IT skills: Requirements for employed persons

The diffusion and use of IT in the world of work

Technological change and digitalisation (artificial intelligence) are permeating our working world, with a wide range of implications for processes, tasks and the associated IT skills requirements. There is a consensus that IT skills are vital as cross-occupational or transversal skills to meet the (future) challenges of the world of work (cf. e.g. Council of the World of Work 2023).

Representative studies are necessary to provide empirical evidence on the extent of digitalisation and the distribution of IT use in the workplace. A previous analysis based on the 2018 BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey (ETB 2018) showed that around seven per cent of the workforce performed professional IT tasks outside the core IT occupations (i.e. IT mixed occupations), with tertiary-educated workers performing such tasks twice as often as those with vocational training (see Hall 2023). Another analysis based on the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) on the type of computer use in the workplace also showed that the complexity of computer usage increases with the level of education (see Christoph 2017). Additional evidence from the NEPS data also suggested that usage of networked digital technologies (from simple tasks to solving complex problems) also increases in complexity with higher educational attainment (see Friedrich et al. 2021). In addition to the traditional use of IT, self-monitoring and self-learning systems have played an increasingly important role in recent years. Thus, representative studies on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace have identified shares of 20 percent and 25 percent respectively in 2019 (cf. Giering et al. 2021; cf. Meyer et al. 2022).

As digitalisation continues to advance, the latest data on the spread of AI and IT requirements in the world of work is of central importance. The results presented in this article are based on the current 2024 BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey, representative of (core) employed persons in Germany (see box below).

Understanding and operationalising competence

The ETB 2024 is based on a “task-related concept of competence”, which focuses on the competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills and abilities) required to perform work tasks in addition to the frequency of computer use (often/ sometimes/never). The ETB 2024 also contains the level or degree of complexity of IT skill requirements. For example, the question “Do you use programming languages in your job?” can be used as an indicator of the programming skills required (see box below). In this way, it can be shown at what level (and in which occupations) IT skills are required that go beyond the use of standard software.

IT skills requirements increase with job complexity

The analyses based on the ETB 2024 and earlier Employment Surveys on computer use in the workplace document the high level of IT diffusion in German workplaces. The majority of employed persons in Germany currently use a computer at least sometimes (87.7%), of whom around 76% do so frequently. The proportion of employed persons who do not use a computer has fallen by around eleven percentage points since 2006 (23.6%, 2024: 12.2%).

Computer use is widespread across all levels of job requirements. Both general and specific computer use increases with the requirement level of the job (see Figure). Almost all employed persons in academic jobs (i.e., jobs for which a university degree is usually required) use computers at least occasionally, almost nine out of ten (87.2%) in vocational education and training (VET) jobs and two out of three (65.3%) in elementary jobs (jobs for which no formal degree is required). The use of standard office software is also almost a matter of course for employed persons at the two highest levels of job requirements, with three out of four employed persons (76.6%) in VET jobs and almost one out of two (48.7%) in elementary jobs using it.

The demand for more complex computer skills is much more heterogeneous. The use of specialised computer programs, e.g. for image or video editing, layout design, accounting, and CAD, sees a particularly strong increase with the complexity of the job. Specialised programs are used by just over a quarter of employed persons (27.4%) in elementary jobs, 46.3% of employed persons in VET jobs, and 69.0% of employed persons in academic level jobs. Advanced IT applications such as programming macros or scripts, e.g. for recurring tasks or to work more efficiently, are reserved for the fewest number of employed persons and are used about three times more often in academic jobs than in VET jobs (33.7% vs. 13.0%). Even more exclusive is the use of programming languages, used by 22.7 per cent of those in employment at the academic level, but only by around six per cent of those in employment at the VET level.

Around 20% of employed persons in Germany state that they use AI technologies in their work, for example to automatically recognise and process speech, images or text. The use of AI increases with the requirement level of the job and is particularly prevalent at the academic level (see Figure). AI currently plays the biggest role in jobs that generally require a university degree (37.9%), while (still) around twelve percent of employed persons at the VET level use AI.
 

Anja Hall
Dr, Academic researcher at BIBB

Translation from the German original (published in BWP 3/2024)