The Labor Market in the Digital Age: A New Perspective on Job

Abstract

With the advent of new technology, the labor market has undergone many changes. These changes were perceived differently by people and may even be rejected. The fear that technology will replace human labor has persisted in people's identities since the beginning of the third millennium. Researchers are of different opinions. Some believe that technology will harm social welfare, while others argue that technology only helps to advance society. We accept on the one hand that technology can take over some workloads, but we also accept that technology creates new jobs. We also propose another perspective on this ideological conflict. We support the idea of reconfiguring jobs by optimizing tasks. We want to highlight the power that skills have in the hiring decision and what these skills are much desired by employers. The novelty comes from the way we work with new unstructured data sources to extract new insights. For this, we used the indicators "Skills needs" and "Skill penetration rate". These indicators were calculated by the World Bank in partnership with LinkedIn, based on the TD-IDF text mining methodology. To capture changes over time we used relative (chronological) dynamics indices, and to capture differences between skill categories we applied ANOVA analysis. Thus, we showed how the main industries have changed their preferences in terms of the skills that candidates have. We also highlighted how the importance for soft skills, technological skills and disruptive technological skills has increased. Finally, we presented the growing speed of demand for people with skills for new technologies (artificial intelligence, data science, human computer interaction).