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This paper sheds light on the extent to which different types of skills are rewarded as industries go digital. It relies on information from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills on labour market participation and workers' skills for 31 countries as well as on a novel OECD index on the digital penetration of industries. It investigates how cognitive and non-cognitive skills are rewarded in digital vs. less digital intensive industries and assesses the extent to which skills bundles matter. The results indicate that digital intensive industries especially reward workers having relatively higher levels of selforganisation and advanced numeracy skills. Moreover, for workers in digital intensive industries, bundles of skills are particularly important: workers endowed with a high level of numeracy skills receive an additional wage premium, if they also show high levels of self-organisation or managing and communication skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies have traditionally measured workers' skills by educational attainment or occupational status. Recent literature using country-specific information on the task content of jobs to identify the different skills of individuals argues that neither these proxies measure skills adequately, as large wage heterogeneity still exists within education and occupation classes. This study follows a job task-based approach and exploits the rich information contained in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to conduct an exploratory state-of-the-art factor analysis. The six task-based skills indicators thus extracted have the characteristic of being comparable across 31 countries and allow clearer interpretation than indicators proposed by previous literature. Moreover, by combining the PIAAC-based skills indicators with data from the OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA) database, light is shed on the way different skills and their distributions (at the country-industry level) relate to industry performance and to integration into global value chains (GVCs). The results underline the importance of cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving for any industry to thrive in the global economy. Also, a persistent and positive association with labour productivity and participation in GVCs is observed, at the industry level, for non-cognitive skills such as managing and communication skills, ICT skills and workers' readiness to learn and to think creatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies have traditionally measured workers' skills by educational attainment or occupational status. Recent literature using country-specific information on the task content of jobs to identify the different skills of individuals argues that neither these proxies measure skills adequately, as large wage heterogeneity still exists within education and occupation classes. This study follows a job taskbased approach and exploits the rich information contained in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to conduct an exploratory state-of-the-art factor analysis. The six task-based skills indicators thus extracted have the characteristic of being comparable across 31 countries and allow clearer interpretation than indicators proposed by previous literature. Moreover, by combining the PIAAC-based skills indicators with data from the OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA) database, light is shed on the way different skills and their distributions (at the country-industry level) relate to industry performance and to integration into global value chains (GVCs). The results underline the importance of cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving for any industry to thrive in the global economy. Also, a persistent and positive association with labour productivity and participation in GVCs is observed, at the industry level, for non-cognitive skills such as managing and communication skills, ICT skills and workers' readiness to learn and to think creatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]