Chile’s economy is strengthening and wage growth picking up. The country should now address the challenge of improving people’s skills, particularly among women and low-skilled workers, in order to boost productivity, innovation and inclusive growth, according to a new OECD report.
Getting Skills Right: Chile says that Chile has made significant progress in education participation and quality in the past decades but more than one in two adults have poor literacy and numeracy skills, according to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills.
Even university-educated Chileans perform, on average, below the OECD mean for high school graduates. Differences among socio-demographic groups, notably between men and women, by educational attainment and across age groups, are also sharper than in most OECD countries.
The report finds a significant mismatch between the level and type of skills acquired in education and those in demand in the labour market. Skills mismatches are relatively high in Chile, with workers more likely than in other OECD countries to have lower literacy than needed by their jobs and to work in a job unrelated to their area of study.
A skilled workforce will be important to ensure that Chile can innovate and adopt new technologies, according to the report. A better use of skills will help translate higher skills into productivity gains. Boosting skill levels will also foster inclusiveness by helping increase the labour market participation of women and improve job quality for the low-skilled, many of whom work in the informal economy.
The report highlights the importance of quality adult learning to upgrade and maintain the skills of people already in the labour force. It recommends the introduction of an effective system for the recognition of prior learning, to better signal the skills of job applicants and reduce mismatch.
The study also recognises that skills may only be part of the solution for some groups: women’s weak labour force participation in Chile is likely to be strongly related to the difficulty of reconciling work and family life. Better services to support women’s labour market participation would help make the best use of women’s skills.