Education Policies to Empower People to Participate in the Social Market Economy in the Era of Digital Transformation

Tasks

Technological change such as the digital transformation of the economy is the source of increased future prosperity. But for many workers, it also implies major challenges such as job displacement. While new job opportunities tend to emerge elsewhere in the economy, these generally require very different bundles of skills. Without successful re-skilling, affected workers will lose out from the overall gains of the transformation process – without their own fault. This is a major threat to the promise of the Social Market Economy to enable all citizens to benefit from the potential of free markets.

In this project, we aim to study how the state can empower people to participate successfully in the Social Market Economy during the digital transformation by equipping them with the skills required on the labor market. While there is increasing knowledge about the effectiveness of early childhood and school investments, skill policies cannot simply give up on all members of society beyond youth. The project therefore focusses on the underexplored topic of education and training of adolescent and adult citizens.

Methods

The project is comprised of three modules aimed at pushing the research frontier on the topic:

1. Medium-term effects of mentoring for highly disadvantaged adolescents
2. Training policies to help workers adjust to the digital transformation
3. Multidimensional skills and successful digitalization of the labor market

Methodologically, Modules 1 and 3 include major big-data applications.