Educational (Mis)match and skill utilization in Germany: Assessing the role of worker and job characteristics

Journal for Labour Market Research

Table 8 Categorization of task items to ALM task groups for 2006 cross-sectional analysis

Task group	Typical level of qualification	Assumed labor market demand	Item in BIBB/BauA 2006
Non-routine cognitive, analytical	High	Increasing	F310, F311, F313, F318
Non-routine cognitive, interactive	High	Increasing	F312, F314
Routine cognitive	Medium	Falling	F307, F308
Routine manual	Medium/low	Falling	F303, F304, F305, F306
Non-routine manual	Low	Constant/increasing	F315, F316, F317

Alignments are initially based on a principal component analysis solution (for the study of task change in Germany over the period 1979 to 2006 see Rohrbach-Schmidt and Tiemann 2011). The variables of the first of the four factors are subsequently aligned to the analytical and interactive sub-categories, respectively. Items F309 and F319a are not included in the index because of their high loadings on more than one factor. The question posed in 2006 was ‘how often do the following activities (random order) occur at work - frequently, sometimes, never’. The index is the worker’s sum of point values (2006: frequently = 1, sometimes = 0.5, never = 0; divided by the total number of activities in the respective task group