Kea Tijdens's presentation about University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam Institute of Advanced labour Studiues at the Eduworks project's kick-off meeting

1. eduworks-network.eu
facebook.com/eduworksnetwork
@EduworksNetwork
EDUWORKS Introduction
WP3 Meso – level
Two post docs at AIAS –
University of Amsterdam

2. Introduction
• University of Amsterdam
• largest university in the Netherlands
• 25,000 students, 5,000 staff
• AIAS (Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies)
• is centre for research focusing on labour issues, including industrial
relations, organisation of work, working conditions, wage setting, labourmarket inequalities, employment and labour market governance, as well as
methodological issues related to these topics
• maintains a large portfolio of internationally funded research projects
and international data bases and data collections.
• is a multidisciplinary institute, established from the Departments of Law, Social
Sciences, Economics, and Medicine in the University of Amsterdam

3. Introduction
• Bio Kea Tijdens
• labour sociologist (PhD) and work and organisational psychologist (M.A.)
with 15 years of service in department of Economics
• research coordinator Amsterdam Institute for Advanced labour Studies (AIAS)
• research topics: wage setting across occupations, measurement of
occupations, comparison educational requirements in vacancies vs educational
attainment of jobholders for several European countries
• Projects
• scientific coordinator WageIndicator web survey (since 2000)
• work package coordinator InGRID EU-FP7 (2013-’17)’: workshop Developing and
testing new tools to measure occupations and their task and skill requirements
• participant Webdatanet: network for web-based data collection (2012-’15)

4. Challenges
• Measurement of occupations
• EU-wide ‘new jobs’ knowledge only highly aggregated
• No EU-wide occupational information system (US Bureau of Labour Statistics
has its O*net information system)
• Challenge: to measure job titles in a cross-country comparative way to provide
disaggregated occupational data at EU-level
• Measurement of skill requirements
• EU-wide ‘new skills’ knowledge only highly aggregated
• Lack of EU-wide understanding of job requirements, both level & fields
• Challenge: to investigate skill requirements in greater detail and in a EUcomparative manner

5. Research agenda
• Dynamics across occupations
• when do new occupations emerge or why do existing occupations fall apart or
disappear?
• relationship of educational requirements in vacancies (skills needs) vis-à-vis
the educational attainment of jobholders within the same occupations
• Dynamics within occupations
• which processes drive the merging of tasks into one job and the allocation of
tasks across occupations -> the division of labour underlying occupations
• Building an occupational information system
• improving the measurement of job titles and their coding into classifications,
using text string matching procedures
• identifying the dimensions in such an information system

6. EDUWORKS associated partners
• Ecorys NL
• is an international company conducting research and providing policy advice
• is one of the oldest research and consulting companies in Europe, established in 1929
• has a staff of 550 with offices in Belgium, India, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Poland,
Russian Federation, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungary and South Africa
• conducts regularly labour market surveys to measure employer’s demand for skills and
provide an internship to one postdoc (ER#6)
• WageIndicator Foundation
• is a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving labour market transparency
by providing accurate wage and labour law information on national websites, currently in 70
countries
• has almost 20 million visitors in 2012 (2.2 million in November 2013)
• runs continuously a volunteer worldwide web survey concerning work and wages posted on
all websites with large numbers of observations
• runs currently in the web survey in 13 countries task lists per occupation asking respondents
how frequent the tasks are performed, to be used by one postdoc (ER#5)

7. ER#5 The dynamics underlying the
division of tasks into occupations
• Research
• comparing task frequencies across jobholders in similar occupations is 13
countries, using interrater agreement analyses and multilevel models,
using WageIndicator tasks data
• testing of theories concerning the role of skill levels in the dynamics underlying the
division of tasks into occupations within one industry,
using WageIndicator tasks data
• confronting required skill levels in vacancies and attained skill levels of jobholders
in similar occupations, using vacancy data and WageIndicator web survey data
• contributing to the building a occupational and educational information system, in
cooperation with EDUWORKS partner CORVINNO
• Data
• data of the web survey, asking jobholders how often they perform a task,
using a list of approx. 10 tasks per occupation, specified for 433 occupations in 13
countries (aim: N=50,000)

8. ER#6 Companies’ skill needs
• Research
• confronting companies’ skill needs and the task and skill profiles of the
jobholders in the same sector aiming to analyse the volumes and the
characteristics of the mismatch, using pooled data from enterprise skills need
data and WageIndicator job holders web survey data for selected occupations
in two countries (UK and NL)
• contributing to the building a occupational and educational information
system, in cooperation with EDUWORKS partner CORVINNO
• Data
• data of the web survey (jobholders) and data of employers (HR officers) in the
agricultural industry in two countries (UK and NL, N=5,000 in each
country), conducted by Ecorys
• the WISCO database of occupational titles for 70 countries, used in the web
survey for reespondent’s self-identification of occupation