This study estimates the effect of non-cognitive skills on job satisfaction among young adults aged 15–29, using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) in 2016 and 2019. We assess whether non-cognitive skills, approximated by the Big Five taxonomy (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability), influence job satisfaction across several dimensions: overall job satisfaction, satisfaction with working conditions, satisfaction with pay, and satisfaction with career development opportunities. Recognizing the critical role of wages in determining job satisfaction, as well as the potential non-linearity in this relationship, the study aims to isolate the effect of non-cognitive skills on job satisfaction from that of wage-related factors. To address endogeneity arising from variation in wages, mixed-effects (multilevel) models are employed. The results indicate that extraversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness have significant positive effects on overall job satisfaction. These effects also vary by wage quintile, with extraversion showing the most pronounced pattern: its effect on job satisfaction is strongest among low-paid workers. Extraversion and conscientiousness also remain significant predictors of satisfaction across the specific domains of working conditions, career development opportunities, and pay. Emotional stability has a positive and significant effect on satisfaction with working conditions and career development opportunities but does not influence pay satisfaction. Finally, domain-specific regressions reveal a significant positive effect of agreeableness on satisfaction with working conditions. The study concludes with practical recommendations for employers on how to enhance job satisfaction among young workers at the early stages of their careers by accounting their non-cognitive skills.
This study uses published job advertisements to examine organizations’ stated demand for digital skills in Canada. We apply a structured and replicable text-mining methodology to 14,010 Indeed Canada postings, combining web scraping, standardized text preprocessing, bigram tokenization, dictionary-based detection, manual validation, and mapping to the DigComp 2.0 framework. Although advanced digital skills appear in the corpus, employer-declared demand is concentrated in Microsoft Office tools, data entry, basic data management, social media, information systems, computer systems, databases, and data analysis. These findings suggest that Canadian employers are not only recruiting for specialized digital transformation expertise, but also for the foundational digital competence required to perform ordinary service, administrative, and retail work in increasingly digitized environments.
This study investigates how members of the labour force in Germany assess wages in various nursing professions, which wage levels they consider appropriate, and how these assessments vary by working conditions. Using a vignette experiment embedded in an online survey, we identify causal effects of worker and job characteristics on respondents’ wage evaluations. We describe hypothetical care workers and characteristics of their jobs and ask respondents both the wages they presume are currently paid and those they consider appropriate for specific combinations of worker and job characteristics. A substantial share of the respondents considers notable increases in wages to be appropriate, especially in geriatric care and for less skilled nursing assistants. Wage assessments also reflect job characteristics such as performance as well as mental and physical stress. Overall, our findings suggest that the public favours slightly higher wages, specifically for outpatient and inpatient geriatric care, and may favour wage models that more strongly account for performance and stress factors. Unique nursing vignette experiment that can identify causal effects on wages. Respondents often underestimate wages for nurses. Performance parameters and stress are taken into account in respondents’ wage assessments. Results inform professional organisations, managing directors and policymakers about public perceptions with regard to nursing wages.
This article examines the relationship between different types of ICT use, flexibility and wages using Austrian survey data from 2011/2012, employing quantile regression to analyze gender differences across the wage distribution. Distinguishing between “techy” and “operational” computer tasks and using a multidimensional flexibility indicator, the analysis reveals that women receive premiums for both techy and operational computer use across most wage levels whereas men generally do not. However, greater flexibility is associated with a reduced operational computer wage premium for low-wage women, while higher-earning operational men benefit. The findings suggest that mechanisms beyond productivity, such as social evaluation processes and different concepts of flexibility, may influence how computer use is associated with wages.
This paper analyses the impact of offshoring in the EU – both in total and differentiated by destination region (advanced Europe, developing Europe, developed non-Europe, developing non-Europe) – on six different non-wage working conditions: physical environment, work intensity, worktime quality, social environment, skills and discretion, and prospects. Results from instrumental variable (IV) estimations show that offshoring has substantial causal effects, improving the physical environment and career prospects, but also worsening the social environment, particularly in old EU member states. Moreover, the effects vary by destination: offshoring to advanced Europe improves skills and discretion but can increase work intensity, whereas offshoring to developing Europe enhances the physical environment and career prospects. Effects for non-European destinations are more heterogeneous and sometimes opposite to those observed in Europe.
