Specific and general skills: Concepts, dimensions, and measurements (original) (raw)

Segmented Skilling: Static and Dynamic 'New Economy' Skills

Proceedings of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation, Bamberg 2011, 2011

ABSTRACT There are at least three problems in the measurement of skill - aggregation, dynamism, and codification. Skill is an individual and collective capacity, expressed in performance and reflected in outcomes. Aggregate measures relying on proxies such as occupational entry qualifications may not provide the best picture of segmentation and mobility processes. Statistics on training effort have the potential to create a misleading picture of an industry's or firm's commitment to skill-based innovation by failing to distinguish ad-hoc, just-in-time measures to maintain the current capability of a firm's workforce from interventions designed to develop a creative, adaptive capability. To be measured, skills must first be named. Workplace-level skill development requires frameworks for identifying growth opportunities. In exploring these three problems in the Australian and New Zealand context, the paper proposes a dynamic framework for classifying approaches to skilling (not confined to formal trading) on the basis of their contributions to adaptive capability, proposing three types of skill: threshold, platform and growth. The codification problem is particularly severe in 'new economy' service industries, and the paper critiques the attempt to capture under-specified service skills in concepts such as 'soft skills' or 'employability skills.' It suggests an alternative framework for classifying the adaptive and generative processes of workplace learning and their outcomes - an analysis that may have relevance beyond the service sector.

Are Skill Requirements Rising? Evidence from Production and Clerical Jobs

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1993

The research on the demand for skills in the U.S. economy is split over the issue of whether technological change has tended to increase or decrease job skill requirements. The question of whether job skill requirements have been rising is important to public policy debates concerning the skill gap, wage inequality, and the changing quality of jobs. Some researchers have attempted to use indirect measures of skill requirements, whereas others have used direct measures and have concentrated primarily on case studies. Neither approach is free of problems, however. A far better data source is job analysis. The job analysis measure developed by Hay Associates is similar to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) measure and includes a series of variables that capture the autonomy and complexity of jobs with respect to areas such as know-how, problem solving, and accountability. The Hay technique of job analyses was used to study the changing skill requirements for production and clerical jobs. The results suggested support for Contents Are Skill Requiremelts Rising?

A taxonomy of multi-industry labour force skills

Research Policy, 2014

This paper proposes an empirical study of the skill repertoires of 290 sectors in the United States over the period 2002-2011. We use information on employment structures and job content of occupations to flesh out structural characteristics of industry-specific knowhow. The exercise of mapping the skills structures embedded in the workforce yields a taxonomy that discloses novel nuances on the organization of industry. In so doing we also take an initial step towards the integration of labour and employment in the area of innovation studies.

Employers’ Investment in Skills: Test of Skills Portability Argument

Social Sciences, 2014

Literature argues that propensity of firmsponsored training depends on portability of skills. The paper seeks to test this hypothesis with the data from 5th European Social Survey that includes 21 EU Member State, Norway and Switzerland. Becker (1993) argued that employers will only invest in training that is of no use to other firms. The data does not support this hypothesis: European firms frequently invest in training that is highly valuable to other firms. Literature on labour market frictions argues that firms are likely to fund training, if the costs of switching employers' are high. Data suggests that the reverse might be true: if individual have many outside options, the odds of receiving firm-sponsored training increases.

The Changing Skill Requirements of Jobs in the U.S. Economy

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1981

The research assesses the effects of changes both in the distribution of employment among 'different occupations and in the. skill requirements, of individual occupations. Estimates of the latter component arel based on two editions of the of Occupational Titles," the third. edition (issued in 1965) and.the.fourth edition (issued in 1977). The results indicate that the general skill requirements of jobs have changed little over the past decade and a half, a period of growth and technological development when the supplypof skilled labor increased dramatically. (Author/PGD) 6

The Evolving Supply and Demand of Skills in the Labour Market

This paper analyses labour demand and supply with respect to skills and tasks. The literature on this topic is abundant, especially in light of education expansion and the impact of technology on labour demand. The goal of this work is not to add evidence to the causes and effects of labour demand and supply but rather to sketch the broader picture of their equilibrium and then to try to anticipate what type of skills mismatch EU countries will encounter during the next dec- ade.

From Occupations to Embedded Skills

2013

We derive the skill content of thirty countries, ranging from low to high income ones, from the occupational structure of their economies. Five different skills are defined, as proposed initially for the United States by Autor, , and later updated by . Cross country measures of skill content show that the intensity of national production of manual skills declines with per capita income in a monotonic way, while it increases for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills. For some countries, we are able to trace the development of skill intensities of aggregate production over time. We find that while the increasing intensity of non-routine skills is uniform across countries, patterns of skill intensities with respect to different forms of routine skills differ markedly.

The Strength of Occupation Indicators as a Proxy for Skill

2013

Labor economists have long used occupation indicators as a proxy for unobserved skills that a worker possesses. In this paper, we consider whether inter-occupational wage differentials that are unexplained by measured human capital are indeed due to differences in often-unmeasured skill. Using the National Compensation Survey, a large, nationally- representative dataset on jobs and ten different components of requisite skill, we compare the effects on residual wage variation of including occupation indicators and including additional skills measures. We find that although skills do vary across 3-digit occupations, occupation indicators decrease wage residuals by far more than can be explained by skill differentials. This indicates that “controlling for occupation” does not equate to controlling for skill alone, but also for some other factors to a great extent. Additionally, we find that there is considerable within occupation variation in skills, and that the amount of variation is...

The skill bias: comparative evidence and an econometric test

International review of applied economics, 2002

Many empirical studies have shown how technological change, organisational change and globalisation can be alternatively (or jointly) seen as causes for skill bias. In this paper, first the empirical literature on these issues is discussed and compared and then some evidence on the G-7 countries -showing a clear upskilling trend in manufacturing industries over the '80s -is presented. Then an illustrative example is put forward: the panel analysis of a sample of 488 Italian manufacturing firms shows how the upskilling trend of employment is a function of the reorganisational strategy adopted by the firms, while technological change and FDI seem to play negligible roles. In other words, organisational change at the workfloor level seems to drive the upskilling of the labour force.