How Workers Use, or Don’t Use, their Skills in the Workplace

A higher skilled workforce is widely recognised as crucial to achieve high productivity growth and competitiveness. Yet, much less attention is given to the demand side of the equation: how the skills developed in education and adult learning are actually deployed in the workplace. This question is important: even when workers acquire high levels of skills proficiency through education and training, their skills may remain underutilised on the job. Using data from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), this report finds evidence of a broken link between skills proficiency and skills use. Countries with higher average proficiency levels in literacy, numeracy or adaptive problem solving do not necessarily report more frequent use of these skills at work, and within each country, a large share of highly skilled workers use their skills only rarely. In countries such as Singapore and Croatia, this share reaches one in three workers.

Studying skills use is essential because the way skills are deployed in the workplace has important implications for both the economy and workers themselves. The analysis shows that greater use of skills is associated with higher labour productivity, with high-productive economies such as Ireland, Norway and the United States also displaying a more frequent use of skills. At the individual level, more frequent skills use is strongly linked to higher wages: for example, a one‑standard-deviation increase in the use of influencing skills corresponds to a 7% rise in hourly wages, all else being equal. At the macro level, the report also finds that inequality in skills use mirrors wage inequality across countries, suggesting that unequal deployment of skills contributes to broader disparities in earnings.

The deployment of skills in the workplace is also correlated with non-economic outcomes. Workers who are able to use their skills more fully tend to report higher levels of job and life satisfaction, indicating that effective skills utilisation enhances motivation and engagement. The analysis also examines another dimension of job quality and worker well-being that has been so far overlooked in the economic research: the risk of job burnout. Burnout represents a critical outcome to consider as it reflects the potential costs of skills use when workers face persistent mismatches between their skills and the conditions under which they are deployed. Computing a composite index of burnout risk, this report finds that greater use autonomy and discretion at work is strongly associated with a lower risk of burnout.

Exploiting the most recent PIAAC data, the report shows that self-organisation and task discretion are the most widely used skills in nearly all countries surveyed, reflecting the growing importance of autonomy and responsibility in modern workplaces. Co-operative skills are also used frequently, consistent with evidence that social and interpersonal skills are becoming increasingly valuable in labour markets.

Drawing on the two cycles of the Survey of Adult Skills, the report also provides a unique perspective on how skills use has evolved over the past decade. ICT use has expanded more than any other skill domain. A decomposition analysis suggests that this increase is mostly due to more use of ICT skills within occupations, rather than shifts in occupational composition. By contrast, the use of dexterity skills has declined sharply in many countries, including France, the United Kingdom and Germany, reflecting the ongoing transformation of task structures within occupations.

Disparities in skills use remain significant. In 2023, women still use most skills at work less frequently than men with the same individual and job characteristics, including similar occupations and proficiency levels. This likely reflects task segregation within occupations, where men and women are assigned different responsibilities. More concerningly, women’s use of key information-processing skills at work – such as numeracy, reading, writing and ICT – has declined relative to men’s over the past decade. Addressing these gaps requires workplace-level interventions to promote fair task allocation and inclusive management practices.

Low-qualified workers also use most skills less frequently than their more educated peers, even when they have the same proficiency level. Encouragingly, however, this gap has narrowed over time. In particular, low-qualified workers have increased their use of numeracy, ICT and influencing skills – which are central to adapting to more complex work environments – more than highly qualified workers. Decomposition results point at a process of job upgrading, with most of the observed catching-up effect explained by jobs themselves becoming more skill-intensive, rather than by low-qualified workers moving into new, more demanding occupations.

Overall, the findings of this report indicate that expanding the pool of highly skilled workers is necessary but not sufficient for productivity growth. Bridging the gap between skills proficiency and skills use is essential for ensuring that talent is fully utilised and that productivity gains are broadly shared. Persistent mismatches between workers’ skills and how they are deployed suggest labour market inefficiencies, which can be simultaneously due to managerial practices that fail to leverage employee potential and workers taking jobs below their skill level due to labour market rigidities. Policy efforts should therefore encourage firm-level innovation and job redesign to make better use of existing skills. At the same time, governments should increase efforts in strengthening labour market institutions and career guidance systems to facilitate better skill matching.