Evolution of the digital labour market: Thecharacteristics and implications for the Education, Opportunities and Work Study are part of a series of working papers published by an international team of researchers from the organisation “Digital Future of Work”.
The study of education and work typically focused on the role of accreditation in shaping individual opportunities in job competition. Despite its crucial role in understanding the link between education and work, the way the labour market works in an increasingly digital context, has remained understudied.
This article explains why the digital labour market urgently needs study, not only because of the decrease in the perceived value of credentials, but also because rapid digital innovation is transforming the way labour markets are structured and shapes competition for jobs.
Digital tools provide jobseekers with new ways to describe additional quantifiable data on applicants themselves and employers in real time and at low cost. The authors identify three dimensions of digital labour markets that distinguish them from previous ‘analogue’ models called ICE:
- Information
- Control
- Involvement
The document then explains how changes in these dimensions contribute to the restructuring of the recruitment process and highlights some of the implications for current accounts of the education-work relationship and social inequalities.