Demand for Low- and Medium-Skilled Workers across Europe: Between Formal Qualifications and Non-Cognitive Skills

This paper analyses job advertisements posted on the public EU portal EURES to identify the specific skills and characteristics that are demanded in the European labour market in selected low- and medium-skilled occupations and in different sectors. This research is innovative in exploring online job advertisement data from the EURES website and quantifying different skills, personal attributes and characteristics requested by employers in three countries: the Czech Republic, Denmark and Ireland. While we find that the service sector demands non-cognitive skills more than other types of occupations, the skill demanded mix is very diverse across the countries analysed, implying that there is no universal demand and that domestic institutions and structures affect how demand is formulated. We point to potential limits of ‘European occupational labour markets’ as we find that employers’ preferences across the three countries seem rather distinct for similar types of jobs. Our work shows that online portals can become a useful source for gathering information about the content and specificities of demand at the micro-level.