The Digital Transformation of the Labour Market – Willingness for Lifelong Learning Is Key

Digital change poses major challenges to workers and businesses. While technological change is not a new phenomenon, the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in recent years has transformed jobs and tasks at unprecedented speeds. And it is not only occupations where you work in direct contact with machines or computers that are affected. Instead, digitalisation permeates almost all areas of the world of work today.

This has, of course, considerable consequences for employment. While technologies can have displacing effects for its capacity to replace human workforce, the extent of this displacement, however, is assessed highly differently. While, for example, a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne sees almost half of all jobs in the USA threatened to become fully automated, ZEW studies show a less dramatic picture. The short report “Übertragung der Studie von Frey/Osborne (2013) auf Deutschland” (“Applying the study from Frey/Osborne (2013) to Germany”), arrives at the conclusion that twelve per cent of jobs in Germany are automatable.

A ZEW study looking at the automation risk of jobs in 21 OECD countries shows that, in the next two decades, nine per cent of current jobs in the OECD countries will be technically automatable by progressing digitalisation – again significantly less than has been feared.

A recent ZEW study on digitalisation and the future of work (in German only) comes to the conclusion that, on balance, digital transformation in Germany has created slightly more jobs than it has destroyed. More importantly, however, it has brought about a fundamental change of the employment structure, creating a great demand for further training and retraining. The pressure to adapt is thereby particularly high for low-skilled workers.

In an interview addressing the question “How will we work in the digitised world of the future?”, Dr. Melanie Arntz, deputy head of the ZEW Research Department “Labour Markets, Human Resources and Social Policy” names the readiness for lifelong learning as the central prerequisite for successfully coping with digitalisation and its consequences in the working life of the future.

Companies are also demanding that employees be more willing to acquire new qualifications in order to adapt to the rapidly changing processes in the Working World 4.0.

An interactive touch-screen exhibit of ZEW on board the exhibition ship MS Wissenschaft provides an insight into how digitalisation changes the tasks and responsibilities of certain jobs. The interactive screen shows which elements of the job have the potential to be automated in the future – and in which fields human skills will become all the more important as a result. The exhibit illustrates how employees can make themselves fit to match new tasks and requirements by gaining further qualification.

A particular type of employment in the digital labour market – referred to with buzzwords like “crowdsourcing” or “gig economy” – is currently the subject of public debate. The prevalence of this type of employment, where services are issued and in some cases carried out via online platforms, is, however, currently still very low according to a ZEW analysis of more than 100 German and international research projects on this topic.