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In this paper I begin to answer the neglected question of “When to downsize?” Specifically, is downsizing and the associated reskilling of workforces an appropriate response to technological discontinuity? Based on past organizational literature written about technological discontinuity, downsizing, and reskilling, I develop a theoretical framework that indicates when downsizing following a technological discontinuity will increase organizational effectiveness. Propositions are developed based on this framework. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for managers and future researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to study the growth dynamics in a model where labor productivity is shaped by two forces. On one hand, it is determined by the extent in which available technology has been already explored. On the other hand, some labor skills may become obsolete, jeopardizing the ability of the labor input in creating value, namely when a transition between technological states takes place.

A theoretical model is developed, based on previous work about hierarchical organizations of production, in order to build an integrated structure of analysis for growth, productivity, innovation and obsolescence of skills.

In a setting in which output grows through the accumulation of layers of activity, the generation of income and the evolution of techniques will be determined by the choice of a representative agent, who faces a trade-off between consumption utility and the desire to maintain intact the skills of the labor force.

The theory provides an analytical structure to think about skill acquisition and skill obsolescence in the context of economic growth. Further work is necessary, namely at an empirical level, to test the validity and the reasonability of the model's implications.

The paper sheds light on the role of labor productivity as a growth determinant. It seeks a deeper understanding on the relationship between human capabilities and the efficient use of technology.

This paper examines to what extent formal training targeted to workers aged 45 and over could enhance their knowledge transmission activities specifically in changing work environments. This is a key issue for human resources practitioners. Allowing older workers to keep on interacting with their colleagues and transmitting their knowledge acquired through experience reduces the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

The authors use French-matched employer–employee data to estimate the effect of participation in training sessions intended to support change on the probability for workers aged 45–59 of frequently showing work practices to their co-workers. To account for selection bias in training, the authors reduce the group of untrained workers to those who wanted to attend a training session but had to cancel their participation for exogenous reasons. Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008) show that this is a valid approximation of a random assignment to training.

Training with the intention to support change for workers aged 45 and more significantly increases knowledge transmission for training participants. This effect is not strictly related to a supervising role as it is significant for workers without subordinates; it holds when the authors address the selection bias in training by narrowing down the comparison group. When training comes as a response to mitigate the potential negative effects of technological or organizational changes in the work environment, it helps workers aged 45–59 maintain their contribution to the knowledge base of the production.

Our findings suggest that two main aspects have to be borne in mind when assessing the effectiveness of training for older workers. First, the reasons for training must be carefully considered, especially if it occurs in response to technological or organizational change in the workplace. Second, the continuation of interactions between older workers and their co-workers must be factored. If the public debate acknowledges that employee learning and development is critical in times of structural change and crisis, the outcomes of knowledge transmission within workplaces in terms of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, productivity or innovation, which the authors do not cover in this paper, deserve further investigations. In particular, the authors believe that studying how the training that supports technological and organizational change influences the relationship between age diversity and firm productivity is a promising avenue for future research.

The implication of this article for human resource managers is that there may be a substantial cost to not updating the skills of older workers after technological or organizational change. Indeed, it is likely that a large proportion of jobs will only be partially automated, which implies that while some tasks will disappear, rendering the corresponding skills obsolete, others will persist and the skills associated with them will remain useful to organizations. If older workers are excluded from their work collectives after these changes, because their skills have not been updated through training, the knowledge from their accumulated experience that remains valuable will be irrevocably lost when they retire.

This study sheds a new light on the effectiveness of older workers’ training. Some contributions argue that training for older workers is not very effective because it has no significant effect on employment duration, earnings or relative productivity. The authors show that specific types of training to update skills after a technological or organizational change allow older workers to keep interacting with their co-workers and pass on their knowledge gained through experience, thereby reducing the risk for firms of losing critical knowledge assets.

Bill Gates, who feels that with respect to Windows and CDROMs, he overestimated in the short‐run, and underestimated in the long‐run, would probably expect Broadband Network Technology (BNT) to arrive in less than a decade. No matter when BNT arrives, there is a fundamental question that has to be raised and answered, which is the theme of this chapter: the UTILIZATION of the exploding multimedia content of the Information Superskyway. How will people USE 1,000 times the current content, arriving 1,000 times as fast? We discuss nine imperative issues of utilization. (1) Use of Content on the Information Superskyway. More than 20 years before IT became a household word, the US National Science Foundation issued a Request for Proposal entitled: “Systems Approach to Evaluate the Use of Science and Technology Information in the Electronic Alternative to Paper‐based Communication.” The same approach is germane toward the use of the entire IT content today. (2) Use of IT Data in Corporate Decision‐Making. In 1972, IBM headquarters removed the computer consoles placed next to the desk of senior executives because the computers were hardly used in two years. How can nonuse be avoided? (3) Networks obsoleting skills, structure. The fusion of computers and communications empowers all the workers to form, dissolve, and re‐form networks based on their relative competitiveness. With the ability to source globally, virtual corporations can be formed, dissolved, and re‐formed based on their competitiveness and credibility. (4) Significant resource commitment to unproven technology. With the very survival of Great Britain at stake, the non‐specialist Churchill had to lay all the technology eggs in the single basket called the “radar,” trusting that “the promises made by our scientists for the still unproven radar would be kept.” It would remain unproven for four years yet. (5) Sensitivity of significant resource commitment to technology forecast. Far more tenuous than the “promises for radar” was Einstein's opinion that nuclear‐energy could be released. Roosevelt launched the atomic bomb project on that opinion. Had he sought a second opinion from an eminent physicist like Niels Bohr, he would have questioned Einstein's opinion as scientific arm‐waving. (6) Sensitivity of significant resource commitment to technology‐generated market forecast. Churchill's reliance on Lindemann for technology advice is echoed in IBM CEO Watson's reliance on Birkenstock. In 1948, the latter encouraged the former to stand up against Watson, Sr. and abandon punch cards for magnetic tape. In 1956, he persuaded Watson, Jr. to negotiate with Texas Instruments to cut down the price of IC to $1.50, making it economically feasible to use IC in System/360. (7) Protection of Primogeniture of Ideas on the Internet. In order not to inhibit the inventor from collaborative interactions, the paternity of seminal ideas has to be unambiguously established when interactive exchanges are instantaneous, as on the Internet. (8) Inter‐disciplinary (synergistic) linguistics. The prerequisite to any inter‐disciplinary communication is the ability of each to understand one language in addition to one's own discipline. A truly inter‐disciplinary language would enable those in different disciplines to communicate with everyone else, enabling synergy to be generated. (8) Putting the Content in the Context. The explosion of instantaneous data racing thousand times as fast as at present is sand without substance, unless the symbols written in sand are given substance by the context of the decision‐maker. The data should be ordered and processed to answer questions of the type: Must I expand the external boundaries; if so, in which direction? Must I expand the internal boundaries; if so, in which direction?

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it intends to engage in skill gain–lose debate in the contemporary global skill mobility context; and second, it looks into whether Southeast Asia (SEA) is losing by experiencing skill deficiency due to over outflow of talents.

Primary data were collected through interviews with policy makers, stakeholder and migrant professionals from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The paper comes up with the brain drain dynamics to better understand the trajectory of skill mobility in and from SEA. Within the skill mobility discourse, it is undoubtedly difficult to conclude who are the losers and the gainers in the long run.

This research is based on relatively small sample. However, this offers a fresh insight into the skill deficiency dynamics in Southeast Asia.

Institutional skill training—training in institutions organised for that purpose rather than on‐the‐job—was the first of the manpower programmes of the 1960s to be mandated by Congress and applied on a nationwide basis. Its overall goal has been to improve the skills, employability and income of the unemployed and under‐employed through the provision of vocational and related instruction in a formal classroom or laboratory setting. A corollary purpose of the programme has been to meet the needs of employers for workers in demand and/or “skills shortage” occupations. It differs from traditional vocational education in that its objective is to train workers for immediate employment in occupations which are currently in demand. Traditional vocational education, on the other hand, has a much broader objective: to prepare the student for a lifetime of work in a dynamic labour market. Institutional skill training, as it evolved in the sixties, is short‐term and intensive; traditional vocational education is longer in length and adapted to the less immediate needs of secondary and post‐secondary level students.

Using the concept of human security, the purpose of this paper is to explore the subjective perception of insecurities experienced by Thai subcontracted workers in industrial value chains and examines how they mitigate these insecurities.

This paper uses a qualitative approach and analyses the narratives from in-depth interviews with 23 female subcontracted workers in low-income communities in Bangkok, Thailand. Four male subcontracted workers were also interviewed to compare gender differences. Five key informant interviews with NGOs and academicians were conducted.

There are three main findings. First, subcontracted workers’ economic insecurities are influenced by their work and personal trajectories in the labour market. Second, many of their health and care-related insecurities are fuelled by relational rather than individual experience; that is, they are worried they will not be able to provide care for their children, to fulfil their responsibility as mothers, or they are concerned with the effects of their hazardous work environment on their family members. Third, most subcontracted workers mitigate their insecurities using their immediate relational network in the absence of formal protection.

While earlier literature on subcontracted workers’ vulnerabilities in Thailand discussed the issues from a politico-economic perspective, this paper uses the concept of human security, which enables us to better understand their insecurities as context-specific experiences in their daily lives.

In our analyses, using data on Dutch tertiary education graduates, we use a direct measure for skills obsolescence based on workers' self-assessment. On average, almost a third of the skills obtained in tertiary education were obsolete seven years later. Skills obsolescence is strongly related to rapid changes in work domain, and to shortcomings in tertiary education. Obsolescence occurs as much in generic as in specific fields of study. It is only weakly related to current skill shortages, and not at all to the prospects for further skill acquisition, wages and investments in additional training.

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the link between human capital depreciation and the educational level of Spanish salaried workers.

Wage equations are estimated by sector and occupation, following the empirical framework proposed by Neuman and Weiss. Data in this study refer to the Spanish labour market, using two cross‐sectional employee‐firm matched data.

The estimates provided in this paper suggest that human capital depreciation rates are not homogeneous for the whole sample; in contrast, they vary across educational levels, being greater as the workers' school attainment increases.

The main restriction of the paper is the limited availability of quality longitudinal data to estimate human capital depreciation.

Knowledge acquired by workers may quickly become obsolete in a context of technological change. Thus, the paper's main findings support the need for ongoing training programs to update workers' skills to changing market requirements.

The added value of this paper is two‐fold. On the one hand, returns to education and human capital depreciation for the Spanish labour force are estimated using a pseudo‐panel created from two cross‐sectional data bases. On the other hand, earnings equations are estimated by sector and occupation in order to calculate human capital depreciation rates; this procedure allows the authors to take into account the worker's occupation and their level of education as well as technological differences associated with their job.