Publication: Closing the Digital Skill Gap : The Potential of Online Platform Data For Active Labour Markets Policies
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2022-06-21
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IE University
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The global challenge of rapidly changing skill requirements due to task automation is currently overwhelming workers, firms, and governments. Indeed, the digital skill gap continues to widen as technological and social transformation outpaces national education systems, and the precise skill requirements for mastering emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), remain opaque. For many newly emerging jobs, labour market mismatches occur as training lags behind workforce and industry needs. In this article, we report on how online user-generated data can provide useful foresight about skills requirements and training implications, showcasing how data from online labour platforms could help us to monitor and understand the complex system of skill formation. This data could allow us to establish a taxonomy of skills, understand their application and individual complementarity, and enable automated, individual, and far-sighted suggestions on the value of learning a new skill in a future of technological disruption. Policy recommendations are manifold. First, reskilling institutions, like the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, are a beneficiary of this highly individualised data. Workers with the need to reskill could be located in the data-based landscape of skills and would receive a targeted reskilling advice that allows them to switch to more sustainable occupations that are closely related to their existing skill set. Furthermore, official occupational and skill taxonomies could be improved with near real-time data, as conventional taxonomies currently struggle with the EC’s ambitious effort to define “AI jobs” and “green skills”. The European Commission’s 2022 Data Act1 acknowledges this versatile potential of online generated data. However, opening the Data Act towards data access practices via web-scraping and improving the legal security of data recipients would further facilitate the usage of data in the public interest.
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Attribution 4.0 International
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IE Center for the Governance of Change
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Stephany, F. (2022). Closing the Digital Skill Gap : The Potential of Online Platform Data For Active Labour Markets Policies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6684547