Technological change and the upskilling of European workers

Using the second wave of the European Skills and Jobs survey, this paper measures the relationship between technological change that automates or augments workers’ job tasks and their participation in work-related training. We find that 58% of European employees experienced no change in the need to learn new technologies in their jobs during the 2020–21 period. Of those exposed to new digital technology, 14% did not experience any change in job tasks, 10% reported that new tasks had been created, while 5% only saw some of their tasks being displaced by new technology. The remaining 13% simultaneously experienced both task displacement and task creation. Our analysis shows that employees in jobs impacted by new digital technologies are more likely to have to react to unpredictable situations, thus demonstrating a positive link between technologically driven task disruption and job complexity. We show a strong linear relationship between technologically driven job task disruption and the need for job-related training, with training requirements increasing the greater the impact of new technologies on task content. Our key results are robust to both selection bias and potential unobserved heterogeneity.