Skill for jobs indicators: Data overview and analysis

The OECD Skills for Jobs Database provides crucial information to understand better how ongoing shifts in societies and labour markets are changing the demands for different sorts of skills, knowledge and abilities. The results of the database, presented in this chapter, show that technical and technology-intensive skills are becoming increasingly more important while more traditional and less technology-intensive skills are increasingly in surplus. Consistent with the literature on labour market polarisation, the results suggest that abstract and soft skills are more in demand than routine skills, and this gap has increased over recent years. Population ageing has resulted in stronger demands for healthcare services, as evidenced by shortages in care-related skills. Increased female labour market participation and population ageing have changed the composition of the skill supply. The results also suggest that countries where the skill gap between young and older workers is bigger face stronger shortages of key information-processing skills. Finally, this chapter shows that there are big differences in mismatch between countries, but also between workers with different socio-economic and job characteristics within countries.