Over the past decade, high-skilled occupations have generally grown strongly, lowskilled occupations somewhat less so, while medium-skilled occupations have declined or stagnated.

In rapidly growing occupations, there was a large surplus of new entrants over retirees in new jobs, for which there were many domestic candidates. But many new immigrants were also hired into these jobs, indicating that domestic sources were not sufficient to satisfy all of the needs. At the same time, new immigrants replaced only a fraction of retiring workers in declining occupations. This suggests that observed and future labour and skill shortages are not a simple function of demographic imbalances in the labour force, but depend significantly on the changing nature of demand for particular skills and the extent to which these can be filled from existing sources of supply.

For some immigrants, low levels of education constrained their occupational choices to low-skilled jobs and for others, the education and work experience earned abroad made them sometimes ill-prepared to compete with the skills of recently graduated young workers and of prime-age workers already having made their way in the labour market. EU migrants more often enter higher skilled occupations than non-EU migrants, but the high-skilled share of entries varies across countries. Finally occupational change over the 2000-10 decade shows a tendency towards a feminisation of high-skilled jobs and a greater presence of women in growing than in declining occupations. There were also proportionally more men in strongly declining occupations. The same pattern was observed for immigrants, whether from EU countries or not.