This study focuses on the risk of automation and its interaction with training and the use of skills at work. Building on the expert assessment carried out by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013, the paper estimates the risk of automation for individual jobs based on the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The analysis improves on other international estimates of the individual risk of automation by using a more disaggregated occupational classification and identifying the same automation bottlenecks emerging from the experts' discussion. Hence, it more closely aligns to the initial assessment of the potential automation deriving from the development of Machine Learning. Furthermore, this study investigates the same methodology using national data from Germany and United Kingdom, providing insights into the robustness of the results. The risk of automation is estimated for the 32 OECD countries that have participated in the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) so far. Beyond the share of jobs likely to be significantly disrupted by automation of production and services, the accent is put on characteristics of these jobs and the characteristics of the workers who hold them. The risk is also assessed against the use of ICT at work and the role of training in helping workers transit to new career opportunities.

This working paper summarises how issues directly related to the future of work have been discussed by ILO constituents in sectoral meetings held since 2010, as further material for reflection by the Global Commission on the Future of Work, established in September 2017 to work around four themes: (1) work and society; (2) decent jobs for all; (3) the organization of work and production; and (4) the governance of work. It has also been prepared to inform ILO constituents in specific sectors, who in recent years have launched their own debates and exchanges at national, regional and global levels on the future of work.The paper takes a sectoral perspective and contains the following sections: (a) a description of the methodology used and the scope of the paper; (b) a brief overview of the many meetings and publications that have addressed the future of work, followed by a description of how the rapidly changing world of work has been analysed and discussed by constituents from six selected sectors: mechanical and electrical engineering (electronics), health services, media and culture, retail commerce, tourism, and road transport; (c) a summary of how key drivers of change - climate change, demographics, globalization, and technological advances - have been addressed in sectoral meetings and report; (d) a discussion of the critical challenges and opportunities affecting the future of work that arise from these drivers of change; it gives examples of how these challenges and opportunities have been discussed in past sectoral meetings and research, and how they relate to the Commissions four themes; and (e) recommendations on how sectoral constituents and the ILO itself can further enhance their contribution to the ILO Centenary Initiative on the Future of Work in general and to the work of the Commission in particular

Routine-biased technological change has emerged as a leading explanation for the differential wage growth of routine occupations, such as manufacturers or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. Less clear, however, is how the effects of technological advancement on occupational wage trends vary across political-institutional context. This paper investigates the extent to which collective bargaining agreements and union coverage shape the relative wage growth of automatable occupations. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study and the United States Current Population Survey, I measure the ‘routine task intensity’ of occupations across 15 OECD Member States and the 50 United States from the 1980s onward. Findings suggest that bargaining coverage is more consequential for the wage growth of high routine occupations relative to less routine occupations, and that high routine occupations lose coverage at a faster rate when bargaining coverage at the national level declines. As a result, declines in bargaining coverage within a country are associated with declining relative wage growth for automatable occupations. Estimates suggest that had union coverage in the United States not declined from 1984 levels, the earnings of high routine occupations might have grown at the same rate as low pay occupations between 1984 and 2015, rather than experiencing a relative wage decline. However, the findings also suggest that gains in the relative wage growth may increasingly come at the cost of reduced employment shares of automatable occupations.

Automation will be a boon or a catastrophe depending on whom you listen to. This paper proposes an overlapping-generations model with endogenous school choice in which the quality of a country's education system determines how well skill supply can respond to increased demand from automation and subsequently whether automation will be beneficial or detrimental. In this sense, education quality in the model offers a bridge between the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on automation. In testing the model's assumptions, the paper finds evidence that educational attainment, cognitive skills, and select noncognitive skills are associated with avoiding automation-prone occupations. Consistent with the model's predictions, census data indicate that countries have historically relied most on these types of occupations at middle-income status. The model and empirical findings suggest that it is middle-income countries that are most vulnerable to automation if their education systems are unable to affect cognitive and noncognitive skills sufficiently. As a result, automation may herald a much different growth model for developing countries: one in which developing these skills is central.

Work-integrated learning (WIL) combines traditional post-secondary education (PSE) with exposure to real-world work experience, often with the goal of better preparing graduates for entry into the workforce and smoothing the transition from student to employee (or becoming self-employed). WIL encompasses a broad range of activities which integrate a student's academic studies within a workplace setting - this includes co-operative (co-op) programs, work placements, internships, and field work. This study examines the relationship between work, learning, and work-integrated learning for the 2012 Canadian population that graduated between 2012 and 2016 using new data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA). Rather than focusing exclusively on traditional WIL (e.g. co-operative education and work placements), which is covered extensively in current literature, the LISA considers the broader interaction between work and learning, asking a variety of questions about graduates' work acquired both through their academic program and independent from it. This research contributes to the Canadian literature on WIL by exploiting a new data source and examining the broader nexus between work, learning, and WIL in Canada that extends beyond traditional streams of work-integrated learning. While most graduates from a post-secondary institution had a job at some point during their post-secondary education - about half of all graduates had a job related to their field of study - most of these jobs were informal WIL. That is, they did not form part of a graduate's program of study. Nonetheless, the majority of graduates with a job related to their field of study reported that this job was useful for obtaining their first career job. Those graduates that had a job related to their field of study were also 14 percentage points more likely to find full-time work within three months of graduating, compared to those that had a job that was unrelated to their field of study, suggesting positive labour market outcomes associated with integrating work and schooling.

This paper revisits traditional human capital models and proposes a new conceptual framework of human capital accumulation, anchored in skills development, to illustrate the phenomenon and implications of youth economic disengagement. In the framework, youth economic disengagement is defined as a state (temporary or permanent) where individuals stop accumulating human capital due to inadequate access and quality of opportunities for skills development through formal education and employment. Total economic disengagement is a rational choice that individuals make when (i) the formal education system and labor market do not contribute to build skills that are valued by the labor market; and (ii) the costs related to economic engagement (that is, studying and working) surpass its benefits. The phenomenon of economic disengagement has lifelong implications that not only constrain and restrain future earnings, but also undermine prospects for improvements in productivity and economic growth.

Resilience refers to the capacity of individuals to prosper despite encountering adverse circumstances. This paper defines academic resilience as the ability of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged backgrounds to perform at a certain level in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics and science that enables them to play an active role in their communities and prepares them to make the most of lifelong learning opportunities. Using data from the most recent PISA cycles, this paper explores changes in the share of resilient students over time (2006-2015); highlights the importance of school environments and resources in mitigating the risk of low achievement for disadvantaged students; and identifies school-level factors that are associated with the likelihood of academic resilience among socio-economically disadvantaged students. Analyses reveal that several countries were able to increase the share of resilient students over time, reflecting improvements in the average performance of students, or a weaker relationship between socio-economic status and performance. In the vast majority of education systems examined, the likelihood of academic resilience among disadvantaged students is lower in schools where students report a negative classroom climate. The paper concludes by exploring school policies and practices that are associated with a positive classroom climate.

Recent significant advances in artificial intelligence have raised questions about the role of workers in an era when robots and algorithms are increasingly able to perform many job duties, including those previously believed to be non-automatable. The COVID-19 pandemic have added to these concerns, as businesses may turn to new automation technology to perform a broader range of work activities traditionally done by human workers. While previous studies have estimated the share of Canadian workers at high risk of automation-related job transformation, this study is the first to examine in great detail the automation risks faced by different groups of workers. This study applies an approach similar to the one developed by Frey and Osborne (2013) and Arntz, Gregory and Zierahn (2016) to Canadian data. Results suggest that, overall, 10.6% of Canadian workers were at high risk (probability of 70% or higher) of automation-related job transformation in 2016, while 29.1% were at moderate risk (probability of between 50% and 70%). Several groups had a relatively higher share of workers who were at high risk, including those who were older (55 or above), had no postsecondary credentials or postsecondary credentials in certain fields, had low literacy or numeracy proficiency, had low employment income, or were employed part time, in small firms, in certain occupations (e.g., Office support occupations), or in the manufacturing sector. One specific finding of interest is that Business, management and public administration and Health and related fields graduates faced the highest automationrelated job transformation risks among postsecondary certificate and diploma holders, but they were among the groups facing the lowest risks when looking at postsecondary degree holders.

WorldSkills and the OECD have joined forces to better understand the attitudes of young people when it comes to future technologies, their perceptions about how technological change will impact their work opportunities, and whether they feel if they are getting enough support from schools to prepare them for the future. This survey aims to fill the gap surrounding international comparable data on perceptions on the future work. Through the OECD campaign “I am the future of work” and WorldSkills Conference 2019 in Kazan, the findings are being promoted with stakeholders to feed the debate and positively influence policies on skills and education for a future that works.