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This book investigates trends in skills demand and supply over the past two decades for insights into ways to build (and use) the critical skills needed to sustain competitiveness of the Philippine economy. Part one of the book investigates trends in demand for skills in the country overall and by sectors, explores its possible determinants, and attempts to identify emerging skills gaps. Part two turns to the analysis of the supply of skills in the country with a focus on the ability of education and training to provide highly skilled labor, keeping workers' skills updated, and providing skills development opportunities for the unskilled. It explores employers' perceptions on the quality of institutions and provides detailed analysis of the main characteristics, outcomes, and challenges in four key (or growing) subsectors of the provision of skills in the country: higher education, postsecondary technical-vocational education, non-formal secondary education, and postemployment training. It concludes with a summary of policy recommendations.

The Industry 4.0 wave is built on technological advancement that is bringing about significant change. The impact of Industry 4.0 is being felt across all industries, including the education sector. During the 2019 State of the Nation address, the President of South Africa pointed out that the government was seeking to respond to the change in skills requirements. In this paper, a systematic literature review will be performed to investigate Industry 4.0 skills requirements in the engineering profession and the role of capability development in meeting Industry 4.0 requirements. An exploration of the impact of Industry 4.0 on technical institutions as opposed to academic institutions will also be discussed. This paper incorporates this exploratory investigation into detailed research on developing a skills development framework that seeks to bridge the gap between Industry 4.0 skills requirements and development in South Africa.

In this article, the authors ask how the institutional design of vocational education and training (VET) affects worker adaptability to changing skill demands over the life cycle. They compare two types of VET systems. Collectivist systems have high employer involvement and focus on specific skills, whereas Statist systems have lower employer involvement and focus more on general skills. Based on prior research demonstrating the importance of general skills in learning new skills, the authors hypothesize that worker adaptability will be higher in Statist VET systems than in Collectivist VET systems. Using a triple-difference model on data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, they find that as age increases, a significantly steeper decline in worker adaptability occurs within Collectivist systems compared to Statist systems. Results provide an explanation behind the diminishing employment returns to employer-dominated VET systems found in prior studies.

Software testing is an integral part of software development that provides better-quality products and user experiences and helps build the reputation of software companies. Though software testers perform a role that requires specific tasks and skills, in-depth studies of software testers lag behind research studies of other roles within software development teams. In this paper, we aim to create a profile of testers by presenting an empirical analysis of the skills the industry currently needs. We analysed data from 400 job adverts in 33 countries. We mapped the skills on a taxonomy comprising test-related, technical, and domain-specific skills. In addition, we looked at the demand for educational attainment, relevant certifications, and previous experience requirements. Our findings show that employers are mostly interested in skills related to test planning and design, test automation, functional testing, performance testing, and progress reporting. One third of the job advertisers were interested in people with the skills to operate test execution tools. Selenium was the testing tool most in demand. The testers must have strong technical abilities, including programming skills in Java, C#, and SQL. Also, they must handle project management tasks such as estimation, risk management, and quality assurance. Employers do not emphasise domain-specific knowledge, which indicates that they consider testing skills portable across industries. One in seven job adverts asks for a software testing certification. Our study helps clarify the complexity of the testing job and outlines the capabilities one needs to fulfil a software tester’s responsibilities.

To date, the knowledge and use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) has become an almost essential requirement when someone wants to find employment in our society. For this reason, this study aims to analyze the importance that students of the Faculty of Business Studies and Tourism of the University of Huelva (Spain) give to the acquisition of ICT skills for their future professional performance and the domain they have over them (achieved throughout their years of learning). This research is developed through a questionnaire completed by 90 students of the Faculty and concludes that in general they give these ICT skills the importance that they deserve and that their domain goes in parallel (except for some skills that show formative need), even being able to observe that in the majority of cases the dominion of these skills is tied to the importance that they give them.

This study aims to investigate up-to-date career opportunities and in-demand competence areas and skill sets for cloud computing (CC), which plays a crucial role in the rapidly developing teleworking environments with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we conducted a semantic content analysis on 10,161 CC job postings using semi-automated text-mining and probabilistic topic-modeling procedures to discover the competency areas and skill sets as semantic topics. Our findings revealed 22 competency areas and 46 skills, which reflect the interdisciplinary background of CC jobs. The top five competency areas for CC were identified as “Engineering”, “Development”, “Security”, “Architecture”, and “Management”. Besides, the top three skills emerged as “Communication Skills”, “DevOps Tools”, and “Software Development”. Considering the findings, a competency-skill map was created that illustrates the correlations between CC competency areas and their related skills. Although there are many studies on CC, the competency areas and skill sets required to deal with cloud computing have not yet been empirically studied. Our findings can contribute to CC candidates and professionals, IT organizations, and academic institutions in understanding, evaluating, and developing the competencies and skills needed in the CC industry.

Objective. This study aimed to locate and describe research studies in which the comprehensive day-to-day care and support needs of older Australians requiring home-based aged care have been measured and reported in detail. Methods. A scoping review was conducted according to Joanna Briggs Institute guidance. A systematic search of peer-reviewed and grey literature was undertaken. Results. Screening identified 2/866 eligible records. Researchers studying the 'service needs' of older people (n = 50) residing in a rural/remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community found a high need for home care (86%), transport (59%), and allied health (46%) services. In the second study, older people (n = 55) from a regional community had 38/79 'underlying care needs' including for washing/bathing, managing urinary incontinence, and arranging/keeping appointments. The authors of each study took a different perspective of 'needs' - that is, their participants' need for specific service types (e.g. transport) versus their fundamental underlying needs (e.g. arranging/keeping appointments) which give rise to service needs. Conclusions. The findings suggest Australian aged care providers and policy-makers lack a strong evidence base about the comprehensive underlying day-to-day care and support needs experienced by older Australians, to optimally inform both the design of home-based aged care programs and services, and workforce skill and skill mix requirements for the sector. Future studies about the population's underlying day-to-day care and support needs, with larger and more representative study populations (e.g. making use of routinely collected aged care datasets), would be beneficial. Such studies would provide important information to support the development of a government-funded home-based aged care system optimised to effectively and efficiently meet the needs of the population it is seeking to support.

Skill mismatch is a key indicator of labour market research that has received significant attention. To date, various approaches of test-based measurement of skill mismatch have been used in research, generating differing results. However, it remains unclear which method is the most valid for measuring skill mismatch. This study provides a comparative validation of five commonly used approaches to test-based measurement of skill mismatches in reading and mathematics to detect the most valid method. Drawing on the 2016 wave of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) Adult Cohort, I find significantly varying distributions for the different measurement approaches, and highly valid skill mismatch measures for the statistical and the mixed approach. Overall, the mixed approach emerges as the most valid method. The findings highlight the critical importance of measurement approaches in skill mismatch research.

The authors analyze the potential effects of automation on the jobs of truck drivers and conclude that media accounts predicting the imminent loss of millions of truck-driving jobs are overstated. Their conclusion is based on three main factors. First, the count of truck drivers is often inflated due to a misunderstanding of the occupational classification system used in federal statistics. Second, truck drivers do more than drive, and these non-driving tasks will continue to be in demand. Third, the requirements of technology, combined with complex regulations over how trucks can operate in the United States, imply that certain segments of trucking will be easier to automate than others. Long-haul trucking (which constitutes a minority of jobs) will be much easier to automate than will short-haul trucking (or the last mile), in which the bulk of employment lies. Although technology will likely transform the status quo in the trucking industry, it does not necessarily imply the wholesale elimination of the demand for truck drivers, as conventional accounts suggest.

[...]tools can be used to benchmark and map an organisation's direction for successful digital transformation. [...]a successful journey of adopting Industry 4.0 can be initiated by performing an Industry 4.0 readiness assessment, which will help to identify focus areas that demand attention. Industry 4.0 is a moderately new phenomenon [20]; so Rajnai and Kocsis [9] point out that there is no an universally agreed and proven methodology for assessing Industry 4.0 readiness. [...]the contribution by Botha [13] on the characteristics of the future readiness model to assess the Industry 4.0 readiness level is acknowledged. The Industry 4.0 readiness assessment by VDMA [18, 19] is a well-grounded tool that has been used and suggested by researchers to perform exploratory Industry 4.0 readiness assessments [9, 17, 21]. [...]to perform this exploratory study, the VDMA assessment tool was chosen from the existing and available Industry 4.0 readiness assessment tools. [...]there is no significant difference between the mean average readiness level for small enterprises, medium enterprises, and large enterprises that are represented in this study within a 95 per cent confidence level (CI: 95 per cent).