Resumen de E-skill’s Effect on Occupational Attainment: A PISA-Based Panel Study
This paper explores the inequalities in the Uruguayan education-to-work transition at the light of new technological determinants: the skills needed for critical and autonomous use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) or e-skills. While important cumulative experience exists regarding the increasing diversification of formal education and labor market pathways and its serious consequences for the process of Uruguay’s social inequality reproduction, none of them relates to the role of ICTs. The central hypothesis presented here argues that even after controlling the factors traditionally associated with unequal pathways, such as social class, gender, cognitive skills, educational attainment and labor history, there is an additional explanatory component of ICT on occupational attainment at the first stages of education-to-work-transitions. With this objective in mind, nested logistic models were fitted, using a longitudinal survey with a representative panel of a sub-sample of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. Findings tend to corroborate the hypothesis, showing a statistically significant effect of digital skills attained until the age of 15/16 on white collar occupational achievements at the age of 19/20. Based on the model’s results public policy implications for ICT training are discussed.
