The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a widespread shift to remote work, reducing the level of face-to-face interaction between workers and changing their modes and patterns of communication. This study tests whether this transformation in production processes has altered the longstanding labour market trend of increasing demand for interpersonal skills. To address this question, we integrate an established skills taxonomy with the text of over 12 million job postings (covering the period from 2015 to 2022) to measure trends in skills demand at the aggregate and occupational levels. We find that since the start of the pandemic there has been a significant and sustained acceleration in the aggregate demand for interpersonal skills. We also find a strong positive association between an occupation’s propensity for remote work and the level of acceleration in interpersonal skills demand for the occupation. Our findings suggest that interpersonal skills continue to grow in importance for employment in the post-pandemic, remote work friendly labour market.

These datasets were created by using proprietary Adzuna Australia job postings data to compute the proportions of job postings that mention different skills. An overview of each dataset is provided below. Full details are provided in the README file. 

Dataset 1: Skill class mentions monthly. 

This dataset provides the proportion of the job postings that mention each skill class (interpersonal, digital, analytical, and manual) in each month. Skill classes were defined using the ESCO taxonomy, as per the manuscript. 

Dataset 2: Level 2 ESCO skill mentions monthly.

This dataset provides the proportion of the job postings that mention each level 2 ESCO skill in each month. 

Dataset 3: Skill class mentions by occupation. 

This dataset provides the proportion of the job postings between July-December 2022 that mention each skill class (interpersonal, digital, analytical, and manual) for each occupation (2-digit ANZSCO). 

R can be used to open the file and generate the outputs in the manuscript.