Previous work has argued that routine-based tasks put employees into an especially vulnerable situation during digitalisation – they would need to adapt most strongly to new tasks but receive fewer employer-provided training than other groups. This paper focuses on a separate reason for vulnerability, namely skill specificity. A skill profile is measured in this paper as the bundle of tasks an employee conducts on a regular basis. The skill specificity is defined following the skill-weights approach and calculated in a novel way applying the Mahalanobis distance. Based on David Marsden’s account of the employment relationship, it is argued that digitalisation calls for more training to attain a skill profile acceptable by the employer and at the same time specific skill profiles reduce employee’s bargaining power. Resulting hypotheses are confirmed in panel regressions with data from the German employer-employee panel "WeLL". Most importantly, when the work of employees with specific skill profiles is affected by different forms of digitalisation, we find these employees to receive less employer-financed training than employees with general skill profiles. Strong skill specificity is also associated with high wage losses after job change – and it is also correlated with routinization. In sum, this paper demonstrates that skill specificity significantly adds to an employee’s labour market vulnerability in the digitalisation process and is entangled with routinization of tasks.
Talea Hellweg (Thu,) studied this question.