Digital Competencies – Is the German Manufacturing Sector Ready for the Future?

Cooperation Partners: Kristin Keveloh (LinkedIn Economic Graph Team), Ramanujam Macharla Vijayakumar (LinkedIn Economic Graph Team)

Tasks
This joint project with the professional network LinkedIn uses data from the profiles of its members to examine how German industry is positioned in terms of the digital skills of its employees. In addition to taking stock of the digital applied and advanced skills in different industries, occupations and regions, it also highlights the industries digital competences come from, how they are distributed across hierarchical levels, and how they have evolved over time.

Methods
Statistical analysis of the LinkedIn member profiles

Data and other sources
Data of LinkedIn member profiles

Results
Since 2016, more and more industry workers have been listing digital skills on their CVs. Today, 48 percent of LinkedIn members who work in industry have digital skills. That’s a surprisingly low number in a country with highly digitalized production.

A good third (36 percent) of members have digital professional skills, as they are called. These are precisely the skills that enable companies to drive digitalization and develop new business models.

The higher up in the hierarchy the members are, the fewer digital professional skills they list. While 41 percent of career starters and 40 percent of employees have digital skills, the figure is 30 percent for managers and just 25 percent for board members.

There are differences among employees with regard to occupational groups, gender, and size of their employer: as expected, most software developers (88 percent) list digital skills, but only 42 percent of project managers do, followed by 39 percent of mechanical engineers, 31 percent of product managers, and 21 percent of sales specialists. Women are strong in digital application skills, while men are strong in digital professional skills (37 percent, women 33 percent). Employees in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have fewer digital professional skills (35 percent) than those in large corporations (41 percent).

The following differences can be observed across industries: digital professional skills are strong in the defense and space industries (56 percent). The electronics sector (44 percent), industrial automation (44 percent), and the automotive industry (41 percent) are also come out well.