Specific Skills and Its Assessment in A New Institutional Context: Discussions, Challenges and Prospects

The search for new drivers of global socio-economic development in the face of a slowdown (partially due to the COVID-19) put the issues of skills development, including institutional solutions of the human capital formation, at the front line. Despite significant progress in understanding the importance of general skills and their contribution to economic growth, professional skills as the pivot of specific human capital are commonly analyzed through the vague categories like formal qualification and years of tenure. The lack of an institutionalized and commonly accepted practice for measuring professional skills restrains research in economics dealing with returns to skills, as well as institutional studies. The present study aims to partially fill this gap by analyzing the discussion about professional skills in broader discourse about skills and systematizing the existing approaches to professional skills’ assessments, as well as by mapping the prospects in the context of emerging digital technologies and institutional change attributed to them. The analysis was conducted on academic papers and reports published in 2013–2020. The research showed that although the number of academic papers focusing on professional skills is high, the discussion (especially, about assessment) is fragmented reflecting industries’ specifics. The mainstream expert discussion on skills and their assessment tends to focus on general skills, overlooking professional skills, with partial exception of certain digital skills. Discussion largely grounds on traditional approaches, which cannot produce scalable and comparable results for further economic analysis. At the same time, new digital assessment tools are not yet widely disseminated. There is a need for further improvement and expansion of traditional skills assessments via exams or tests, alongside with searching for novel approaches to measuring skills acquired and being used on the workplace. This could also contribute to the institutional studies dealing with the research of transformations happened in corporate, national, and international level.