Policy Research Reports
The Future of Skills in the Egyptian Labor Market
No.
SPRR 2023-1
Publisher
ERF and GIZ
Date
June, 2023
Technological change brings both progress and disruption to labour markets. For example, there are concerns that automation may lead to the loss of jobs, particularly middle class jobs, globally (Autor 2015) and in Egypt (Helmy 2015). In reality, technological change is unlikely to lead to extensive job losses (Acemoglu et al. 2022; Aghion et al. 2022; Arntz, Gregory, and Zierahn 2019; Autor 2015; Fox and Signé 2021). Instead, future work will have a different occupational structure and require different skills (Aghion et al. 2022; Autor 2015; Hardy, Keister, and Lewandowski 2018; Schlogl and Sumner 2018).
What skills will the Egyptian labour market require in the future?
Understanding the skills needed in the labour market is critically important for students, workers, employment services, and policymakers to ensure they supply the skills demanded in the future labour market. Yet Egypt lacks nationally representative surveys on current skill demand, making projecting future skill demand even more difficult. This report uses nationally representative Egyptian labour market data from 2017 through 2021, projections of employment through 2030, and international (O*NET) data on the skills, abilities, and knowledge different occupations require to assess the future of skill demand in the Egyptian labour market.
The requirements of occupations are organized into three domains: skills, abilities, and knowledge. The report focuses on the top five skills, abilities, and knowledge the O*NET data suggests are needed in different occupations and in the future Egyptian labour market overall. Analyses highlight the skills needed for technical secondary graduates as compared to other education levels, in specific occupations and industries, for new entrants versus experienced workers, and in jobs held by women versus men.
The next section reviews the global evidence on skill demand and the future of work, while the following section presents the existing research on skills in Egypt. The third section discusses the Egyptian and skills data sources. The results on the skills needed are presented in the fourth section, followed by a concluding section discussing the implications of the results for education and labour market policy.
This Special Policy Research Report is an output of a project between the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on Employment Promotion. It aims to support the generation of information about the current and future demands of the Egyptian labour market and equipping relevant partners with high quality evidence which would support them in making labour market-oriented decisions. As such, the project collaborated with ERF to produce sound research findings that aimed to address several topics related to the future of work, published during the national forums on the future of work in Egypt.
Authors
Caroline Krafft
Associate Professor of Economics, St. Catherine University