Skills, Tasks, Competences: a Conceptual Framework and Data from Online Job Advertisements

The Institute of Economics will hold a webinar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Wednesday, May 19, 2021: Matteo Sostero from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission will present the paper "Skills, Tasks, Competences: a Conceptual Framework and Data from Online Job Advertisements".

Abstract:

Skills and competences are frequently invoked by policy-makers in reference to labour market developments and education objectives. However, these concepts have different meanings across academic disciplines such as sociology, economics, and education. We proposes a unified conceptual framework for tasks, skills and competences. We start from the concept of task, as the smallest unit of work involved in an economic process, as defined in the taxonomy proposed in Fernández-Macías and Bisello (2020) and measured in different EU countries with existing surveys (Bisello et al. 2021). Skills are defined as the ability to perform tasks, within related domains. We then present new data on occupational task profiles gathered from online job advertisements and introduce a skill-task dictionary to guide future systematic data gathering in online job advertisements.

Here you can find a working paper collecting some of the results of the analysis.

All interested participants are welcome to join online at the following link. External participants need to contact the organisers via email to grant access to the seminar.