July 18, 2023

Over a quarter of employed people spend almost all their working time working with a computer or a smartphone

Over a quarter of employed people spend almost all their working time working with a computer or a smartphone

New data from Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, on job skills show that 25.8% of employed people spend all or almost all of their working time working with a computer, tablet or smartphone. For others, this time goes almost entirely to interacting with people from outside the enterprise (15.9%) or with people from the same enterprise (13.9%) and to hard physical work (11.7%).

Clerical support workers (54.2%) and managers (42.8%) in particular spend most of their working time working with a computer or other digital devices.

11.7% of employed people always or almost always perform tasks that require hard physical work: mainly 15-24-year-olds (20.2%) among men, mainly 50-74-year-olds (11.5%) among women.

The jobs in which employed people spend almost all their working time on tasks requiring hard physical effort are mainly found in the occupational categories “Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers” (34.2%), “elementary occupations” (31.4%) and “Craft and related trades workers” (30.5%) and in the sectors “construction” (31.7%), “administrative and support service activities” (24.3%) and “agriculture, forestry and fishery” (23.7%).

It also appears that workers have much less influence over the order and content of their tasks than employees and civil servants. Self-employed workers have by far the highest degree of autonomy.

Furthermore, 13.4% of employed people have a job with a very high degree of repetitiveness and 13.9% have to a large extent tasks precisely described by strict procedures.

Questions on job skills were added to the Labour Force Survey for the first time in 2022 and in all EU Member States. Over 17,800 people aged 15 to 74 who had a job during the reference week or who had left their last job in the last 2 years answered the survey. The results presented here concern only those who had a job during the reference week.

Source: STATBEL
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