Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and robotics are transforming the workplace—but not always in the ways public debates suggest. A new study offers a data-driven perspective on how technology is actually embedded in jobs today, shifting the focus away from hypothetical automation risks toward the skills workers currently use.
At the core of the analysis is a novel indicator, the Occupational Technology Skill Share (OTSS), which measures the proportion of skills in an occupation associated with three broad technology categories:
- Manual skills: Skills used to perform tasks without digital support—such as manually controlled equipment or non-IT-supported tools. These are characteristic of work prior to the Digital Revolution.
- Digital skills: Skills required to use digital tools that support or indirectly control work processes—such as CRM software, ERP systems, or computer-controlled machinery. These reflect the computerisation wave since the 1970s.
- Frontier skills: Skills related to advanced technologies that can perform tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously—such as AI systems, machine learning, collaborative robots, or digital twins—associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The measure is constructed using detailed information on occupational skills from expert database BERUFENET, provided by the German Federal Employment Agency. To ensure consistent classification, the study combines this expert-based information on job-specific skill requirements with modern AI tools to enrich and standardize skill descriptions. These harmonized descriptions are subsequently classified using supervised machine learning methods.
Discover the OTSS dashboard,
An interactive tool to explore how manual, digital, and frontier skills are distributed across occupations in Germany. Users can select occupations, compare skill shares, and track how these change between 2012 and 2023—revealing how advanced technologies are spreading across the labour market.