Over the first year of activities, the ESSC partners produced three reports on:

• The employment situation of the sector, including forecasts and trends
• The evolution of the sector's occupations, and the associated skills
• Innovative tools, national and regional strategies, initiatives, methods to monitor skills needs and address skill mismatch and gaps.

They represented the basis for a series of recommendations established by the ESSC Partners to all sector stakeholders for future activities. They are:

1. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce has a medium- to long-term stability to build up commitment and expertise to tackle issues such as skills anticipation and labour shortages and also skills development.
2. Ensuring that a stable cooperation between ESSC Commerce and affiliated members of the European Social Partners enables national social partners to develop sustainable employment opportunities and the skills that the commerce sector will require in the future.
3. Ensuring that the European Commission supports the work of ESSC Commerce and that the relevant Directorates-General associate it in their own initiatives relating to skills anticipation and development, notably via the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) and the EU Skills Panorama, and to sectoral qualifications, via the European Qualifications Framework
4. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce expands its membership, reaches out to new stakeholders and contributes directly to the European networking of national observatories/industry skills partnerships
5. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce develops a wide communication and dissemination strategy to facilitate information exchange of good practice in terms of skills anticipation and development
6. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce provides support for the harmonisation of methodologies for employment forecasting among its members, to provide a common data framework which will provide a solid basis for planning its activities and monitoring the results of the projects it undertakes
7. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce undertakes regular applied research activities to monitor labour market developments in the commerce sector, in particular skills needs, so that policy makers, social partners and businesses, particularly small and medium-size enterprises, are in a better position to plan for the future and support the development of emerging occupations
8. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce undertakes regular applied research activities to examine national qualifications in the commerce sector, with a view to establishing a model of excellence for sectoral training, notably core qualifications and a bottom-up common framework, to facilitate labour mobility throughout Europe
9. Ensuring that ESSC Commerce has the appropriate financial and human resources to carry out this work.