Recent work in the labour economics literature has focused on the polarisation of jobs as a source of growing income inequality in the US and some countries in Europe. The hypothesis is that the growth in employment and corresponding employment shares over the past decades has been in jobs at the low and high ends of the skill distribution, with declines in employment shares in the middle. The underlying distributions of jobs and skills, the educational intensity of employment, is the focus of the present paper. Using data from the EU-Survey of Income and Living Conditions, we present a descriptive analysis of the distributions of skills (measured by educational attainment) and employment shares for a sample of countries in the EU in 2007, and compare the results with the US.