Putting Tasks to the Test: The Case of Germany

The demand for skills has changed throughout recent decades, favouring high-skilled workers that perform abstract, problem-solving tasks. At the same time, research shows that occupation-specific skills are beneficial for labour market success. This article explores (1) how education, workplace char...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social Inclusion
Main Author: Rohrbach-Schmidt, Daniela (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cogitatio Press 2019
In: Social Inclusion
Further subjects:B worker-level
B Education
B occupational specificity
B Wages
B job tasks
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Summary:The demand for skills has changed throughout recent decades, favouring high-skilled workers that perform abstract, problem-solving tasks. At the same time, research shows that occupation-specific skills are beneficial for labour market success. This article explores (1) how education, workplace characteristics and occupations shape job task requirements, (2) how within-occupation job task content relates to wages, and (3) whether these relationships vary across types of tasks due to their presumably varying degrees of occupational specificity. Using worker-level data from Germany from 2011-2012 the article shows that a large part of task content is determined by occupations, but that task requirements also differ systematically within occupations with workers’ educational levels and workplace characteristics. Moreover, differences in task usage within occupations are robust predictors of wage differences between workers. Finally, the results suggest that non-routine manual tasks have a higher occupational specificity than abstract and routine tasks, and that manually skilled workers can generate positive returns on their skills in their specific fields of activity.
ISSN:2183-2803
Contains:Enthalten in: Social Inclusion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.17645/si.v7i3.2025