Skill-proximate occupations for non-post-secondary-educated workers in Ghana

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 color representing wages (dark blue being the highest).

Our results show that in 2016/17, there were approximately 1.2 million individuals whose skill profile based on current work is proximate to the skill profile of a higher paying occupation. We call these STARs after Blair et al (2020). Of these, 46 percent were workers with less than post-secondary education in low wage occupations who have skills to transition to a higher wage role in their wage category. Another 344,840 (28.3 percent) were workers with less than post-secondary education in middle wage occupations who have skills to transition to a higher wage role in their wage category. An estimated 292,151 (23.9 percent) were non-post-secondary-educated workers who have skillsets to transition to higher wage work. Finally, there were just 18,379 (1.5 percent) workers with less than post-secondary education who are in high-wage roles.