Conference Program

The aim is to develop a political economy framework to analyze how self-employment interacts with lifelong learning under the twin digital and green transition. In human capital theory, education and training are forward-looking investments undertaken when expected returns exceed costs (Becker, 1964). For self-employed workers, this logic is particularly strong since they directly internalize productivity gains and bear the full consequences of skill obsolescence, while also facing higher economic risk. As documented by OECD (2021), self-employed individuals typically experience weaker access to social protection, higher income volatility and greater exposure to economic shocks compared to standard employees. In principle, such exposure should reinforce incentives for continuous training, as skill upgrading can increase income and provide insurance against market uncertainty. Lifelong learning becomes essential to preserve employability and reduce vulnerability to technological and regulatory change.

The acceleration of digitalization and the expansion of green regulatory frameworks increase technological complexity and compliance requirements (European Commission, 2022). Digital transformation intensifies demand for advanced skills while accelerating their obsolescence, in line with skill-biased technological change (Acemoglu and Autor, 2011). Simultaneously, the green transition introduces new environmental standards and reporting obligations that reshape market participation. For self-employed workers, who lack internal organizational buffers, these shifts amplify technological and regulatory risks, making continuous skill updating essential for compliance and access to sustainability-oriented value chains. Yet evidence shows that the self-employed engage less in formal training than employees (Eurofound, 2024).

Under these conditions, lifelong learning shifts from a discretionary productivity-enhancing investment to a structural condition. By strengthening cognitive, informational and relational competences, lifelong learning enhances what the capability approach defines as effective opportunities for participation, that is, the conversion of formal rights into real capacities to engage in collective and democratic processes (Bonvin, Laruffa & Rosenstein, 2018). Since economic independence underpins civic participation (Bonvin and Laruffa, 2022), these dynamics extend beyond the labour market, making lifelong learning a condition for both economic resilience and democratic agency.

The framework developed in this paper highlights that while highly skilled and well-positioned autonomous professionals may leverage digital and green transformations to reposition themselves in higher value-added segments, more vulnerable self-employed workers may struggle to meet escalating competence and compliance thresholds. Rather than uniformly increasing training participation, the twin transition may induce selective skill upgrading among advantaged groups and market exit among others, contributing to growing segmentation. A life-course perspective suggests that the returns and risks of lifelong learning and self-employment vary across career stages, producing age-specific patterns in training and entrepreneurship (Kautonen, Down & Minniti, 2014; OECD, 2019). As the twin transition raises required competence thresholds, training becomes less a purely private investment and more a form of public infrastructure; without adequate support and quality assurance, unequal access may deepen segmentation and inequality among the self-employed. By combining human capital theory with institutional perspectives and recent comparative evidence, this survey study contributes to the debate on labour market transformation and provides a framework for designing survey research on barriers and drivers of training investment among self-employed workers.