In upcoming research, my colleague and I posit that the skill content of a worker’s current occupation is a high dimension piece of information that can function as a job market signal, particularly for low wage, non-post-secondary educated workers. Using the 2013 Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) Survey data for Ghana, we construct a skill vector for every occupation consisting of a skill measure incorporating routine versus nonroutine; and manual versus cognitive intensity. We then create an occupation relatedness measure across all occupations at the 3-digit ISCO level. The fact that many jobs in different industries share common skills but differ substantially in wages suggests that there may be incomplete information in the labor market and potential pathways for low educated workers to become skilled through alternative routes (STARs). The figure below illustrates the resulting relatedness plot of occupations with node size denoting employment shares and node c...
Economics, Data Science, Consulting