What consequences will digitisation have for the labour market?

Abstract

Recently, there have repeatedly been concerns in many public and academic debates that the ongoing digitisation might replace people on the future labour market. To what extent can occupations be replaced even today, because activities currently performed by employees will soon be done by computers or computer-controlled machines? To answer these questions, Dengler and Matthes (2015, 2018a, 2018b) calculated so-called substitutability potentials of occupations. This means, they determine to what extent occupations could currently be taken over by computers or computer-controlled machines. This makes it possible to both show the consequences of digitisation for different occupations and determine them for employees. This contribution shows that the fears of a massive reduction of employment as part of digitisation are currently unfounded. The challenges of digitisation are not the number of job losses in particular, but rather the industry and occupational structures that will change substantially. Only in very few cases will occupations completely vanish; most of all they will change. ((en))

Cite article

Dengler, K. (2019): Welche Folgen hat die Digitalisierung für den Arbeitsmarkt? In: B. Badura, A. Ducki, H. Schröder, J. Klose & M. Meyer (Hrsg.) (2019): Fehlzeiten-Report 2019 : Digitalisierung - gesundes Arbeiten ermöglichen, p. 29-37. DOI:10.1007/978-3-662-59044-7_3