Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TransEuroWorkS (Transforming European Work and Social Protection: A New Proactive Welfare State Fit for the Future World of Work)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2023-10-31
The project aims to conduct a field experiment that helps evaluate the impact of participating in digital skills training programs on labor market outcomes, psychological well-being, and political integration. One of the goals of the EU is to help European countries digitalize the economy. This involves deep labor market transformations and changes in the tasks that workers need to perform in their jobs. Furthermore, the adoption of AI in companies implies an ongoing process of automation of many tasks conducted in jobs. To help workers adapt to changing labor markets and to make job transitions when they become unemployed, the key policy advice are active labor market policies that provide the skills that labor markets need, such as digital skills. In spite of the importance of this topic, no rigorous experimental evaluations of such digital skills training programs have been conducted in European contexts. The current project seeks to fill this gap.
During the first year of the project we have conducted 12 interviews with experts and key policy providers of digital skills training programs in Catalonia. To obtain feedback about the design, we presented the paper to four experts in field experiments and to a session at the Catalan Agency of Policy Evaluation (I-Vàlua).
During this initial year, we also prepared the fieldwork materials:
We have prepared the fieldwork materials:
- Questionnaire (2 rounds)
- Consent form
- Document about payments to participants
- Contracts to RA, compliant with privacy and data management regulations
- Pre-analysis plan
- Ethics document: currently under the third round of revisions
In parallel to the field experiment, we collaborated with other working packages in the broader project by developing a survey experiment. We conducted a pre-test of the survey experiment that we proposed to the joint cross-national survey. The results are written up and have been uploaded to the website as a working paper.
The team underwent some changes. The technician started working for the project obtained a job at the Catalan regional government, and we have recruited a first year PhD student, who will write her dissertation related to the project. This meant that the questionnaire is now more focused on gender, which is her focus of interest in the dissertation. There have been two changes in the project manager provided by the university.
Finally, we have worked with partners to make our fieldwork more policy relevant. We haved talked with the main service provider in Catalonia, SOC (Servei d’Ocupació de Catalunya) and identified a program with which we could collaborate on providing digital skills to women in rural areas.
During this initial year, we also prepared the fieldwork materials:
We have prepared the fieldwork materials:
- Questionnaire (2 rounds)
- Consent form
- Document about payments to participants
- Contracts to RA, compliant with privacy and data management regulations
- Pre-analysis plan
- Ethics document: currently under the third round of revisions
In parallel to the field experiment, we collaborated with other working packages in the broader project by developing a survey experiment. We conducted a pre-test of the survey experiment that we proposed to the joint cross-national survey. The results are written up and have been uploaded to the website as a working paper.
The team underwent some changes. The technician started working for the project obtained a job at the Catalan regional government, and we have recruited a first year PhD student, who will write her dissertation related to the project. This meant that the questionnaire is now more focused on gender, which is her focus of interest in the dissertation. There have been two changes in the project manager provided by the university.
Finally, we have worked with partners to make our fieldwork more policy relevant. We haved talked with the main service provider in Catalonia, SOC (Servei d’Ocupació de Catalunya) and identified a program with which we could collaborate on providing digital skills to women in rural areas.
The impacts of the project are threefold. First, from an academic point of view, major contribution of the project is the linking of three major labor market transitions, i.e. green transition, digitalisation, and the internationalization of the workforce, to better understand new labor market risks and how to address them successfully through new social protection schemes. In that sense, it advances existing academic literature by providing a more encompassing theoretical framework of shifts in employment risks in European economies and new social protection needs that they imply. Second, for this purpose, the project will gather new data and information through individual-level survey (experiments), interviews, and the revision of the existing EU legislation and policy documents. In addition, the project involves a novel field experiment to assess the impact of active labor market policies such as reskilling and digital training on employment and political outcomes. And finally, based on these new data and tools, the project then suggests potential new pathways for policy adjustments that reflect both gaps in the existing EU protection schemes and new policy needs of the workforce in transitioned labor markets.