Employers’ skill preferences across Europe: between cognitive and non-cognitive skills

Abstract

This article analyses online job advertisements to identify skills that are demanded in selected low- and medium-skilled occupations. We explore data from the publicly administered cross-European EURES job search portal and quantify the different cognitive and non-cognitive skills requested by employers in small European economies. While we find that the service sector demands non-cognitive skills more than other types of occupation, the skill-mix demanded is very diverse across countries, implying that other domestic factors shape how demand is formulated. Our work shows that online portals can become a useful source for studying employers’ demand at the micro-level to inform employment, education and training policies.

Keywords:

• EURES
• job advertisements
• labour demand
• low-skilled
• non-cognitive skills
• qualifications

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Political Economy Research Group members at CEU and Vladimir Kvetan for useful comments on the earlier versions of this work. We would also like to thank Mikkel Barslund for assistance with preparing coding scheme for the Danish data and for providing useful comments on our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The American Psychological Association defines cognitive skills as the ‘ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought’ (Heckman 2011).

2. See Bowles, Gintis and Osborne (2001) for a survey of such literature.

3. Based on the ILO classification, we consider occupations in ISCO88 category 9 as low-skilled (skill level 1) and ISCO88 categories 4–8 as medium-skilled (skill level 2). For more information, see the ILO website (http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/isco88/index.htm). We are aware of the debate contesting such clear division, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage with it in more depth. For a discussion and critique on measuring and conceptualising low-skillness see Kureková, Haita, and Beblavỳ (2013).

4. The job ads posted in EURES also have a ‘predefined’ experience field, which was added to the occurrence of experience requirement in the ad description itself.

5. See the EURES website at http://ec.europa.eu/eures/home.jsp?lang=en.

6. Unfortunately, at the time of study we did not have data to estimate the portal coverage at the national level.

7. See the article ‘About EURES Job-search’ on the EURES website (http://ec.europa.eu/eures/main.jsp?acro=job&lang=en&catId=481&parentCategory=481).

8. From the three analysed countries, Denmark is the only one where employers are obliged to report existing vacancy to national PES. In the Czech Republic and Ireland such mandatory obligation does not exist.

9. For an overview of the use of public versus private employment service providers see European Commission and ECORYS (2012, 97).

10. When enquiring about the reason for no or extremely few vacancies in these categories in Ireland with EURES web design staff, we were told that the countries are asked to transpose their national classification systems to ISCO88, which in the case of Ireland is in some occupational areas more problematic due to greater differences between the international classification and the Irish system.

11. These are the latest available according to European Commission and ECORYS (2012, 123).

12. Advertisements written in a foreign language were excluded from the analysis. In all three countries, this meant only a few job advertisements, typically written in English or German.

Additional information

Funding

This research was produced as part of FP7 project NEUJOBS financed by the European Commission under grant agreement number: 266833.