Reshaping the labor market: understanding the dynamics of a skill-biased technological change from the business and engineering education perspective

Technological progress has shifted the composition of employment, making business skills obsolete to a certain degree and replacing them with digital skills needed in a digitalized labor market. In Switzerland, digital skills such as coding or data science, and analytics, are generally taught in university level academic programs offered pertaining to the field of engineering, but they lack in the field of business. This inconsistency of digital literacy in the Swiss educational system, on the one hand governs the labor supply by creating a semi-permeable membrane which gives the possibility to engineering students to gain some of the traits of business students and get hired in the latter’s respective job positions, leading to an educational mismatch. On the other hand, it governs the labor demand, which lacks employees with the adequate level of digital skills required for the job positions, leading to a qualification mismatch in the labor market. The paper is aimed at understanding the effects that technological development has on labor market and its effects on the skills’ imbalances developed between: - labor demand, represented by the jobs available in the Swiss financial service sector; - and labor supply, represented by a potential workforce with either a business or engineering education.