The quantitative summary of the greatest skill gaps is much less precise,<sup>22</sup> but it shows that while socio-emotional skills are the most frequently listed skill set among the top five skills gaps, technical skills are the most pressing skills gap (Table 5, bottom panel).<sup>23</sup> Fifty percent of the studies report that employers identified a technical skill as the top skills gap, including such skills as professional skills, job-specific skills, technical skills, and work experience. While we have classified all these as “technical”, several likely include all four of our skills sets. For example, “professional skills” or “work experience” may include knowledge of specific equipment (technical), working with others (socioemotional), the ability to resolve problems (higher-order cognitive), and basic math for operating the equipment (basic cognitive).

Gaps in socio-emotional skills and higher-order cognitive skills dominate the second through fifth most lacking types of skills. Basic cognitive skills are barely mentioned as an important skill gap when aggregating across countries; this may suggest that, workers’ dominance of basic numeracy and literacy are adequate for employers in our sample or that other skills gaps are more noticeable to employers.

# **4.1  Global Trends**

We begin by exploring results of two studies that interview employers across the world. Both studies draw from developed and developing countries in most regions. The results reviewed in this Section IV are summarized in Table 6.

Globally, socio-emotional skills are most important to employers. Mourshed, Farell and Barton (2012) survey employers in nine countries<sup>24</sup> and asks them to rate, on a scale of one to ten (low to high) the importance of 13 pre-determined skills.<sup>25</sup> Eighty percent rank work ethic or teamwork as the top 22 Unlike in the sample asking about the most important skills, the data on key skill gaps is disaggregated across skill level and type of industry in many of the studies. The studies present the share of employers that state that skills is their greatest skill gap, conditional on a skill level or on an industry. Since we do not know the share of the labor force in each of these categories, we cannot appropriately weight the responses. Thus, we make a very general assumption that the labor force is equally distributed across these categories and we take a simple average across skill level or industry. A further complication is that 20 percent of the sample of 16 are studies from the UK which used very similar survey instruments. Thus, the UK results may be overweighted in the small sample. 23 The studies included in the aggregate gaps analysis are Mourshed, Farell and Barton (2012), Manpower (2010), CBI (2012), UKCES (2012), Learning and Skills Council (2008), IFC (2010), diGropello (2010), diGropello (2011), World Bank (2008), TCCI (2010), Close (2012), Balcar (2012), Rutkowski (2010), Arnhold et al. (2011), World Bank (2012), and Vasiliev (2013).

> 24 Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UK, US.  2832 employers interviewed. 25 The skills in the survey are: English proficiency, basic math, written communication, oral communication, local language, problem-solving (cognitive skills), computer literacy, hands-on training in discipline, theoretical training in discipline (technical skills), work ethic, teamwork, leadership, and creativity (socio-emotional).

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