Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)

The 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), provides a comprehensive overview of adults’ literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem-solving skills – skills that are fundamental for personal, economic and societal development. For the first time, the 2023 Survey measured social and emotional skills of participating adults, using the BFI-2 inventory based on the Big Five taxonomy. This report provides a detailed account of the psychometric properties of the information collected with this instruments. In particular, it discusses whether such measures of social and emotional skills, collected from adults' self-reports, can be compared across different countries and cultural contexts and provide recommendations for how the resulting variables should be used in analysis.

This paper reviews a number of previous studies that have investigated how measure of non-cognitive skills predict important life outcomes such as educational attainment, employment, earnings, and self-reported health and life satisfaction. All reviewed studies analyse data from large-scale surveys from multiple countries and rely on the Big-Five framework to assess non-cognitive skills. The paper finds that measures of non-cognitive skills are robustly and consistently associated to indicators of life success in youth and adulthood, and have incremental predictive power over traditional measures of cognitive ability.

This paper explores enhancements to international large-scale assessments (ILSAs). It advocates for diversification, targeting specific groups or individuals for more precise diagnoses, and flexibilisation, refining the item bank for assessments' relevance and adaptability. The paper also introduces prototypes for new assessment tools, representing a significant evolution in ILSAs' design and application, aiming for broader impact and increased adaptability in ILSAs.

In the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), the Big Five personality traits were assessed using the BFI-2-XS, the 15-item extra-short form of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2). For this purpose, the instrument was translated into 24 languages and adapted to 29 countries, resulting in 39 language versions. This translation and adaptation process followed state-of-the-art procedures to generate language versions of the BFI-2-XS that are maximally comparable across countries and regions. In the present paper, we describe this general translation procedure from a methodological point of view. We also document each resulting language version and report in detail the decisions taken during the translation process and the adaptations made to preexisting national versions of the BFI-2-XS. Our aim is to share with researchers the resulting BFI-2-XS language versions developed with high quality standards to allow maximal cross-cultural comparability. Our intention in so doing is to enable their wider usage beyond PIAAC.

In the vast majority of the world’s countries, information on the literacy proficiency of the adult population is collected through census collections, labour force surveys or through omnibus household surveys. These commonly use simple measures: respondents’ reports of their own or other household members’ capacity to read and write or the capacity of the respondent to accurately read aloud a short sentence. While there is a justified interest in the use of assessments to collect information regarding literacy proficiency, household surveys using simple measures will continue to be a primary source of data on literacy in many countries for some time. Improvement of the quality of simple measures should, therefore, be a priority. Three main avenues for improvement are identified: greater clarity regarding the concepts being measured, the development of improved simple direct assessments of literacy proficiency and encouragement for the use of a common set of instruments and questions.

This paper illustrates similarities and differences between two international surveys that assess adults’ skills: the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the Skills Towards Employment and Productivity (STEP) survey. In particular, the paper highlights the issues that can arise for researchers interested to jointly analyse the data from the two surveys and to compare their results. The paper finds that, in spite of the many similarities, important differences exist between PIAAC and STEP, both in the way the data are collected, and in the way the proficiency of respondents is estimated. These issues can indeed affect the cross-country comparability of results from the two surveys. There is instead little evidence that the literacy assessment used in the two surveys is not adequate to form a basis for a valid assessment of adults’ proficiency on a global scale.

This report focuses on the adult learning data that was collected as part of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills between 2012 and 2016, which has been a core activity of the ongoing OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The objectives are to: present the data on adult learning made available by PIAAC; provide an international and comparative overview of the extent of adult learning of different types along with trends, where possible, for countries and economies that have so far participated in PIAAC; reveal international and comparative patterns on the distribution of adult learning within participating countries and economies, focusing on who is and who is not participating in terms of the types of jobs they work in as well as their socio-demographic profile; assess empirically the relationship between some types of adult learning and economic as well as social outcomes; discuss systemic features of adult learning systems and their relationship with selected economic and social policy instruments; and to draw out implications of the results in relation to the continued measurement of adult learning.

We study the links between family configuration and formation on the one hand and adult literacy skills on the other by analysing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a survey of 250 000 people aged 16 to 65 conducted by the OECD in 33 countries and economies.Literacy proficiency has an effect on many aspects of the formation and development of families, such as age of parents at birth of first child, or age of partners at cohabitation, even when educational attainment and age are taken into account.Moreover, having children and living with a partner have consequences for adults’ job opportunities and participation in the labour market, which can be particularly negative for the women with the highest literacy proficiency.

This paper explores the impact of test-taking conditions on the quality of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) assessment. Interviewers record information about the room of assessment and interruptions that occurred during each interview. These observations, along with information on interviewer assignment size and a careful look at interviewer effects, provide insights into the quality of the assessment. This working paper first describes the variations in test-taking conditions among participating countries. Second, it examines interviewer assignment sizes and the frequency of interruptions, finding that both vary markedly among countries (contrary to the room of assessment). The paper then looks at the relationship between these variations and response rates and engagement measures. While neither the room of assessment nor the recorded interruptions impact quality differences among countries, interviewer assignment size and interviewer effects may have a mild impact on results.

We assess the relationship between numeracy skills and numeracy practices among adults in everyday life and at work from the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250 000 adults aged 16-65 years old conducted by the OECD in 33 countries/economies. The level of proficiency and the intensity of engagement in numeracy practices are two embedded aspects of numeracy. Proficient adults use numeracy frequently and adults who regularly engage in numeracy practices improve their performance. Individual and contextual factors influence, in different ways across countries, the strength of these links. The intensity of the use of numeracy in everyday life decreases as the lapse of time since a person’s studies increases. Moreover, employed people engage in mathematical activities less in the private setting if they do not do so intensively in the workplace.

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief recap of PIAAC and its two predecessor international skills surveys. Second, it outlines the main themes which have been investigated to date using data from PIAAC. Third, the main findings and policy lessons drawn from PIAAC are highlighted. Finally, looking forward to the second cycle of PIAAC, for which planning is now underway, the paper suggests some priority areas for improvement to the survey design in order to add to its analytical usefulness and enhance its utility to policy makers.

We assess the relationship between general literacy skills and health status by analysing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), an international survey of about 250 000 adults aged 16-65 years conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2011-15 in 33 countries/national sub-regions. Across countries, there seems to be a strong and consistent association between general literacy proficiency and self-rated poor health, independent of prior socio-economic status and income. General literacy proficiency also appears to be a mediator of the association between self-education and self-rated poor health. While the literacy-health association is robust over time, it varies in magnitude across countries. It is strongest for those with a tertiary or higher degree and does not appear to exist among young adults (ages 25 to 34 years). Future studies are required to understand the contextual factors that modify the general literacy proficiency-health association.

Using PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) data for 21 countries, we study interrelationships between formal qualifications, cognitive skills, and labour market outcomes, focusing on comparisons between less and intermediate-educated adults (i.e. between adults with a degree below the upper secondary and at the upper secondary level). Less-educated adults tend to have lower cognitive skills than intermediate-educated adults, yet both groups are internally heterogeneous. In country-specific individual-level regressions, cognitive skills partly explain the lower occupational status of less-educated adults, but cross-national variation in their disadvantage remains substantial after accounting for skills. Country-level regressions show that the remaining disadvantage increases with the aggregate skills gap and with the internal homogeneity of the two educational groups. We further show that the association between skills and occupational attainment is weaker among the less educated than among the intermediate group. These findings are consistent with the idea that employers statistically discriminate on the basis of formal qualifications.

Personality characteristics shape human behaviour and influence a wide range of life events and outcomes. They do so not only through their direct effects on life outcomes, but also through their indirect effects on other important personal factors and intermediate life events, such as the development of cognitive capacities, the attainment of educational qualifications and the formation of a family. As such, personality characteristics have a demonstrable relevance for a wide range of policy issues and represent an important, although often neglected, subject of policy interest.This paper reviews the scientific literature covering a wide range of personality characteristics, discussing their conceptualisations and main features, their relevance for important outcomes in life and work, and the chief ways they are measured. It aims to provide a comprehensive overview of various attributes of personality from the perspective of their potential importance for the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), taking into account their analytical potential and policy relevance. The paper also outlines and evaluates the most important measurement instruments for each personality characteristic, with a focus on short self-report scales as the most appropriate form for inclusion in large-scale international surveys. Finally, it presents some considerations related to the evaluation and promotion of personality characteristics and introduces the substantive and measurement criteria that could be used to select the personality attributes, and related measurement scales, to include in large-scale surveys.

The set of skills that is required to be a successful citizen in the 21st century is rapidly evolving. New technologies and social systems grow increasingly complex and require individuals to quickly and flexibly adapt to new and changing circumstances. This paper outlines the key features of the domain of adaptive problem solving that is proposed to be assessed in the 2nd cycle of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) in addition to the domains of numeracy and literacy. Adaptive problem solving is considered to be a crucial 21st century skill that combines cognitive and meta-cognitive processes. The paper develops a definition of adaptive problem solving building on relevant work in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, introduces its covariates and preconditions, discusses relevant assessment principles, and provides insights on the relevance of adaptive problem solving for labour markets and social integration.

This paper uses data from PISA and the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to examine the evolution of socio-economic and gender disparities in literacy and numeracy proficiency between the ages of 15 and 27 in the sample of countries that took part in both studies. Socio-economic disparities are exacerbated between the age of 15 and 27 and the socio-economic gap in proficiency widens, particularly among low-achievers. Gender disparities in literacy at age 15 are marked across the performance spectrum but are particularly wide among low-performers. However, by age 24 there is no difference in the literacy proficiency of males and females. The gender gap in numeracy at age 15 is quantitatively small when compared with the gap in literacy, although it is more pronounced among high achievers. The paper canvasses possible explanations for the trends observed and discusses implications for policy and practice, including the extent to which the lack of an established link between PISA and PIAAC limits the analytical value of the two studies.

There is a growing literature providing evidence that not only cognitive skills but also non-cognitive skills are important for economic and social outcomes. This paper assesses the measurement properties of the Big Five and Grit scales in a large representative sample of adults in Poland. The data from the Polish Follow-up Study on the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (postPIAAC) include longitudinal information on PIAAC respondents in Poland and additional background information not available in the international study. The results presented in this paper show that not all the criteria concerning the reliability, validity and comparability of these scales have been satisfied, though the personality measures significantly contribute to explaining the variability in policy-relevant outcomes. Most of the questions discriminate well between people possessing a high and a low level of a given trait, though reverse-worded items perform weaker. The Big Five theoretical five-factor structure was not replicated; however, a six-factor model with an additional factor loading reverse-worded items fits the data. In case of Grit, a bi-factor model, which has an equivalent interpretation to the second-order theoretical structure, holds. The scales are not fully measurement invariant. The results confirm earlier findings from the literature that differences in personality traits are clearly associated with differences in life outcomes. For most of the outcomes, the Big Five traits outperform cognitive skills in predictive power. Only educational attainment is more strongly related to cognitive skills, while for wages, the predictive power of personality and cognitive skills is similar. The paper provides recommendations for incorporating measures of personality traits into competence surveys.

This paper examines how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The findings are consistent with the notion that, in producing human capital, work experience substitutes formal education at the bottom of the schooling distribution. First, the number of years of working experience correlates with literacy proficiency only among low-educated individuals. Secondly, low-educated workers who only perform simple tasks on their jobs (calculating percentages or reading emails) do better in numeracy and literacy tests than similar employees who did not perform those tasks. Thirdly, workers in jobs intensive in numeric tasks perform relatively better in the numeracy section of the PIAAC test than in the literacy part. Overall, our results suggest that the contribution of on-the-job learning to skill formation is about a third of that of compulsory schooling in most of the countries that participated in PIAAC.

This paper examines the relationship between age and literacy using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL) and The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). A negative partial relationship between literacy and age exists with literacy declining with age, especially after age 45. However, this relationship could reflect some combination of age and birth cohort effects. The analysis shows that in most participating countries the negative literacy-age profile observed in cross-sectional data arises from offsetting ageing and cohort effects. With some exceptions, more recent birth cohorts have lower levels of literacy and individuals from a given birth cohort lose literacy skills after they leave school at a rate greater than indicated by cross-sectional estimates. The results for birth cohort suggest that there is not a general tendency for literacy skills to decline from one generation to the next, but that the majority of the countries examined are doing a poorer job of developing literacy skills in successive generations.

A recurring issue for education policy-makers is the labour market effect of the long-term global mass expansion of higher education, particularly on what is a “graduate job”. The traditional assumption is that graduate jobs are virtually coterminous with professional and managerial occupations. A new indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, is derived using task-based data drawn from the The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The new classification shows that several jobs in ISCO major group 3 “Technicians and Associate Professionals” are also classed as graduate jobs in many countries. Altogether, 27.6% of jobs are classified as graduate jobs in the 15 OECD country-regions for which we have data. Considerable variation in the proportion of graduate jobs is found across industries and countries and in the short period from 2011 to 2013, the proportion of graduate jobs has become more diverse across countries.

This paper analyses proficiency in literacy and numeracy in the countries that have participated in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS, administered between 1994 and 1998), the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL, administered between 2003 and 2007) and the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC, administered in 2012). While many countries experienced small to modest changes in literacy proficiency between IALS and PIAAC, others saw sizeable variations, mostly on the negative side. In the shorter span that separated ALL and PIAAC, numeracy proficiency clearly declined (except in Italy), while literacy moved less on average (except for the large increase registered in Italy and the large decline experienced by Norway). Changes in the composition of the population have had little impact on observed changes in scores. Larger variations took place within different socio-demographic groups, but these tended to cancel each other out on aggregate. In particular, large variations are observed by age and levels of education. Older adults in PIAAC are generally more proficient than their IALS counterparts, probably due to the increase in educational attainments that took place over recent decades. On the contrary, tertiary-educated individuals appear to be on average less proficient than in the past, which may signal that the expansion of tertiary education has been accompanied by a decline in the average quality of university graduates (or of university instruction). There is also no evidence that the change in delivery mode, with a switch to a computer-based assessment in PIAAC, had any significant effect on performance. However, the OECD is unable to ascertain how differences in implementation and technical standards affect the comparability of the data, so that a certain degree of caution should always be exercised in interpreting these results. Amongst the countries that experienced larger changes in literacy proficiency between surveys, a close inspection of IALS data (in particular through an investigation of response patterns at the item level) highlights some anomalies in Italy and Poland (and, to a lesser extent, in England and Northern Ireland), suggesting that particular caution should be exercised in interpreting the evolution of proficiency in these countries.

How important is mastering information and communication technologies (ICT) in modern labour markets? We present the first evidence on this question, drawing on unique data that provide internationally comparable information on ICT skills in 19 countries from the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Our identification strategy relies on the idea that Internet access is important in the formation of ICT skills, and we implement instrumental-variable models that leverage exogenous variation in Internet availability across countries and across German municipalities. ICT skills are substantially rewarded in the labour market: returns are at 8% for a one standard-deviation increase in ICT skills in the international analysis and are almost twice as large in Germany. Placebo estimations show that exogenous Internet availability cannot explain numeracy or literacy skills, suggesting that our identifying variation is independent of a person’s general ability. Our results further suggest that the proliferation of computers complements workers in executing abstract tasks that require ICT skills.

In this study, we investigated how empirical indicators of test-taking engagement can be defined, empirically validated, and used to describe group differences in the context of the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). The approach was to distinguish between disengaged and engaged response behavior by means of response time thresholds. Constant thresholds of 3000 ms and 5000 ms were considered, as well as item-specific thresholds based on the visual inspection of (bimodal) response time distributions (VI method) and the proportion correct conditional on response time (P+>0% method). Overall, the validity checks comparing the proportion correct of engaged and disengaged response behavior by domain and by item showed that the P+>0% method performed slightly better than the VI method and the methods assuming constant thresholds. The results for Literacy and Numeracy by module revealed that there was an increase from Module 1 to Module 2 in the proportion of disengaged responses, suggesting a drop in test-taking engagement. The investigation of country differences in test-taking engagement by domain using the P+>0% method showed that the proportion of responses classified as disengaged was quite low. For Literacy, the proportion was well below 5% for the majority of countries; in Numeracy, the proportion was even smaller than 1% for almost all countries; while for Problem solving, the proportion of disengaged responses was more than 5% but usually well below 10%. There were significant differences in test-taking engagement between countries; the obtained effect sizes were small to medium. Population differences in test-taking engagement were highly correlated between the three domains, suggesting that test-taking engagement can be conceived as a consistent characteristic. Furthermore, there was a clear negative association between test-taking disengagement and proficiency in Literacy, Numeracy and Problem solving, respectively. Finally, subgroup differences for gender, age, educational attainment, and language proved to be insignificant or very small. Results suggest that males tend to be more disengaged, that disengagement increases with age in Problem solving, with lower educational attainment and when the test language is not the same as a testee’s native language.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to “naturally” decline with age. Age differences in proficiency are, at first sight, substantial. On average across the OECD countries participating in PIAAC, adults aged 55 to 65 score some 30 points less than adults aged 25 to 34 on the PIAAC literacy scale, which is only slightly smaller than the score point difference between tertiary educated and less-than-upper-secondary educated individuals. However, despite their lower levels of proficiency, older individuals do not seem to suffer in terms of labour market outcomes. In particular, they generally earn higher wages, and much of the available empirical evidence suggests that they are not less productive than younger workers. Older and more experienced individuals seem therefore able to compensate the decline in information processing skills with the development of other skills, generally much more difficult to measure. On the other hand, proficiency in information-processing skills remain a strong determinant of important outcomes at all ages: this makes it important to better understand which factors are the most effective in preventing such age-related decline in proficiency, which does not occur to the same extent in all countries and for all individuals. Two broad interventions seem to be particularly promising in this respect. First, it is important to ensure that there is adequate and effective investment in skills development early in the life-cycle: as skills beget skills, starting off with a higher stock of human capital seems also to ensure smaller rates of proficiency decline. Second, it is equally important that policies are in place that provide incentives to individuals (and firms) to invest in skills across the entire working life. In this respect, changes in retirement policies can not only have the short-term effect of providing some reliefs to public finance, but have the potential to radically reshape incentives to stay active, to practice their skills and to invest more in training, thus helping to maintain high levels of proficiency.

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the information from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) regarding adults with low literacy and numeracy proficiency. The paper first describes the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of these populations. Although, they are more likely than the rest of the population to exhibit certain characteristics, such as lower levels of educational attainment, lower rates of unemployment or more disadvantaged backgrounds, adults with low literacy are found in among all socio-demographic groups and in all walks of life. The paper then explores the frequency with which adults with low proficiency engage in the reading, writing and numeracy practices and the relationship between these practices and a range of social and economic outcomes. For most outcomes, levels of engagement in literacy practices appear to be as strong predictors as proficiency, indicating the importance of encouraging more intense use of these skills both in and outside of work. The unique data from the Survey of Adult Skills regarding performance on the simple reading tasks (the so called “reading components”) is also analysed. Adults with low proficiency are found to be able to easily recognise commonly used words in printed form but often have difficulty with processing the logic of sentences and reading extended passages for basic meaning. Adults with low proficiency are considerably less likely than their more proficient peers to participate in formal or non-formal adult education or training programmes, which is mostly due to the socio-demographic and employment characteristics of this population. However, the lower participation rates among the low proficient adults does not appear to be a consequence of their lack of motivation as much as of the presence of various obstacles to participation, such as lack of time and the cost of training.

The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a comprehensive picture of work and study in 23 countries/regions. Crucially, it decomposes the total share of working students by the context in which they work (VET, apprenticeships or private arrangements) and assesses the link between field of study and students’ work. The paper also assesses how the skills of students are used in the workplace compared to other workers and identifies the socio-demographic factors and the labour market institutions that increase the likelihood of work and study. Finally, while it is not possible to examine the relationship between work and study and future labour market outcomes at the individual level, some aggregate correlations are unveiled.

In this report we investigate the effects of vocational education and training (VET) on adult skills and labour market outcomes by using the PIAAC survey. Data comparability across countries, the breath of countries involved, and the almost unique presence of information on assessed skills, training, earnings and employment makes this survey especially valuable to study the different facets of VET as compared to more academic education.

Field-of-study mismatch occurs when workers educated in a particular field work in another. It is conceptually distinct from qualifications or skills mismatch, although a part of qualifications and skills mismatch results from graduates from a particular field having to downgrade to find work in another field. Some studies have identified labour market dynamics related to field-of-study mismatch, but few (if any) have sought to directly understand the interplay between labour supply factors (the types of skills brought to the workplace) and the labour demand factors (the types of skills demanded by employers) in field-of-study mismatch. Using data from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies’ Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), this paper shows that although students may choose to specialise in a particular field, it is not solely up to them to actually work in that field. In accordance with assignment theories, both the degree of saturation of a particular field in the labour market and the level of generic skills of a particular field predict the occurrence of field-of-study mismatch, highlighting that mismatch is the result of both labour supply- and demand-side factors. The paper then evaluates the costs to individuals – in terms of wages, risk of being out of work and job satisfaction. Findings suggest that the costs of field-of-study mismatch may only be high in terms of individual earnings when it is associated to qualification mismatch. For economies, field-of-study mismatch, when associated with qualifications mismatch, can amount to important costs, meriting the attention of policy makers to better aligning course places to skill needs or by encouraging skill transferability across fields.