Abstract
The demand for skills has changed throughout recent decades, favouring high-skilled workers that perform abstract, problem-solving tasks. At the same time, research shows that occupation-specific skills are beneficial for labour market success. This article explores (1) how education, workplace characteristics and occupations shape job task requirements, (2) how within-occupation job task content relates to wages, and (3) whether these relationships vary across types of tasks due to their presumably varying degrees of occupational specificity. Using worker-level data from Germany from 2011–2012 the article shows that a large part of task content is determined by occupations, but that task requirements also differ systematically within occupations with workers’ educational levels and workplace characteristics. Moreover, differences in task usage within occupations are robust predictors of wage differences between workers. Finally, the results suggest that non-routine manual tasks have a higher occupational specificity than abstract and routine tasks, and that manually skilled workers can generate positive returns on their skills in their specific fields of activity.
Highlights
The demand for knowledge and skills has changed significantly in Western societies, partly due to technological change
This article explores (1) how education, workplace characteristics and occupations shape job task requirements, (2) how within-occupation job task content relates to wages, and (3) whether these relationships vary across types of tasks due to their presumably varying degrees of occupational specificity
Using worker-level data from Germany in 2011–2012, this article analysed the association between education and generic job task requirements, and between job tasks and wages, while assuming that the three main task domains distinguished in the literature differ in their level of occupational specificity
Summary
The demand for knowledge and skills has changed significantly in Western societies, partly due to technological change. Two strands of literature addressing this question, i.e., the task-approach literature and the literature on occupational specificity are in the foreground in this article. In the task approach (Autor, Levy, & Murnane, 2003) aggregate demand for skills is linked with the specific skill demands of jobs. This approach draws an explicit distinction between skills, as characteristics of workers, and tasks, as characteristics of job requirements. The key insight of this conceptualisation is that advances in computer technology throughout recent decades have complemented workers in abstract tasks, substituted for workers in routine tasks, and left most non-routine manual tasks unaffected.
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