How much will the literacy level of working-age people change from now to 2022?

by François Keslair
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Taken as a whole, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) present a mixed picture for Korea and Singapore. As their economies have grown, these two countries’ education systems have seen fast and impressive improvements; both now rank among PISA’s top performers. However, neither Korea nor Singapore do so well in PIAAC. PIAAC measures the skills of adults aged between 16 and 65, i.e. a large majority of the population, not just the 15-year-olds pupils measured by PISA. And while the skills of younger Koreans and Singaporeans are just as impressive in PIAAC as in PISA, the same cannot be said of their elders, who did not enjoy the advantages of their current successful education systems. The skills of the older population covered by PIAAC simply cannot keep pace with such change.

But why exactly can we draw this conclusion? In other words, why do the drivers of change in the skills of the population examined by PIAAC necessarily work so slowly? And since we are looking into it, why not take the opportunity to try our hand at predicting the future of adult skills, taking literacy as an example? We are all familiar with the strong link between skills and productivity, so predicting the skills of the working-age population could help to identify, for example, trends in some economic fundamentals. This exercise – prospective and necessarily provisional – is covered in the latest issue of Adult Skills in Focus (ASIF), “How might literacy evolve among working-age adults by 2022?”

The first driver of change is population renewal. Without wanting to state the obvious, people aged between 16 and 65 in 2012 will be aged between 26 and 75 in 2022 (unless, unfortunately, they have died). So the population of 16-65 year-olds in 2012 and 2022 will largely overlap, except that 2022’s 16-24 year-olds, who were previously too young, will have joined the population, while 2012’s 56-65 year-olds, now too old (as well as any 16-65 year-olds who passed away between 2012 and 2022) will have left it. This means that only about one-fifth of the 16-65 age group is renewed every ten years.

During that ten-year gap, the remaining population, i.e. four-fifths of 2012’s 16-65 year-olds, will get that much older. People’s skills vary over time. Skills can naturally be learned, but they can also be lost, most often because they are not practised. The second driver of change, then, is the impact of ageing on skills. This subject was covered in another issue of ASIF, “What does age have to do with skills proficiency?”, which identified two trends: first, a marked improvement in the skills of 16-35 year-olds, corresponding to the age of higher education, followed by a slow decline; and second, a distinct improvement for a minority of the population and a small deterioration for the majority, the combined effect of which will not be particularly significant.

In ten years, neither population renewal nor the impact of ageing on skills will be able to significantly affect the skills of all those aged between 16 and 65. But the projections we can make by modelling both drivers reveal a not-insignificant increase, as demonstrated in the graph above.

The improvement in literacy skills ought to be generally observable across all nations surveyed. Some countries may stagnate, such as England and Northern Ireland (UK), and Italy; but the good news is that none should see a decline. On the contrary, some countries should see a considerable improvement. And those countries which are expected to see the greatest progress include – surprise! – Singapore and Korea, although both of them will nevertheless continue to lag behind their neighbour Japan; but in Japan’s case, modernisation had already begun in the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, which included the modernisation of the education system. The fruits of the efforts invested in education are harvested little by little, over a period of many years, meaning that the future beyond 2022 may well see yet more improvement. But we have to lay the foundations now.

Links
Adult Skills in Focus No. 7: How much will the literacy level of the working-age population change from now to 2022?

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)

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Why it matters if you can't read this

by Tanja Bastianic
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Adults who lack basic skills – literacy and numeracy – are penalised both in professional and private life. They are more likely to be unemployed or in precarious jobs, earn lower wages, have more health issues, trust others less, and engage less often in community life and democratic processes.

Basic skills are not complicated. What we measure in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the ability to process the information needed to perform everyday tasks – to read the instructions on a bottle of aspirin or to know how many litres of petrol are needed to fill the tank.

In Australia, around three million working-age adults – one in five – currently have low basic skills and are living with the consequences. And if Australia doesn’t tackle this problem, it risks being left behind by countries investing more successfully in the skills of their people, especially in a world where work is undergoing a rapid technology-driven change and people have to adapt to new circumstances (See figure).

Many Australians with low levels of education have low skills – this comes as no surprise, as they often quit education at an early stage. Perhaps more surprising is that a higher level qualification doesn’t guarantee advanced basic skills. The OECD study published today, Building Skills for All in Australia: Policy Insights from the Survey of Adult Skills shows that 17% of Australians with a vocational Certificate IV, Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree still have low levels of basic skills. 

Australia’s post-secondary VET (Vocational Education and Training) system is inclusive and caters to adults with different needs, including those with poor basic skills.  This is a real asset to the Australian education sector. But the OECD argues that providers of post-secondary VET could do more to help those students with poor basic skills.

The study also highlights specific weaknesses in the numeric skills of young women in Australia, indicating that far greater attention should be devoted to ensuring that young women participate fully within Australia’s wider efforts to strengthen mathematics within secondary education. Opportunity exists, moreover, to better support young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (the NEETs) to reengage in learning whether through the development of pre-apprenticeship provision or access to better childcare for young mothers.

The OECD Australia review follows a number of similar studies on low basic skills conducted in the United States, England, and Finland. The OECD’s work on adult learning and skills is designed to help countries identify where skills-related challenges arise among adults, and then offer them an opportunity to redirect their skills policies and investments. The review of Australia is part of this work.  

Helping adults to improve their basic skills remains a challenge nearly everywhere and there are no easy answers. But the alternative – of doing nothing – is even worse. So each of these studies help us all understand the challenges better and offer a menu of interventions to help countries tackle the issue. 

Links

To read the report, visit Building Skills for All in Australia: Policy Insights from the Survey of Adult Skills

To read a literature review about the problem of low basic skills, visit Adults with Low Literacy and Numeracy Skills: A Literature Review on Policy Intervention

Figure: Share of adults with low basic skills (literacy and/or numeracy level at or below 2)

Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

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Why are immigrants less proficient in literacy than native-born adults?

by Theodora Xenogiani
Senior Policy Analyst, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs

Why is it that highly educated migrants to OECD countries are less likely to be employed than native-born adults who are similarly educated, even if they have lived in their host country for several years? The OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) provides some answers. Based on results from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), a new Adult Skills in Focus shows that immigrants tend to have lower proficiency in the language of their new country than native-born residents. On average, the difference amounts to about 3.5 years of schooling and a difference is observed even when comparing immigrant and native adults with the same level of education.

Migrants in the various countries participating in the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) differ in their reasons for migration, their country of origin, the time they have already spent in the host country, and the age at which they arrived. For instance, the literacy gap is much wider for immigrants in Sweden than for immigrants in other countries. This could reflect the fact that a large share of Sweden’s migrants came to the country for humanitarian reasons. It could also be because relatively few people outside of Sweden speak Swedish, so migrants are less likely to be already familiar with the language.

In contrast, the small differences in literacy proficiency between immigrants and natives in Australia and New Zealand could be explained by these countries’ selective immigration policies, leading to a large share of highly educated migrants with good knowledge of the English language.

Migrants’ language skills should be taken into account when interpreting their literacy proficiency. Two-thirds of the migrants assessed by the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) were not taking the test in their native language. The literacy and numeracy proficiency measured in the survey thus does not just reflect migrants’ cognitive skills, but also – possibly to a large degree – their familiarity with and fluency in the test language. That means we have to distinguish between language skills and purely cognitive skills. For instance, we could take into account the country where migrants earned their qualifications, or the languages they speak at home or have learned in their lives.

A report by the OECD and the European Union shows that around one-third of the gap in literacy proficiency between immigrant and native-born adults can be explained by whether immigrants speak the host-country language at home or had learned it as a child. In Finland and Norway, countries with complex and less widely spoken languages, this factor can account for at least half of the gap in proficiency between migrants and natives.

The good news is that migrants’ literacy and numeracy skills improve with time, especially in countries where the gap is large and the language issue is important. In most countries, immigrants who arrived as young children and completed their education in their host country do just as well as their native-born peers.

If countries are to make the most of immigration and ensure the successful integration of migrants into their labour market and their society, they need the right policies to tackle these issues. However, the lack of detailed data up to now has made it hard to provide the analysis needed to create effective policies.

The Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) opens a new world of information to policy makers. Not only does it assess the skills of both migrants and natives, but it also includes detailed information about immigrants, their country of origin, their migration experience and their outcomes since arriving. It is possibly the first data source that allows us to draw a detailed picture of migrants’ skills and how those skills are used in the labour market. It provides a solid basis from which we can design policies to help migrants integrate more quickly and successfully into their new communities.

Links

Adult Skills in Focus No. 6: Why are immigrants less proficient in literacy than native-born adults? 

Bonfanti S. and T. Xenogiani (2014), “Migrants’ skills: Use, mismatch and labour market outcomes – A first exploration of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)” in Matching Economic Migration with Labour Market Needs, OECD Publishing.

Skills Matter, Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
Explore the full set of PIAAC data
4th PIAAC International Conference – CALL FOR PAPERS

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law

Chart source: Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) (2012, 2015) 

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Working together to build the culture of learning in the Netherlands

by Andreas Schleicher 
Director for Education and Skills, OECD

The Dutch are known for making a virtue of necessity. Now is a time when their reputation will be put to the test.

The Netherlands’ economy and society are being transformed by technological change, increased economic integration, population ageing, increased migration and other pressures. A highly skilled population with the opportunities, incentives and motivation to develop and use their skills fully and effectively will be essential for confronting the challenges and seizing the opportunities of the future. The Dutch skills system is strong compared to others internationally, but still the Dutch understand that for a small country with an open economy to remain competitive, it will need to reinforce the foundation of skills on which Dutch success has been built.

The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands, published today, identifies nine key skills challenges for the Netherlands and three priority areas for action.

So what are the priority areas for action?

1. Fostering more equitable skills outcomes: The Dutch skills system works well to ensure that most people develop strong skills. Still, a large number of adults have very low levels of skills that mean they have trouble extracting information from longer and more complex texts or performing numerical tasks involving several steps. Too often these people are not actively engaged in learning to improve their skills. Older workers with still many years of working life ahead of them and migrants account for a sizable share of the low-skilled population. With the costs of marginalisation so high, and with an ageing population, the Netherlands cannot afford to waste its precious talent. 
2. Creating skills-intensive workplaces: Despite having comparatively highly skilled population, the Netherlands could use these skills more intensively at work. Small and medium-sized firms, especially, could do more to get the most out of the skills of their workers. The increased adoption of high performance workplace practices, in particular, has potential to foster greater skills use at work, resulting in higher productivity, wages and greater job satisfaction.
3. Promoting a learning culture: Despite many years of talk in the Netherlands about the importance of developing a learning culture and the introduction of a series of policy measures aimed at making it a reality, the country is still far from realising this aim, as evidenced by the low “readiness to learn” of Dutch adults when compared with their peers in other OECD countries. Many stakeholders confirm this assessment, finding that the Netherlands has much more to do in order to transform itself into a learning economy.

The OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands reflects the many valuable contributions received from four ministries, the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands and hundreds of stakeholders who shared their perspectives on what are the key skills challenges facing the country and their causes, and proposed some good practices for addressing these challenges.

In a series of workshops, the Dutch lived up to their reputation for frankness and self-reflection, with many claiming that too many people in the Netherlands were neither developing the “right” skills to succeed, nor taking sufficient responsibility for maintaining and further developing their skills in adulthood. Firms also came in for some criticism for not investing sufficiently in the skills of their workers. Stakeholders also lamented that fact the Netherlands was failing to live up to its ambitions for creating a learning society.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Netherlands is one of collective action. Taking action in these priority areas will require that governments, individuals, employers, trade unions, education and training providers and others take joint responsibility and action. 

Along with presenting a number of specific recommendations for addressing the countries skills challenges, the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands proposes the creation of skills strategy founded on a commitment to a “national skills pact” that goes beyond a virtuous “statement of intent”. One that would, at a minimum, be guided by a shared vision, specify the concrete actions that each partner needs to take, and establishes performance measures and clear public reporting requirements for all partners.

In the past, it took a whole of society effort to build the dikes and canals that protected the Netherlands from flooding and allowed it to reclaim land for habitation and cultivation. Today, the Dutch once again need to call upon their talent for collective action, this time to shore up the skills foundation upon which they will secure their future for generations to come.

Links

OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report: Netherlands

OECD National Skills Strategy

Survey of Adult Skills

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/skills/

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDSkills

Join us on Edmodo

Photo source: Biking @shutterstock 

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How inequalities in acquiring skills evolve

by Francesca Borgonovi
Senior Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been a key source of information on how well societies and education systems have equipped 15-year-old students with the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies. However important this information is, most 15-year-old students can expect to stay in education or training for at least another three to four years after they are eligible to sit the PISA test; those who go on to complete higher degrees are looking at around another ten years of study. The tendency to devote more and more years to the development of skills through formal schooling, further education and training implies that the effectiveness of education and training systems should not be judged solely on how well 15-year-old students have mastered certain skills.

PISA data reveal large disparities in achievement not only across countries, but also within countries across different subgroups of students. In particular, compared to other students, students from socio-economically disadvantaged households score lower in the three core subjects considered in PISA: reading, mathematics and science. However, PISA by itself cannot identify how disparities in achievement evolve between the teenage years and young adulthood.

A new OECD working paper released today combines data from PISA and the Survey of Adult Skills to identify how socio-economic disparities in achievement evolve as students make the transition from compulsory schooling into further education, training or the labour market. In most countries, the socio-economic disparities in literacy and numeracy observed among 15-year-old students not only persist in young adulthood, but tend to widen.

Further education and participation in the labour market are crucial for acquiring skills after compulsory schooling. But socio-economically disadvantaged young people are considerably less likely than their more advantaged peers to attend post-secondary education and training, and are more likely to drop out of education without a secondary level qualification. They are also more likely to be unemployed or out of the labour force and to work in jobs that require little advanced, on-the-job training or practice of higher-order thinking skills.

Although it is not possible to establish causality, the data suggest that, once compulsory schooling is over, the opportunities available to young people to develop their skills diverge – in ways that are largely related to socio-economic status.

Links
Adult Skills in Focus No. 5: Do socio-economic disparities in skills grow between the teenage years and young adulthood?
OECD Working Paper No. 155: Youth in Transition: How does the Cohort Participating in PISA Fare in PIAAC
PISA 2015 Results
Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)


Chart Source: OECD Survey of Adult Skills (2012, 2015), www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publicdataandanalysis ; OECD PISA (2000, 2003), www.oecd.org/pisa/data/database-pisa2000.htm ; www.oecd.org/pisa/data/database-pisa2003.htm

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Skills Summit 2016: Skills strategies for innovation, productivity and inclusion

by Andreas Schleicher

Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Building the skills needed to succeed at work and in life: Charting the path to 2025

In all OECD countries the working-age population is now either growing at a much slower rate than in the past or shrinking, making productivity and innovation the primary engines of economic growth. The expansion of global value chains and technological advances are reshaping the structure of employment and the skill requirements of jobs. Skills demand and supply continue to diverge rather than converge, despite large numbers of unemployed in many countries and pockets of entrenched unemployment in all. Everywhere, too few adults are upgrading their skills in response to the rapidly changing skills needs of the economy and society. At the same time, countries are also struggling with significant social challenges, such as rising inequality and large increases in flows of migrants. Skills are central to responding to all of these challenges.

On June 29 and 30, 26 Ministers and senior government officials from 15 countries representing a wide range of portfolios, including education, employment, trade, economy, and local government, met in Bergen, Norway, for the Skills Summit 2016: Skills Strategies for Productivity, Innovation and Inclusion. They gathered to chart a path towards 2025 and departed with a renewed resolve to prepare their countries for the skills challenges on the horizon.

Effective skills strategies are essential, yet hard to build

Building effective national skills strategies is critical for making progress on these issues, but countries often struggle to foster the government and society-wide commitment needed to make cross-sectoral skills strategies a reality.

Participants at the Skills Summit spoke frankly about the difficulties they face in putting skills policy at the top of a crowded policy agenda and keeping it there. While action needs to be taken today to ensure that we have the skills we will need tomorrow, this can often be forgotten in the face of pressures to respond to the immediate crises of the day. Too often, the urgent crowds out the important.

Evidence from many quarters, including the Survey of Adult Skills which released new country data earlier this week, shows that skills are critical to people’s economic and social success. What is far less clear is what skills will matter the most in the future. People need to develop skills today that will allow them to succeed in jobs that in many cases do not yet exist, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve problems that have not yet been identified.  It is even possible that in the future, as technological advances replace more and more of the work currently performed by humans, we will be asking less about what skills matter for the labour market and more about what skills matter for meaningful social participation and inclusion. While none of us knows for sure what challenges and opportunities the future holds, what is certain is that we will face them with the skills we develop today.

At the Summit, Ministers acknowledged the need to craft whole-of-government approaches to skills policy. A wide range of factors influence skills needs and outcomes, and responsibility for these areas is spread widely across many ministries and all levels of government. Beyond the ministries of education and employment, ministries of industry, economic development and finance are also involved. Despite growing awareness, all too often cross-ministerial and cross- government collaboration fails to happen in practice.

Collaboration with social partners and other stakeholders is equally critical if we are to achieve enduring success in developing and deploying skills effectively. Ministers were clear that Governments cannot act in splendid isolation if their aim is to improve skills outcomes. Yet engaging employers, labour and people in the co-production of skills policies is complex and requires sustained political commitment.

Maximising a country’s skills potential is everyone’s business. As hosts of the Skills Summit, and pioneers in undertaking a national skills strategy project with the OECD, Norway was well placed to share lessons learned from its experience in building shared commitment and concerted action across ministries, counties, local governments and social partners. Ever-mindful that the actions Norway takes today will drive innovation, productivity and prosperity in the future, while ensuring that no-one is left behind.

International cooperation on skills policies is needed to deliver better skills outcomes

So what more can be done? Despite their diversity, countries appear to be struggling with similar and longstanding challenges, so there is a clear case to be made for greater international cooperation in this area. The Skills Summit provided a valuable opportunity for countries to learn from one another. But it was just a starting point.

For its part, the OECD is upgrading its capacity to meet growing demand from countries for support in building effective skills strategies.

During the Skills Summit, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría announced the launch of the OECD Centre for Skills saying “Better skills policies can help us to overcome these challenges and transform many into opportunities”, according to Angel Gurría, Secretary General at the OECD. “But despite growing recognition of the importance of skills for economic growth and social inclusion, many countries are still failing to anchor skills policies at the centre of national policy agendas and make progress on long standing skills challenges.”

This Centre will support countries in developing and implementing better skills policies in three main ways:

• First, the Centre will continue to carry out national skills strategy projects with both member and non-member countries, building upon our successful experience to date of working with 10 countries;
• Second, the Centre will mobilise expertise from across the OECD to develop useful analytical tools while promoting peer-learning by convening policy-makers at the Skills Summit and practitioners on a regular basis;
• Third, the Centre will draw upon this rich experience to periodically update the OECD Skills Strategy to ensure it continues to respond to countries’ changing and evolving needs.

At the OECD we are excited about the new opportunities that the Centre will offer countries. For it is only by working together that in 2025 we will be able to fuel innovation, productivity and inclusion through better skills.

Links:

The Skills Summit 2016

National Skills Strategies

Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies

Skills Matter: Further results from the Survey of Adult Skills

For more on the OECD’s work on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/skills/

Photo credit:@OECD

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Why skills matter

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

It’s the time of year when young people in the northern hemisphere are finishing their formal studies for the year – or for the foreseeable future. Some will soon be working at their first jobs, some are just beginning to look for a job, some may have been looking for months with nothing to show for it. What links the classroom and lecture hall to the workplace? Skills.


Three years ago, the OECD published the First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of our Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC. That report found that adults who are highly proficient in the information-processing skills measured by the survey – literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments – are more likely to be employed and earn high wages. They are also more likely to report that they trust others, that they have an impact on the political processes, and that they are in good health.

Since those first results were published, nine more countries and economies have joined the survey. While the results from these countries/economies, published today in Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, broadly confirm those from the countries/economies that participated in Round 1 of the survey, some messages have emerged more clearly.

For example, in Singapore, one of the nine countries/economies that participated in the second round of the survey, young people perform much better than older adults in all three domains assessed. While younger adults outperform their older compatriots in many of the countries/economies surveyed, in no other country is the difference between the proportion of 25-34 year-olds with tertiary education and the proportion of 55-65 year-olds who have attained that level of education as large (53 percentage points) as it is in Singapore. Only 2.4% of Singapore’s 55-65 year-olds demonstrate strong literacy skills, while young Singaporeans now benefit from one of the world’s most advanced education systems. This shows that even as Singapore expanded access to education over the past few decades, the country was able to maintain the quality of the education provided – adding further strength to the argument that expansion of education does not have to come at the expense of the quality of education.

Jakarta (Indonesia) is also among the nine Round 2 countries/economies. Although adults in Jakarta score lower in literacy and numeracy, on average, than adults in any other participating country/economy (more than one in two adults in Jakarta score at or below Level 1 in literacy), their participation in the survey confirms that valuable data on education and skills can be gathered in less economically developed countries. For example, several participating countries and economies, including Jakarta, have large populations of adults who perform poorly in literacy; but none of these populations can be said to be illiterate. How do we know that? The survey includes a special assessment for these adults to pinpoint where their difficulties in literacy lie. Most of these adults recognise words, but have trouble determining whether a sentence makes sense logically in a real-world context.

In both rounds, there is a relatively strong link between performance in the survey and in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the age cohorts covered by both surveys. The performance of a particular age group in PISA is a reasonably good predictor of that group’s performance some years later in the Survey of Adult Skills. The message is loud and clear: if countries want a highly skilled work force, they have to get compulsory education right. This is not to say that acquiring and developing literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills stops once people leave school. In fact, the evidence shows that proficiency continues to improve over time, and that developing and maintaining – or losing – skills over a lifetime is affected by such factors as participation in work and training, which, in turn, can be influenced by policy. But school is one of the key places in which these skills are acquired, and the failings of schooling can be costly and difficult to rectify.

Links:
Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
The Survey of Adult Skills: Reader's Companion
OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
For OECD work on skills: www.oecd.org/skills
Follow: #OECDSkills

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Going grey, staying skilled

by Marco Paccagnella
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD

The population is “greying” in most advanced countries as well as in some developing countries. Many governments are struggling to address the challenges resulting from this demographic transition, from rising costs of healthcare, to worries about the sustainability of pension systems.

Increased life expectancy represents one of the great achievements of modern societies: living longer and better has been a dream of past generations. At the same time, it implies changes to many aspects of life. To finance retirement incomes and aged care, many governments have reformed their pension provisions and are asking individuals to work longer for less-generous pensions and to contribute more to the costs of care. When such reforms are passed during times of sluggish economic growth and rising unemployment, they tend to create discontent not only among older workers (who may long to retire), but also among younger adults, who may feel that delaying the retirement of older workers reduces their opportunities. At the same time, older workers may feel threatened by the increasingly rapid pace of technological change, and fear that they will not be able to find a new job, should they be laid off in a highly competitive labour market.

Managing these issues is extremely complex, given the interests involved and the interaction between different areas of social and economic policy. Yet, there is little doubt that skills development will play a central role in solving the puzzle. A big question is whether, and to what extent, skills decline with age. Is it true that older workers are less skilled, and therefore less productive than younger workers? If that’s the case, how can we make sure that people maintain a sufficiently high level of skills proficiency over an increasingly long horizon?

New evidence from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills and examined in the most recent issue of Adult Skills in Focus is extremely relevant to this debate. It provides an accurate picture of the cognitive skills of adults in a wide range of countries, and links such skills to important economic and non-economic outcomes, such as employment, wages, and health status.

The data suggest that proficiency in skills such as literacy and numeracy declines with age, although slowly, and not much. More important, there is considerable variation across countries in the extent and size of differences in skills proficiency related to age, suggesting that policies can play an important role in shaping the evolution of skills over a lifetime. Yet while skills decline with age, wages and employment rates typically do not. This could suggest that older workers are overpaid, given their productivity. If that were the case, older workers would be justified in fearing they are more likely to be dismissed, and that they would have a hard time finding a new job if they were. But productivity is a complex concept, and the cognitive skills measured in the Survey of Adult Skills constitute only a fraction of the skills portfolio that employers reward. With experience, workers are likely to develop an entire range of other skills that are much more difficult to measure than literacy or numeracy, but that are equally, if not more, valuable to employers.

This is not to downplay the importance of cognitive skills. The data also show that proficiency in literacy influences the wages and likelihood of employment among older workers more than it does among younger workers.

What can be actually done to sustain the skills of people as they age? As usual, prevention is better than cure. Improving the quality of education, i.e. ensuring that people leave formal education with the highest possible level of literacy and numeracy proficiency, is likely to yield large benefits, more than simply increasing the time spent in education. Starting working life with high skills increases the chances of entering the virtuous circle in which skills provide access to the opportunities, such as good jobs and training that further develop skills.

Training is clearly important, but targeting access is probably even more important. The overall rate of participation in training appears to have little relationship to the size of differences in literacy proficiency between the young and the old. Countries with large differences in literacy proficiency between younger and older adults tend to be countries in which training is disproportionately taken up by young adults.

As other recent research show, retirement appears to accelerate the loss of cognitive skills. This suggests that policies to delay retirement may benefit the cognitive skills of existing workers, but also that policies to encourage older people to remain engaged are important for those who have left the workforce.

The bad news is that cognitive skills inevitably decline with age. The good news is that this is only part of the story. There is large scope to shape the evolution of skills over a lifetime; and cognitive skills, while important, are not the only determinant of people’s success in life.

Links:
What does age have to do with skills proficiency? Adult Skills in focus, issue No.3 by Marco Paccagnella
Quel rapport entre l’âge et les compétences?
Age, Ageing and Skills: Results from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills
Photo Credit: © OECD

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Why do we bother with qualifications?

by Simon Field
Senior Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

After all, they are just pieces of paper with fancy script and impressive-looking designs, and employers are surely interested in what people can actually do – their skills – rather than pieces of paper? A new OECD study, entitled Building Skills for All, A Review of England casts a spotlight on this question.

Qualifications are useful because they make skills visible. It is confidently assumed that the holder of a school-leaving certificate can read and understand instructions, and make calculations, and that those with university degrees can do much more. This confidence allows employers and others to decide how to make the best use of the skills of the labour force.

In England, as in many countries, young people have more qualifications than ever before. Hopefully that means progress. But surveys of literacy and numeracy, like the new 2012 Survey of Adult Skills, sometimes cloud this rosy vision. In England, although young people aged 16-24 have many more and better qualifications than those aged 55-65, their basic skills are no better. That is something of a surprise, because in most other OECD countries educational progress, in the sense of more qualifications, also corresponds to better basic skills.

The study of England defines the low-skilled as those below level 2 in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills – these are people who very often would find it difficult to understand the instructions on an aspirin packet, or estimate how much petrol remains in the tank after looking at the gauge – basic life skills rather than technical tasks. Roughly one third of those aged 16-19 have low skills by this definition, three times more than the strongest performers, such as the Netherlands, where only one in ten of the same age group have low skills. England’s active programme of school reform, and more recently a set of measures to address literacy and numeracy weaknesses in this age group is therefore very much needed, and it has far to go.

Coming back to qualifications, how many people with good qualifications have low skills?  Across many OECD countries, it is striking how many university graduates have relatively low levels of literacy and numeracy. In England one in ten university students have low skills – far too many. But in some ways this is not a surprise. Looked at across countries England stands out from the crowd: despite weak skills among the teenagers  that aspire to enter university, the entrance rate to universities is high.

Qualifications do have a point, but that means they need to reliably signal skills. Employers need reassurance that qualified young people, including university graduates, have adequate literacy and numeracy. This report argues that, in England, this calls for a rethink, particularly on the role of university education. With a bit of effort, qualifications might come to mean a whole lot more.

Links:
Building Skills for All: A Review of England
Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)

Photo Credit: White Gas Gauge Illustration @Shutterstock

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