Does intelligent manufacturing increase skilled labour demand? Evidence from Chinese online job postings

Intelligent manufacturing, an emerging technological paradigm that integrates digital technologies with advanced manufacturing, may reshape firms’ labour demand by reorganizing production processes and task structures. Using data on Chinese listed manufacturing firms from 2013 to 2022 and more than nine million online job postings, this paper constructs a corpus of intelligent manufacturing scenarios based on China’s Guidelines for Typical Intelligent Manufacturing Scenarios. We apply natural language processing techniques to match job-posting texts with scenario descriptions and identify firm-level demand for skilled labour related to intelligent manufacturing. Exploiting firms’ staggered designation under the Intelligent Manufacturing Pilot and Demonstration Program, we use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of pilot designation on skilled labour demand. The results show that intelligent manufacturing significantly increases firms’ demand for skilled workers. Mechanism analysis indicates that the effect operates through collaborative innovation and task restructuring: intelligent manufacturing promotes technological recombination, cross-organizational knowledge flows, and knowledge spillovers, while shifting internal task structures from low-skilled routine tasks towards new tasks and organizational governance tasks. The estimated effects are more evident among labour-intensive, non-technology-intensive, and non-capital-intensive firms. The paper provides micro-level evidence on how Industry 4.0 policies and technologies reshape firms’ labour demand.