France Stratégie, with the support of Cereq (Centre d'études et de recherches sur les qualifications) has undertaken to develop a a shared vision of jobs and skills in the digital sector.
A working group made up of actors and experts from a wide range of backgrounds worked for 8 months to shed light on the 2/3-year evolution of the "core" jobs and professions in the digital sector, and on the modes of professionalization that will enable these professions to be fed.
The report opens with an analysis of the digital sector in France: the broad vision of the digital economy used results in an estimate of approximately 860,000 full-time equivalent employees. "In terms of total employment, the digital economy employs a share of employees similar to that observed in Germany, Canada or the Netherlands (around 3%). However, some countries, such as Ireland, South Korea, Finland, the United States and the United Kingdom, have a much stronger presence in this sector.
The report then reviews the various recent prospective studies on employment in the digital sector.
Three challenges for a digital job forecast
- Giving better visibility to the sector's professions: This need for clarity in the digital sector is partly due to the current discrepancy between the nomenclatures used by public statistics (PCS, FAP, ROME, NAF) and the expressions and classifications used by companies, sectors and their observatories. This observation has led to the collective development of a directory of occupations that constitute the "core of the digital world".
- Bringing together sectors and industries that were previously far apart: a second major challenge for the professionals concerned is to build a unified representation of the digital professions, beyond the singularities of each industry.
- Opening up the skills needed to enter the digital sector: this third dimension focuses on building a broader representation of the skills needed to enter the digital sector.
36 professions and nine families of professions "at the heart of digital technology
In order to overcome the difficulties linked to the current nomenclatures of public statistics, the working group identified thirty-six occupations, structured into nine families."For each of these families, an analysis has made it possible to present the respective developments and challenges of each of the trades that make up the family, based on the framework of skills, tasks or functions that characterize them.
The jobs identified "correspond to two categories: the "hard" digital jobs (IT, networks, telecoms) but also new jobs or those that require a strong adaptation of their content.
These trades " meet a sustainability criterion: they are relatively perennial trades. They are perceived as trades that will still exist in a few years, whether they are "high-volume" trades (with the idea of minimizing the consideration of "niche trades") or emerging, low-volume trades that are likely to become more important in the future. For some, a clue here is that these are "occupations for which we are already seeing tensions and shortages in the labor market.
Finally, this list does not claim to be exhaustive.
Rethinking the training and professionalization processes in the sector.
"Exposed to rapid and perpetual technological changes, the digital sector requires a training system based not on a succession of segmented interventions by training and professional actors, but on a "continuum" between training and employment, based on an iterative and networked approach."The traditional sequential pattern of the training-employment relationship (evolution of trades and jobs, then formalization of skill needs by professional actors, then response of the educational system in terms of adaptation of training courses, then supply of the labor market by the new generations who have passed through these courses)"does not allow for rapid evolution of the content of training courses while certain jobs are being profoundly transformed by technological change.
"As a result, more and more of the systems created or mobilized to find solutions to the challenges of adapting people and organizations are part of ad hoc arrangements, one-off cooperative ventures or more permanent partnerships between structures belonging to the "classic" system of initial training, to that of continuing education, to professional and social integration, or even to companies and their intermediary organizations, such as OPCAs or professional branches.Three components of the traditional training-employment relationship are, according to the report, particularly affected by this evolution:
- The world of social and professional integration, where the learning of digital technologies has given rise to several particularly innovative initiatives to renew the vision of the pathways to employment for people who have been permanently distanced from it;
- Initial training structures are organizing responses by developing new modes of cooperation with companies, and by integrating more and more initial training practices and continuing education actions. Such a dynamic is particularly observable in everything that concerns the training of technicians in digital technology.
- Lastly, companies themselves may be led to become heavily involved in continuing education to resolve major tensions in their recruitment needs. They can also be mobilized to address the retraining of certain employees affected by the rapid obsolescence of the skills that make up their professions.
