EMPLOYERS' DEMAND FOR QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS

ABSTRACT

The paper attempts to empirically test skill demand on the Austrian labour market between 1985 and 2005 by making use of job advertisements. We analyze job advertisements covering a time span of 20 years. This allows us to examine whether there is a trend towards increased merit selection. Our empirical research is based on a content analysis of 975 newspaper job advertisements. We expand on the operationalization of education by looking at both educational level and field of study. Results indicate that jobs described in advertisements increasingly demanded various types of skill. Besides educational merits, other types of skills are also relevant in modern-day economies: social and personal skills. It is demonstrated that the driving force in changing demands is not only compositional change (with the expansion of high-skill demanding jobs), but also changes within occupational groups.

Keywords:

• content analysis
• employment skills
• occupational groups

Notes

¹A potential problem with Kingston's definition is that also conventional indicators of merit (e.g., educational qualifications, cognitive skills) are strongly affected by social background. Kingston argues that such variables could indicate merit because their impact on labour market outcomes is unaffected by the inclusion of social background in the regression equation.

²Newspapers were: der Kurier (62 percent of advertisements), der Standard (16 percent, only 1990 and 2005), and die Presse (22 percent). Distribution across years is 26 percent in 1985, 32 percent in 1990, and 42 percent in 2005.

³Note that our linear specification of a time trend would also be warranted with equal intervals, but the data were initially gathered for a project that purposefully aimed to compare the present with two periods in the past.

⁴Research by the Public Employment Service Austria (‘Arbeitsmarktservice’) has shown that especially high-skilled jobs are published in newspapers, whereas jobs demanding lowest qualifications (compulsory education or even no education) are mostly advertised on the website of the ‘Arbeitsmarktservice’ (Kostera 2006). Since these job descriptions are not archived, we could not include them in our empirical analysis.

⁵The increasing importance of the internet has changed the face of job advertising, with some jobs and sectors mainly being advertised on the web. A quantitative analysis of the Austrian job market represented in job advertisements of 2005 has shown that most online advertisements target white collar and service sector occupations (Kostera 2006).

⁶About 40 percent of all pupils of 1 year enrol into apprenticeship training. Source: Arbeitsmarktservice Österreich.

⁷Occupational categories VIII and IX have been excluded from the quantitative analysis because they contain too few cases; therefore, the analysis is based on 975 job advertisements

⁸Although compulsory education has initially been coded, it has been excluded from the statistical analysis because no job advertisement required compulsory education.