Ben Etheridge (University of Essex)
Emilia Del Bono and Paul Garcia
Recent research has emphasized the growing importance of socio-emotional skills in labour market success. But little is known about how these skills shape work outcomes. In this paper, we use detailed longitudinal data from the British Cohort Study 1970 on workers' skills measured at age 10 and monthly job histories until age 46 to examine the role of skills in career trajectories. To provide a precise picture of how skills fit with job task requirements, we focus on workers with low education, a group for whom understanding skill-job matching could offer alternative pathways to career progression beyond formal education. Specifically, we analyze how workers sort into occupations, and assess wage penalties from skill-task mismatch. Across different types of socio-emotional skills, we find that 'attention' skills, which capture perseverance, predict sorting into cognitively-demanding jobs, while 'assertiveness' predicts sorting into jobs with high soft-skills requirements. Mismatch between attention skills and cognitive tasks reduces contemporaneous earnings, but leaves no scarring. By contrast, mismatch between assertiveness and soft tasks has a long-term effect on earnings. It is also persistent, despite raising occupational mobility. Our findings inform a current agenda on policies to improve socio-emotional skills in schools, against the backdrop of a continually changing demand for job tasks.