Differing skill requirements across countries and over time

This report investigates skill matches to job requirements for workers in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. The research takes advantage of two international surveys coordinated by Statistics Canada and the OECD: the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALLS) survey. These two surveys, conducted 10 years apart, contain unique information about the literacy skills of workers and the frequency with which they undertake a range of literacy and numeracy related tasks. These data allow the authors to investigate skill matches to job...  [+] Show more

This report investigates skill matches to job requirements for workers in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. The research takes advantage of two international surveys coordinated by Statistics Canada and the OECD: the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALLS) survey. These two surveys, conducted 10 years apart, contain unique information about the literacy skills of workers and the frequency with which they undertake a range of literacy and numeracy related tasks. These data allow the authors to investigate skill matches to job requirements for workers in the four countries noted above. It might be expected that differences between the four countries in economic growth, technological innovation and structural change in the labour market may have led to differences in job skill requirements and use. This research finds, however, that the broad match of workers to jobs that use their skills is quite similar for the four countries, although some differences in the patterns of skill use over time were identified.