Between 2006 and 2016, total employment in the OECD area grew by 6.9% (a net gain of about 38 million jobs). Examining the contributions towards these net changes shows that the sectors with the highest digital intensity made a strong contribution to employment gains in many countries: around four of every ten additional jobs in the OECD area, and as many as eight-in-ten jobs created in the Slovak Republic. In contrast, the contribution from medium-high digital intensity sectors was much smaller, on average, across the OECD (3.7%), as relatively strong positive contributions in some countries such as Poland, Chile and Mexico were balanced by strong negative effects in Greece, Finland, Italy and others. In almost all countries where aggregate employment fell between 2006 and 2016, the greatest declines were in low digital intensity sectors, while medium-low digital intensity sectors also experienced a decline in employment. Overall, this suggests that the more digitally intensive sectors have contributed to employment growth more strongly than other sectors.
ICT skills are in high demand. All things being equal (including education and other workers’ skills), the higher the ICT task intensity of a job, the higher the hourly wage earned. However, estimates suggest that the pay-off for working in ICT task-intensive jobs varies widely across countries. In Korea and the United States, workers in jobs requiring a 10% higher intensity of ICT tasks than the country average earn hourly wages that are more than 3.5% higher. Conversely, workers in Israel and Turkey enjoy relatively lower returns on ICT task-intensive jobs (i.e. only about 1%). Returns on ICT task-intensive jobs depend on many factors including a country’s supply of and demand for ICT skills, and its wage structure (OECD, 2017; Grundke et al., 2018).
Recently, some have expressed concern over potential imbalance between the demand for and the supply of ICT specialists in the labour market (OECD, 2017b). According to data available for European countries, over half of firms trying to recruit ICT specialists reported difficulties in doing so. The number of ICT specialist vacancies in each responding business is not known. Nevertheless, this equates to a relatively small percentage of all enterprises reporting hard-to-fill vacancies for ICT specialists – about 5% in 2018. However, the share of businesses overall having difficulties with filling ICT specialist roles has increased nearly two percentage points, from 3% in 2012, on average. A majority of countries have seen the share of firms reporting recruitment difficulties increase, with especially large rises in Slovenia and Italy, where the rate of businesses with hard-to-fill ICT specialist vacancies tripled between 2012 and 2018. The Netherlands has the highest rate, at 9% in 2018, nearly three-times the 2012 figure. Meanwhile, markedly fewer businesses in Iceland and Poland reported hard-to-fill ICT specialist vacancies in 2018 compared to 2012.
