What are the directions of change in the complexity of work and the required skill levels of the labour force in Europe? Three prominent strands of literature suggest conflicting expectations – upskilling, deskilling and polarisation. This question is answered by employing a novel work complexity indicator that measures how tasks are performed at work according to three dimensions: routinisation of tasks, autonomy at work and continuous skill-building. The measurements rely on the European Working Conditions Surveys carried out in 2005, 2010 and 2015. The results show that the European labour markets witness upskilling with some polarisation, although there are significant cross-national differences. They also show that, individually, neither shifts in work complexity within occupations (deskilling hypothesis), nor changes in employment structure (the focus of the upskilling and polarisation hypotheses) can provide an adequate view of trends in the European labour markets. Instead, both vectors of change should be analysed collectively.

How does the design of evaluation systems affect the different ways of using the results of evaluations? This article offers a conceptual model that outlines three 'ideal' types of evaluation systems. It is a heuristic tool for opening up the 'black box' of evaluation systems and assessing their qualitative differences in terms of types of 'owners' of evaluations, questions asked, methods deployed, answers provided and avenues for use of evaluative knowledge. We apply the model to study the case of the Lithuanian evaluation system. In contrast to the expectations of some of the previously developed models, it does use evaluation results, and we aim to understand why the generated evidence is more often used in some areas rather than others.

A number of academic debates rely on the distinction between general and specific skills as being valuable to a large number or a few firms. However, the meaning attributed to these concepts as well as empirical measurement strategies have significantly varied in the literature. To address the resulting theoretical and empirical confusion, we propose a multidimensional approach for defining skill specificity, which encompasses four distinct concepts: accessibility and similarity of skill sets as well as the portability and replaceability of skills. The former two refer to skills acquired by an individual (i.e. skills are substantively specific), while the latter two depend on the structure of labour demand and supply, institutions and firms’ strategies (i.e. on economic factors) that are time and place dependent. This paper proposes and tests empirical strategies for measuring each concept. The results challenge assumptions in the literature that graduates of vocational training and high-skilled blue-collar occupations have substantively specific skills. The multidimensional conceptualization and empirical results provide a number of theoretical implications. We focus on three conceptual debates regarding firms’ incentives to fund training, workers’ demand for social insurance and types of skills that facilitate or obstruct adjustment to technological and economic shocks.

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How did technological upgrading in the Baltics during the transition from planned to market economy affect labour? Existing academic literature would imply a skill-biased or polarising effect. However, we find that the opposite is likely true—technological upgrading predominantly benefited lower skilled workers. This is explained by an abundance of lower skilled labour, which fostered the usage of less advanced technologies that such workers could utilise. This article contributes to the discussion on the relationship between technology and labour by highlighting that technological upgrading may lead to low-skill-biased change.