6Employability in the Era of Digitization of Jobs
6.1. Introduction
The fast pace of the technological evolution forces workers to update their competencies in order to remain attractive in the labor market: the World Economic Forum (2018) identified upskilling and re-skilling as two of the main challenges for reducing the risk of job loss. Interestingly, proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the future skills requirement, as other “human” skills (e.g. analytical thinking, active learning, creativity) are growing in prominence.
Hence, in order to remain employable, workers need to add new skills, either soft or digital, to their traditional competencies. Indeed, as recently suggested by research reports (WEF 2018; Deloitte 2019), new hybrid jobs (Gubitta 2018) or superjobs stem from traditional jobs because of the blending of several types of competences: soft skills, professional competences and digital competences. Such competences are defined by Oberlander and his colleagues (2020, p. 5) as “a set of basic knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that enable people at work to efficiently and successfully accomplish their job tasks regarding digital media at work”. The Digital Competence Framework 2.0 elaborated by the European Union individuates five areas of digital competences: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety and problem-solving. The professional trajectory leading to these new ...