Leiden, Netherlands, 9 December 2025 – As digitalisation accelerates across Europe’s workplaces, vocational education systems are racing to adapt. A new SkiLMeeT research paper finds that training curricula for non-university professions have been steadily updated over the past decades to include more digital and social skills and fewer routine tasks. The changes boost job prospects for younger workers but raise the risk of skill obsolescence and wage decline for older employees.
In Expertise at Work: New Technologies, New Skills, and Worker Impacts, researchers analyse how Germany’s vocational training curricula evolved between 1971 and 2021 in response to major technological shifts, combining this with detailed employer – employee data. The study focuses on workers in middle- and lower-paid occupations, who make up around 70% of the German workforce and are in the forefront of digitalisation and automation.
The paper finds that training curricula in these occupations have increasingly emphasised software use, digital tools and interpersonal and teamwork skills, while the repetitive, routine activities have been scaled back.
These changes translate into tangible labour market gains for new cohorts. Young workers who complete training after curricula are modernised earn on average about 3.3% higher wages in the first years of their careers, with gains rising to around 5.5% in occupations where updates are closely linked to new technologies. They are also more likely to remain in the occupation they trained for and gradually move into somewhat better-paying firms.
“At the point where new technologies enter the workplace, they also change what people need to learn,” said Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage of Utrecht University and ZEW. “Our findings show that updating the content of vocational training helps new labour market entrants benefit from technological change rather than be displaced by it.”
However, the study also highlights a growing divide within occupations. Older workers who trained under previous curricula and stay in the same jobs increasingly compete with “new-skilled” colleagues whose qualifications are better aligned with current employers’ needs. The report finds that the oldest workers, aged 55 to 65, can see their wages fall by up to around 10% in the years after a curriculum update, while younger incumbents often respond by changing job or sector.
“We see a tale of two generations sharing the same occupation,” Zierahn-Weilage adds. “For younger workers, updated training opens doors; for older workers, the same technological shifts can close them unless they get real opportunities to refresh their skills.”
The authors conclude that curriculum reform is a powerful tool for making labour markets more resilient, but that it must be complemented by inclusive lifelong learning policies.
Anna Salomons, Cäcilia vom Baur, and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage (2025). Expertise at Work: New Technologies, New Skills, and Worker Impacts, SkiLMeeT Deliverable 2.6.
Read the paper here.
