How digitalisation is changing task and skill profiles of occupations

Using advanced text mining methods, we will extract, from 1990 until today, information from job ads about the advertised occupation, the tasks to perform in the job and the required skills, as well as the IT tools to use in the job. This will allow identifying trends in task and skill profiles and investigating the effects of these changes on workers’ careers. For this, we will draw on individual-level data, providing information on unemployment spells, wages, and occupational mobility. We then match this data, at the occupation level, with the respective information on task and skill profiles.

Little is known about how digitalisation transforms tasks and skills at the job level. For lack of suitable data, most studies have so far ignored possible shifts within occupations and have addressed only those occurring between occupations. However, there are good reasons to assume that within occupation change matters more than between occupation change.

The aim of the study is to identify changes in task and skill profiles at the job level in order to assess how digitalisation transforms the occupational structure and affects within-occupation changes. We will show how intra- and inter-occupational change affects wages, mobility opportunities, and unemployment risks.

This study will develop algorithms for extracting information from job ads related to tasks and skills. In collaboration with education and labor-market stakeholders, we will then develop a public web‐based data‐mining dashboard fortask and skill monitoringof the Swiss labor market.The findings of this project will also provide reference points for educational measures.

Monitoring Task and Skill Profiles in the Digital Economy: Employers' Changing Skill Demand and Workers' Career Outcomes