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The authors illustrate that there are significant differences in the wage performance across companies in relation to the digital content of their production and training activities.

Using company-level data from three waves of the Continuing Vocational Training Survey (2005, 2010 and 2015), this paper provides an overview on European firms implementing training and the magnitude of their training effort.

The authors conduct a regression analysis documenting that a wage premium of 9% is associated with companies undertaking training and that an additional 8% is paid by firms arranging training for IT skills-intensive workers. The latter effect is pervasive across sectors and is not strictly related to industry exposure to the digital transformation.

The authors assess the wage effect of training, in relation to the digital content of firm production or job tasks, using a large set of European companies (112,000), from countries with different degree of specialisation and institutional setting. The analysis covers a significant period of time of the last wave of digitalisation (2005, 2010, 2015).

The main aim of this paper is to test the ways in which the role of high‐technology services (HTS) in the economy of European Union (EU) member countries changes and the extent to which the development of HTS depends on the quality of human resources.

The paper adopts comparative and cluster analysis of statistical data published by Eurostat.

The empirical analysis approved the growing proportion of HTS in both employment and gross value added in the EU as a whole. However, there are great differences among individual member states that can be grouped into four clusters. HTS have a significantly higher proportion of tertiary educated employees, belong to young sectors and show a higher rate of participation in continuing education. HTS development is closely related to information communications technology (ICT) literacy of the population of the country, on the one hand, and on its economic standards, on the other.

The major findings constitute a starting‐point for more thorough national analysis and for setting measures supporting HTS development, especially through the availability of an appropriately educated labour force.

The growing proportion of HTS in the economy is an important feature of knowledge economies; therefore it is necessary for politicians to have information about the development of this sector.

HTS has been little researched in a detailed way to date. This paper tries to indicate all the important features that should be further and more deeply analysed.

This article addresses social dimensions and implications of the rise of the information, skill‐intensive economy based on self‐managing teams. The basis of the paper is an historical analysis of how “Taylorist” industrialization suppressed the self‐directing, team‐based labour process which had characterized pre‐industrial America, in the process inflicting deep long‐term economic and social costs even as it helped produced unprecedented prosperity. Extrapolating from the historical analysis, in the second section of the paper social trends are discussed which seem likely to emerge in the future with the establishment of an information‐ and skill‐intensive economic organization based on self‐managing teams.

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs survey (ESJS) (Cedefop, 2014, ESJS microdata are Cedefop copyright and are reproduced with the permission of Cedefop. Further information is available at Cedefop, 2015), a new international dataset on skill mismatch of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich set of variables in the estimation of the effect of overeducation on earnings, such as individuals’ job search motives and the skill needs of their jobs. Oaxaca decomposition techniques are employed to uncover the extent to which the earnings penalties of overeducated workers can be attributed to either (i) individual human capital attributes, (ii) job characteristics, (iii) information asymmetries, (iv) compensating job attributes, or (iv) assignment to jobs with different skill needs. Differences in human capital and job-skill requirements are important factors in explaining the wage premium. It is found that asymmetry of information accounts for a significant part of the overeducation wage penalty of tertiary education graduates, whereas job characteristics and the low skill content of their jobs can explain most of the wage gap for medium-qualified employees. Little evidence is found in favor of equilibrium theories of compensating wage differentials and career mobility. Accepting that much remains to be learned with regards to the drivers of overeducation, this paper provides evidence in support of the need for customized policy responses to tackle overeducation.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the extent of “over‐qualification” (i.e. holding a qualification which is above that required to gain entry to the job being done) and “skills under‐utilisation” (i.e. being in a job which does not make use of the knowledge and skills possessed) in the United Kingdom and to examine whether these conditions are correlated with age.

The paper makes use of the 2006 Skills Survey. Cross tabulations of both conditions with age are produced and binomial probit estimates of both conditions are reported.

It is estimated that 38 per cent are over qualified; 15 per cent are in jobs which do not make use of the knowledge and skills they possess; and age is correlated with the probability of being over qualified but not with the condition of under‐utilising the knowledge and skills possessed.

Skills policy in the United Kingdom focuses almost exclusively upon increasing the supply of more highly qualified individuals. Given the extent of over‐qualification and skills under‐utilisation demonstrated in the paper, more effort should be made by policy makers to design and implement policies which increase the demand for highly skilled labour.

The paper answers three questions: How prevalent are qualification mismatches? How prevalent are skills mismatches? To what extent are the two conditions of being over‐qualified and being in a job which does not offer scope to make use of the knowledge and skills possessed correlated with age?

Some positions within a firm consistently lead to promotion with a higher probability than other positions at the same hierarchical level. Therefore, serial correlation of promotion rates is not indicative merely of individuals with high innate ability, but it is also a feature of organizational structure. I describe these positions as “fast jobs” and present a model in which jobholders acquire human capital in these jobs that is more valuable at the next level. Data from a financial services firm confirm that workers in fast jobs are younger than other workers at the same level, and that transfers from fast to slow jobs are common. Thus, the process of grooming workers for advancement is analogous to more aggressive up-or-out systems. This deliberate grooming of some workers for advancement has income inequality implications, as it may reinforce the effect of small biases or small differences in early apparent ability.

This paper describes the ways automation and artificial intelligence are shifting the business landscape and how learning professionals can use curiosity to enhance their own and their organizations' success.

A review of theory and research on automation and artificial intelligence, curiosity, and learning and development challenges was conducted.

Although technological advancements are already transforming the workplace, the optimal benefits of these technologies will be realized only in collaboration with human capital. In particular, as certain manual and technical skills are replaced by automation, the jobs that remain will require more highly developed social and cognitive skills such as creative problem solving, interpersonal skills and empathy, and adaptability and continuous learning.

Learning professionals are encouraged to use strategies that leverage the power of curiosity to cultivate the soft skills critical for success in technologically advanced workplaces.

Technological advancement creates an ever-changing organizational and learning landscape for employees and development professionals. Cost-effective strategies are needed to close the growing skill gaps that result. Curiosity is a helpful tool for growing needed competencies.

This paper explores organizational restructuring in corporate law firms. We review recent changes in law firms’ business models and structures, specifically as they relate to the externalization of work – or the unbundling of work and its placement with outside entities, which redefines the division of labor and the nature of the employment relationship. We draw from the extensive scholarship on the legal profession to raise empirical and theoretical implications of market-driven change to the careers of lawyers as well as the shifting patterns of stratification within corporate firms and the profession at large.

Empowering the American economy requires creating a world‐class K‐12 (primary and secondary) education system, because K‐12 is where youth learn the skills essential to empowered work. However, the USA must not just equal the K‐12 standards set by Germany and Japan. Because 70 percent of future jobs will not require a four‐year college degree, the USA must remake its economic‐occupational structure to create a “technician class” offering high‐skill, high‐wage, socially esteemed jobs that operate in close conjunction with college‐educated professional‐managerial workers. A technician class will provide a focus for K‐12 reform that does not presently exist in the USA.