The impact of digitization on the Turkish manufacturing industry labor market: A qualitative analysis of firm views

Today, Industry 4.0 is promoted as an active digitalization movement. Many labour¬intensive jobs and the way they are done are changing with digital transformation. The main purpose is to carry out every stage of production with digital systems. The increasing digitalization and automation phenomenon in economic activities has created new types of jobs and employment and forced the skill requirements of the workforce to change. Before, robotization in production processes has been accepted as an indicator of the substitutability of labour with capital since human beings have an expensive and error- prone structure in production processes. Therefore, in today's world, to avoid being pushed out of the workforce, human beings are expected to have superior qualifications than a machine used in production. On the other hand, with the development of digitalization in production technologies, it can be said that the function has changed rather than decreased in the place of labour in production. In this respect, the employment opportunities for those who adapt to the new production technology can increase even more. In the study, to determine the factors affecting the employment decision of professionals in the labour market in the digitalization period that came with Industry 4.0, interviews were conducted with companies in the manufacturing sector, qualitative analysis was made on the data obtained from the interviews, and the effects of digitalization on the Turkish labour market and policies that could be developed were discussed.