Digital Jobs

Summary

The impact of digitisation on life and the world of work in our society has led to the emergence of digital jobs, a reflection of changing trends and needs in the labour market. The variety of jobs where digital technology plays a main role is constantly growing as more and more activities rely on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to improve results and efficiency. The concept of digital jobs ranges from those intensive in technology (e.g., programmers or digital artists) to the more traditional ones that have incorporated digitisation to some extent (e.g., accountants or delivery drivers). Somewhere in the middle, we can find hybrid jobs: where specific specialisation in a field is complemented by relatively advanced digital skills (e.g., stockbrokers, marketing executives, accountants using digital software, etc). This diversity of digital jobs opens up a whole world of opportunities for people anytime they upskill, i.e. improve/develop digital skills to perform the tasks the job requires. The EU has developed labour classifications like ESCO, the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework, and specific references like the e-Competence Framework, which provide common terminology and descriptions of digital jobs and ICT professional roles, thus making labour market clearer and understandable across Europe.

About the author 

Luis has a BSc and MSc in Informatics from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) since 1989. He earned his PhD with extraordinary award from the University of Basque Country in 1997. He has served as interim associate professor at UPM (1989-1996), aggregate professor and head of department at Universidad Europea de Madrid (1996-2008) and associate professor at Universidad de Alcalá (since 2008). He was the CEO of an ICT service-oriented SME (2002-2006) and has acted as freelancer consultant for big companies. Luis has been a board member of CEPIS (2011-13, 2016-2020), and as of 2022 he is CEPIS’s president. Over the years, he has helped to shape the development of EU reference frameworks for digital skills and employment. Luis has actively contributed as an official expert to the development of the three main references in the area: the ESCO labour classification for ICT services, the European standard of e-competences for ICT professionals EN6234-1:2019 and DigComp, the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens.

The digital world already touches almost every part of our lives, and this trend is getting bigger and bigger. While it is hard to predict what will happen next, one fact remains true: demand for jobs that require digital skills and competences is growing fast (Mandl, 2021)[KJ(1] [LFS2] [GM3] . Even[KJ(4] [LFS5]  occupations traditionally far from technology are increasingly incorporating technology in their daily and basic activities (e.g., truck and taxi drivers are now constantly using guiding systems with GPS, apps for managing reservations and delivery plans, etc). Digitisation is imposing a general change of paradigm in the type of roles and jobs that companies and organisations demand from employees, even much greater than other contemporary trends such as internationalisation (Schmerber et al., 2021)I or environmental and sustainability aspects (CEDEFOP, 2021) .

We can consider digital jobs as those, where application of information and communications technologies (ICT) to a new or existing activity or process is essential, although other skills can also be crucial The World Bank (2018) considers anyone that “uses digital technology or is made possible by such technology” a digital worker. So, these digital jobs can be found in large corporations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), non-government organisations (NGOs) and government and public entities as these organisations adopted ICT in their existing operations to become more effective and efficient.

Others tend to focus on ICT-jobs (Folea, 2019), those very intense in digital activity or exclusively existing in digital and media companies, and easier to categorise by official statistics, e.g. as regularly done by Eurostat. That is the reason why, at the beginning, people may think these types of jobs only appear in the digital sector, the companies related to media, technology, digital marketing, and so on. However, as digitisation now pervades every area of life, digital jobs appear across all industries and sectors.