Search results

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the degree of complementarity between cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, and to evaluate their joint impact on individual wages.

The author uses a survey representative of the Polish working-age population with well-established measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

Non-cognitive skills are important in the labour market, not only as separate factors that influence wages, but as complements to cognitive skills. Specifically, the analysis showed that the more neurotic an individual is, the lower his or her returns to cognitive skills are. Social skills were not shown to be complementary to cognitive skills in Poland unlike the recent results in the United States.

To the best of author's knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence that neurotic individuals have lower returns to cognitive skills. It also tests the existence of the complementarity between social and cognitive skills.

The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have converged. Family change has not been uniform, however, and the widening gaps in marital status, relationship stability, and childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child well-being in poor families and future inequality. This paper uses data from a recent cohort of young adults – Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – to investigate whether disparities in cognitive ability and non-cognitive skills contribute to this gap. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of differences in key family outcomes across education groups show that, though individual non-cognitive traits are significantly associated with union status, relationship instability, and single motherhood, they collectively make no significant contribution to the explanation of educational gaps for almost all of these outcomes. Measured skills can explain as much as 25 percent of differences in these outcomes by family background (measured by mother’s education), but this effect disappears when own education is added to the model. Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly predictive of educational attainment but, conditional on education, explain very little of the socioeconomic gaps in family outcomes for young adults.

The study aims to study the effect of non-cognitive ability in human capital on the wages of rural migrant workers in China. The study also examines the mechanisms by which career choice, career development and social capital influence.

Based on the new human capital theory, this paper empirically investigates the effects and mechanisms of rural migrant workers' non-cognitive ability on wages using the 2018 China Family Panel Studies database and Stata 17.0 for construct validation and hypothesis testing.

The results showed that non-cognitive ability has a significant positive effect on rural migrant workers' wages. Subsequently, the mechanism of non-cognitive ability was examined. In further analysis, the study found that non-cognitive ability has a greater effect on the wages of vulnerable individuals (females, low and medium skills) among the rural migrant workers.

The originality of this study is to break through the existing research perspectives, overcome the limitations of scholars' existing research perspectives focusing on the employment and competitiveness of rural migrant workers in China and explore the factors affecting the rural migrant workers' wages from the perspective of non-cognitive ability as a new entry point by combining psychology. At the same time, the study design is more rigorous, avoiding the measurement error of variables.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the principal qualities that define a good worker for microenterprises of the trade sector according to the contemporary literature of the human capital and associated with the Big Five personality traits. It also determines the effect of those skills over the success of trade microenterprises in the context of a developing country.

A total of 393 owners/managers of microenterprises located in six trade zones of Lima district in Peru were involved in this study. They were randomly selected and asked to answer a survey of perceptions about the microenterprise’s performance and workers’ behavior.

The results demonstrate that workers that possess mainly non-cognitive skills would be considered as good workers for trade microenterprises. These skills are associated with four of the Big Five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness or autonomy and conscientiousness. Also, the results show that punctuality, honesty and assertiveness, associated with the traits such as extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, are the principal non-cognitive skills that impact positively over microenterprises’ success.

The performance of workers is only based on owners/managers’ perceptions.

The owners/managers’ role is important to help workers to develop the necessary skills that can contribute to the microenterprise. In that sense, if the direct contact that exists between them is leveraged, owners/managers could implement strategies such as mentoring to promote the personal and professional growth of their workers.

This study provides useful information about how specific non-cognitive skills of workers can contribute to the success of trade microenterprises in developing countries like Peru.

The purpose of this paper is to learn more about demand for competences is crucial for revealing the complex relationship between employee selection, different strands of education and training and labor market regulation.

Content analysis and statistics of job advertisements.

Employer skills requirements even for low- and medium-skilled jobs are highly specific. Formal education requirements are higher than they “should” be. No detectable “basic package” of general cognitive skills for low- and medium-skilled jobs was found. Employer demand focusses on non-cognitive skills and specific cognitive skills. Specificity of skill requirement across different sectors or occupation groups differs vastly between different types of low- and medium-skilled jobs and is linked to the interactive nature of the job, not to the qualifications or the experience required.

The analysis can be considered an initial feasibility test for a larger comparative cross-country project that would aim to understand labor demand in different EU countries.

The analysis could be used as input in designing labor market policy and life-long learning programs to integrate low-skilled and unemployed.

The research provides a tool to match disadvantaged workers to jobs for which they possess greater capabilities or to help them develop crucial skills for a given occupation.

This paper contributes to the HRM literature with a more demand-led approach to labor market policy. The authors reveal what role skills and upskilling can play in alleviating the problem of unemployment. The results can be useful for HR specialists and policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a measure of soft skills suitable for use in a large survey of Australian adolescents.

A survey was conducted with N = 4,704 Australians aged 15–19 over 2 years. Principal components analysis was performed on 14 self-report items, followed by generalised linear mixed modelling predicting education- and employment-related outcomes.

Self-reported problem solving, creativity, teamwork and verbal communication were alternately associated with later high school performance, hourly wage and employment status. These effects persisted when controlling for demographics and prior academic achievement.

Existing measures have been limited by their length or focus on specific skills or industries. The presented measures are short, domain-general, measure multiple skills simultaneously, and are suitable for a wide range of research contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on the competencies of potential information technology (IT)-retrainees. The results give insights in the monetary value and relative returns to both soft and hard skills.

The authors apply a DCE in which the authors propose seven pairs of hypothetical candidates to employers based in the municipality of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. These hypothetical candidates differ on six observable skill attributes and have different starting wages. The authors use the inference from the DCE to calculate the marginal rates of substitution (MRS). The MRS gives an indication of the monetary value of each skill attribute.

Employers prefer a candidate who possesses a degree in an exact field over a similar candidate from another discipline. Programming experience from previous jobs is the most highly valued characteristic for an IT-retrainee. Employers would pay a candidate with basic programming experience a 53 percent higher starting wage. The most high-valued soft skill is listening skills, for which employers are willing to pay a 46 percent higher wage. The results of this paper show that both hard and soft skills are important, but not all soft skills are equally important.

The results on the returns to skills provide guidelines to tailor IT training and retraining programs to the needs of the business environment. A key strength of this paper is that the authors have information on the preference orderings for different skills and kinds of experience.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of soft skills for leadership and offers recommendations for soft skill development training for the next generation of leaders.

An integrated review of current research literature was conducted on management, leadership and soft skills to develop recommendations for integrating the development of soft skills in leadership development training protocol.

A one-size-fits-all approach does not work for soft skills development or measurement. Each soft skill is defined differently and should be assessed based on different behavioral actions. Progress in this area of measurement development will make a great impact on the use of soft skills. The development of assessment tools for the different soft skills across professional disciplines is assumed to enhance other aspects of transformational leadership such as coaching and mentoring.

Current strategies for the assessment and measurement of soft skills present an obstacle for including these skills in current leadership training models.

The paper includes implications for the development of soft skills for the next generation of leaders and offers recommendations for integrating the development of soft skills in leadership training programs.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how soft skills can be measured and assessed. This is important given that specific skills vary across professional disciplines and organizational contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how active labour market policy (ALMP) training programmes and hiring subsidies increase or decrease differences in the unemployment risk between lesser and higher educated people during an economic downturn. A focus is put on potential job competition dynamics and cumulative (dis)advantages of the lesser and higher educated.

The paper uses multi-level data. The fifth wave (2010) of the European Social Survey was used and combined with macro-level data on labour market policies of the OECD. The sample consisted of 18,172 observations in 19 countries.

The results show that higher levels of participation and spending on training policies are related to a smaller difference in the unemployment risks of the educational groups. Higher training policy intensity is associated with a lower unemployment risk for the lesser educated and a higher unemployment risk for the higher educated. This implies that the lesser educated are better able to withstand downward pressure from the higher educated, thereby, reducing downward displacement during an economic downturn. Hiring subsidies do not seem to be associated with the impact of education on unemployment.

The paper adds to the discussion on ALMP training and hiring subsidies that are primarily rooted in the human capital theory and signalling theory. Both theories ignore the social context of labour market behaviour. The job competition theory and cumulative (dis)advantage theory add to these theories by focussing on the relative position of individuals and the characteristics that accompany the social position of the individual.