Getting Skills Right: Australia by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: education/employment
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2018-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Box 2.9. Identifying transversal skills

While the demand for skills is changing rapidly, some skills have a high degree of transferability between different occupations and sectors and are likely to continue to be in high demand. The European Union recommends the use of the term “transversal skills” to refer to the category of skills which are, by nature, transferable across all sectors and occupations and have an important impact on success in life. Transversal skills can include soft skills – those that are non-job-specific and closely connected with attitudes (e.g. teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship), but also generic hard skills, which are technical and job-specific abilities which can be applied effectively in most jobs (e.g. digital skills, communication in foreign languages).

“Skills clustering” is a tool used to identify skills which are highly transferable across the economy or within sectors. The Foundation for Young Australian’s new report, The New Work Mindset, uses a rich database of online job vacancies from Burning Glass and exploits clustering techniques to divide 625 occupations into seven “job clusters” which are defined on the basis of overlapping skill requirements. For example, the Technologists cluster includes jobs requiring “skilled understanding and manipulation of digital technology,” while the Artisans cluster comprises jobs requiring skill in “manual tasks related to construction, production, maintenance, or technical customer service.” The FYA estimates that when a person trains for one job, they gain skills in an average of 13 other jobs.

Using skills clustering techniques to identify transversal skills has numerous potential policy applications. Skills identified as highly transferable should be included in a consistent way in VET training packages. There is also potential to apply this methodology to processes of recognition of prior learning, and career guidance.

Source: European Union (2011), “Transferability of Skills across Economic Sectors.” ; Foundation for Young Australians (2017), “The New Work Mindset: 7 new job clusters to help young people navigate the new work order.” https://www.fya.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/The-New-Work-Mindset.pdf

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