Thread by @fabian_stephany

More than half of European Union companies struggle to fill job vacancies for ICT specialists! How come & what could we do about it?🧵A thread based on new project at @oiioxford (skillscale.org) & work with @Bruegel_org (bit.ly/fowbruegel) [1/n]:

Technological change is not ‘skill-neutral’: New technologies favour certain new skills while making others redundant or devaluing them. Innovation will create jobs in the future but they will involve entirely new tasks. [2/n]

The Beveridge curve below shows the relationship between unemployment and job vacancy rates. Currently, vacancy rates are much higher than ten years ago - despite economic recovery, many firms are not able to fill their job vacancies. [3/n]

In this fast-changing labour market, it is crucial to know which skills will enjoy sustainable demand in the future, & how to acquire those skills. Conventional training programmes are increasingly ineffective as technological transformation outpaces nat. training systems. [4/n]

Large employers are also struggling to keep their workforces’ skills up to date. Workers have begun to assume greater personal responsibility for their reskilling via online courses, distance education tools and entrepreneurial approaches to work. [5/n]

How do these workers reskill? Online labour platforms – global marketplaces that match millions of buyers and sellers of digitally delivered work in various occupational domains – are a source of data for research on how workers develop new skills. [6/n]

Likewise, information from job vacancy portals, such as Indeed, or professional social networks like LinkedIn, could be used to inform skill development. These data sources have different advantages and shortcomings in terms of informing research into skills development. [7/n]

Fortunately, the European Commission has recognised the need for a data-driven approach in closing the skill gap. The 2020 Pact for Skills, for example, aimed to maximise the impact and effectiveness of upskilling and reskilling in the vocational training sector. [8/n]

But to implement the Pact successfully, two aspects are crucial. First, industry’s specific skill needs must be made explicit. Second, the unique training history of workers needs to be acknowledged. [9/n]

Online generated data can help update occupational taxonomies and understand the skill requirements of new jobs. This is aligned with Europe’s interest in developing skill foresight and support for career transitions. [10/n]

The approach could support the Commission’s proposals for recommendations on individual learning accounts and more flexible certification of competences developed through short courses or training programmes (so-called micro-credentials). [11/n]

The Commission identified the importance and the difficulties of accessing business (and platform) data in the public interest, while acknowledging the protection of businesses’ interests, in the February 2022 proposal for a #DataAct. [12/n]

However, the act might prevent retrieval and usage by public bodies of private-sector data. Enforced sharing of private-sector data would require ex-ante proof of a “public emergency”, and the Data Act would prohibit modes of automated data retrieval, such as web-scraping. [13/n]

Amendments to the Act should go for the right for public bodies acting in the interest to access data (web-scraping). This would benefit the assessment of the digital skills gap, but also helps tackling societal challenges like gentrification or social media polarisation. [14/n]

In response to this challenge, we started the SkillScale Project (skillscale.org) @oiioxford, entering into a new domain of labour market research. Revealing how online generated labour data helps us understand new skills and sustainability of novel occupations. [15/n]