Background

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The digital transformation causes substantial shifts in the tasks associated with specific jobs and the skills and competencies demanded by employers. The extent of possible disparities this will create on the labour market will crucially depend on how labour supply responds to these developments.

Moreover, digitalisation disrupts entire management systems, creating both new opportunities, and challenges for the formation and design of employment relationships. In this project, we investigate how the digital transformation changes employment relationships and the matching of labour supply and demand in Switzerland.

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Aim

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In this project, we investigate how the digital transformation changes employment relationships and the matching of labour supply and demand in Switzerland. Our goal is to identify the current changes on the Swiss labour market and to analyse how companies, employees, unemployed workers and new labour market entrants adapt.

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Overview

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The first step is to investigate how digitalisation changes job-specific tasks and the skills and competencies demanded by employers based on large-scale data on job vacancies. This information will serve as input for studying how firms and workers respond to these changes. On the labour demand side, we analyse the policies firms take to accommodate their changing needs and the challenges created by digitalisation. On the labour supply side, we study three dimensions of possible adjustments to the digital transformation. Firstly, we investigate how workers employed by Swiss firms adapt to changing requirements in their jobs, especially in terms of investments in new skills. Secondly, we study whether unemployed workers adjust their job search strategies towards the types of jobs with increasing demand and whether counselling services or participation in job search assistance and training programs help in the adjustment process. Thirdly, we study new labour market entrants using students of the University of Basel as example. New entrants play a particularly important role when labour demand changes substantially because they can tailor their educational and occupational choices to these changes.

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