in the eight countries rated the frequency of ten tasks per occupation they had knowledge of (n=4,197 ratings). Three hypotheses are investigated: first, interrater agreements of occupations are similar regardless the country; second, interrater agreements of occupations are similar within countries; and third, experts and jobholders are similar in their ratings.

Half of the occupations reveal no agreement across ratings, one-third shows a weak/moderate agreement and one in ten shows a strong agreement. H1 is rejected for task frequency but not for task importance. Within-country similarity of occupations is larger than across-country similarity. H2 is supported for two countries and rejected for two other countries. H3 is not supported. Jobholders demonstrate higher agreement than experts.

An empirical testing of occupation-specific tasks for a wide range of occupations across Europe seems a viable approach.

The paper contributes to the challenges related to labor market mobility across borders.

Work tasks for a wide range of occupations and countries, using job-specific work activities in combination with web surveys and the internet for recruitment of jobholders, have not been used before.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to two related contemporary debates on the changing views of the employment relation and on the adoption of telework as a new work practice by analyzing line managers' general telework‐attitude formation processes, and possible outcomes in concrete request situations, mirroring managers' views of the employment relationship.

This multi‐method study among 65 managers in six financial‐sector organizations comprises two parts. The interview part focuses on managers' arguments for or against telework in their departments, and how these are weighed in the telework‐attitude formation process. In the vignette study, managers assess their attitudes towards specific, hypothetical, but realistic telework requests of fictive employees in their departments.

Combining the results of both studies, it is shown that the governance view dominates. Some managers, however, consider telework an “idiosyncratic deal.” Particularly in telework‐request situations, also the exchange view enters into the managers' perceptual frames. In order to decrease managers' ambivalence towards telework, the human resource management (HRM)‐system needs to be internally consistent and based on a view of the employment relationship which stresses commitment and trust as guiding principles, rather than control and coordination.

Employing a “configurational approach to strategic HRM,” this paper focuses on the importance of the “embeddedness” of telework practices in larger HRM‐systems in general, and the role of cultural obstacles in particular. Telework arguments are considered the HR principles guiding the telework‐attitude formation process, and mirroring managers' views of the employment relationship as part of their workforce philosophies.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories: