Political economists and labour sociologists alike have studied how the skill specificity of workers can be explained, as it significantly affects workers’ performance. However, the emergence of the gig economy may substantially change skill hiring and specificity in online labour markets because gig workers do not need formal educational credentials to offer their services. Instead, skills are “unbundled” from occupations, and platforms provide alternative ways to signal competencies, for example, via their rating and review systems. To shed light on the applicability of existing theories to explain the skill profiles of gig workers, we examine what predicts the skills hired in the online gig economy. Based on multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses of 2336 gig worker profiles, we show that—as in traditional labour markets—gig workers with a vocational degree and longer online work experience are hired for more specific skills. However, national labour market institutions and educational systems affect the gig workers’ skill specificity in the opposite direction than in traditional labour markets. Our findings thus suggest that online gig platforms allow workers to overcome restrictions imposed by national institutions as they are hired for those skills in the online gig economy that are institutionally less facilitated in their home labour markets.

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高技能在线零工平台的技能特异性：与传统劳动力市场相同吗？

政治经济学家和劳动社会学家都研究了如何解释工人的技能特殊性，因为它显着影响工人的绩效。然而，零工经济的出现可能会极大地改变在线劳动力市场的技能招聘和特殊性，因为零工工人不需要正式的教育证书来提供服务。相反，技能与职业“分离”，平台提供了表明能力的替代方式，例如通过其评级和审查系统。为了阐明现有理论在解释零工工人技能概况方面的适用性，我们研究了预测在线零工经济中雇用的技能的因素。基于对 2336 名零工工人资料的多级序数逻辑回归分析，我们发现，与传统劳动力市场一样，拥有职业学位和较长在线工作经验的零工工人会被聘用以获得更具体的技能。然而，国家劳动力市场机构和教育体系以与传统劳动力市场相反的方向影响零工工人的技能特异性。因此，我们的研究结果表明，在线零工平台使工人能够克服国家机构施加的限制，因为他们是因为在线零工经济中的技能而受雇的，而这些技能在制度上在本国劳动力市场上不太便利。