Grasping Digitalization in the Working World: An Example From the German National Educational Panel Study

Abstract

Digitalization and automation have increased substantially in recent years and are reshaping the working world. These fundamental changes alter employee training needs and training programs. They create new employment opportunities, may cause excessive demands or raise fears of job loss. The extent of the societal transitions induced by the ongoing digitalization call for high-quality research data. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-dimensional survey module on digitalization and its consequences for the working world, which has recently been implemented in the adult cohorts of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). We show how well and for which employee groups the newly developed survey questions capture experiences with digital technologies at the workplace. We test for the applicability of the instrument with regard to gender, age, education, and job tasks and show that it predicts employee's actual participation in further training. Moreover, we show the potential that results from the combination of the new survey module with further key strengths of the NEPS data such as its life-course or competence measures.