BASIQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 142 The Labor Market in the Digital Age: A New Perspective on Jobs Carmen-Elena Bănescu 1 , Emilia Țițan 2 and Daniela Manea 3 1)2)3) The Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania E-mail: banescucarmen15@stud.ase.ro; E-mail: emilia.titan@csie.ase.ro E-mail: daniela.manea@csie.ase.ro Please cite this paper as: Bănescu, C.E., Țițan, E. and Manea, D. 2021. The Labor Market in the Digital Age: A New Perspective on Jobs. In: R. Pamfilie, V. Dinu, L. Tăchiciu, D. Pleșea, C. Vasiliu eds. 2021. 7th BASIQ International Conference on New Trends in Sustainable Business and Consumption. Foggia, Italy, 3-5 June 2021. Bucharest: ASE, pp. 142-150 DOI: 10.24818/BASIQ/2021/07/018 Abstract With the advent of new technology, the labor market has undergone many changes. These changes were perceived differently by people and may even be rejected. The fear that technology will replace human labor has persisted in people's identities since the beginning of the third millennium. Researchers are of different opinions. Some believe that technology will harm social welfare, while others argue that technology only helps to advance society. We accept on the one hand that technology can take over some workloads, but we also accept that technology creates new jobs. We also propose another perspective on this ideological conflict. We support the idea of reconfiguring jobs by optimizing tasks. We want to highlight the power that skills have in the hiring decision and what these skills are much desired by employers. The novelty comes from the way we work with new unstructured data sources to extract new insights. For this, we used the indicators "Skills needs" and "Skill penetration rate". These indicators were calculated by the World Bank in partnership with LinkedIn, based on the TD-IDF text mining methodology. To capture changes over time we used relative (chronological) dynamics indices, and to capture differences between skill categories we applied ANOVA analysis. Thus, we showed how the main industries have changed their preferences in terms of the skills that candidates have. We also highlighted how the importance for soft skills, technological skills and disruptive technological skills has increased. Finally, we presented the growing speed of demand for people with skills for new technologies (artificial intelligence, data science, human computer interaction). Keywords job skills, job tasks, job creation, labor market, digital age, industry 4.0 DOI: 10.24818/BASIQ/2021/07/018 Introduction The general fear of society has been, and continues to be, that technology solutions will be able to replace the human workforce (Ford, 2015). This hypothesis on the one hand can be supported, if we consider some jobs in factories that have been fully automated. We can say rather that it was not the work itself that was automated, but the task that had to be accomplished (Frey and Osborne, 2017). Thus, the researchers described the risk of automating the tasks within the workplace. On the other hand, a partial automation of some activities could be beneficial for the quality of life of the employee, for the efficiency of the activity and even to eliminate the operational risk. There are also many jobs that require high complexity and could not be automated by existing technologies. However, technology is quite beneficial for the economy, helping to improve the internal processes of companies, but also building new areas of activity since the 21st century (Tohănean, et al.,2020). We can say that