The Demand for Digital and Complementary Skills in Southeast Asia
As the economies of Southeast Asia continue adopting digital technologies, policy makers increasingly ask how to prepare the workforce for emerging labor demands. However, little is known about the skills that workers need to adapt to these changes...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099207106012292605/IDU015d114c30628f046a20a644099df1ade479f http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37503 |
| Summary: | As the economies of Southeast Asia
continue adopting digital technologies, policy makers
increasingly ask how to prepare the workforce for emerging
labor demands. However, little is known about the skills
that workers need to adapt to these changes. Skills profiles
in low- and middle-income countries are typically derived
from data collected in the United States, which is known to
inaccurately reflect their occupational skills. This paper
uses online job postings data from Malaysia to identify the
digital, cognitive, and socioemotional skills required for
digital and non-digital occupations. The skills profiles for
each occupation are then merged with labor force survey data
from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to sketch
skills profiles of the workforces in these countries. Using
descriptive statistics and linear probability model
regressions, the paper finds evidence that highly digital
occupations require not only digital skills, but also
cognitive and socioemotional skills. Similarly, virtually
all occupations, regardless of the digital intensity of the
job, require some basic or intermediate digital skills.
Pairwise correlations and a factor analysis confirm the
complementarity between digital skills and different subsets
of cognitive and socioemotional skills. The data also
confirm that, even with the excitement about the digital
revolution, the bulk of employment in Southeast Asia is in
low- (around two-thirds) or medium-digital (around
one-third) occupations. Only between 1 and 5 percent of jobs
are highly digital in the four countries studied. These
findings suggest that as education and training systems
adapt to teach basic digital skills, they will need to
continue to foster cognitive and socioemotional skills. |
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