The digital edge : skills that matter in the European labour market after COVID-19

Following the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the emphasis on digitization and robotization has grown at an unprecedented rate in the global economy, resulting in significant changes to the labour market composition and increasing the value of digital skills. The aim of this article is to emphasize the ways in which people's digital abilities and appetite for online activities are connected to job productivity (salary levels) and to determine which individual internet-based digital skills are genuinely important and correlated with better wages. We employed a Principal Component Analysis (PCA-type factorial analysis) with orthogonal rotation to gain a general understanding of the main components that synthesize the digital capabilities of individuals from the European countries analyzed. We decreased the dimensionality of our initial dataset to two major components, namely comprehensive online skills and digital social and media skills, keeping more than 80% of the overall variability. We then evaluated the potential association between the two created components and the average hourly wages and salaries. Since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have observed an important shift in the impact of digital and internet skills on the job market in Europe. Thus, the development of comprehensive internet skills is highly correlated with individuals' more effective integration into the labour market in Europe in general and the EU in particular, evidenced by better wage and salary levels (r = 0.740, p < 0.001). On the other hand, we found no correlation between the possibility of obtaining higher salaries for employees and the second component, digital social and media skills. The novelty of our research lies in its specific focus on the unique and immediate impacts of the pandemic, the accelerated adoption of digital skills, the integration of comprehensive individual internet skills, and the use of the most recent data to understand the labour market's characteristics. This new approach offers fresh insights into how Europe’s workforce could evolve in response to unprecedented challenges, making it distinct from previous studies of labour market skills.