The Interplay between Education and Digital Skills in Shaping Social Mobility: An International Comparative Perspective

Education is central in determining occupational outcomes and social mobility, but rapid digitalisation and skill-biased technical change has transformed occupational hierarchies, as well as the skills needed in the workplace. In this context, digital skills, particularly in information and communication technologies (ICT), now take a pivotal role in predicting occupational outcomes. This may offer new possibilities for social mobility, or may further strengthen social inequalities. Indeed, the classic interplay between class origin, education, and class destination (OED triangle) may be modified in important ways based on these new sets of skills that impact successful labour market integration. Through analyses of Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, this paper considers the relationship between social background, education, digital skills, and employment outcomes across 30 countries. We use PIAAC’s Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments competency domain assessment to examine the associations between country-specific relative digital skills and social origin, education, and occupational status. Furthermore, we study how ‘old’ mechanisms of social mobility interact with ‘new’ skills by examining the interplay between education and digital skills in predicting social mobility between the status of family of origin (measured by parents’ education) and current occupational status (measured by the International Standard Classification of Occupations, ISCO). Finally, we compare hypotheses of cumulative and compensatory effects, perspectives which provide two divergent explanations of the size of the effects of education and digital skills depending on class origin when predicting occupational outcomes. The originality of this approach lies in its effort to demonstrate empirically how the interplay between education and digital skills is shaped by class origins and theoretically how cumulative advantage and compensatory advantage perspectives both contribute to understanding this relationship.