In order to know what the quality of employment is for salaried employees in Colombia, this study proposes a measurement to know it based on the construction of an Employment Quality Index (EQI) with five dimensions and ad hoc weightings: working conditions that refers to the intrinsic quality of work and contemplates underemployment due to insufficient hours, qualification and training that concerns opportunities for improvement, wage benefits, social protection, and combination of work and daily life that captures the compatibility of work with family life.The proposal for this index uses an objective approach to job quality, that is, it aims to obtain measures of job quality using job attributes, excluding the personal circumstances of the worker and the labor market; it goes beyond how important emotions and perceptions are as measures of workers' well-being, in addition to the fact that these are not constitutive of job quality because they do not necessarily correspond to the satisfaction of needs (Arranz et al., 2016). Data from the Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares are used and the methodology followed is that of Arranz et al. (2016) in a similar study they conducted for the Spanish labor market, in which, to recode the variables, each component and subcomponent is assigned a weight and recoded with a logical metric of how desirable each attribute is in terms of quality. The main finding in the results of the synthetic index is that salaried employees in Colombia have an average job quality of 58.3 points for 2019 and 58.6 points for 2020, with a year-on-year increase of 0.3 points which means a very slight improvement from one year to another in this overall index. This result could evidence the work in public policy that has been done recently to improve working conditions, since all previous measurements that have been made for Colombia have been characterized by low job quality. However, it is not enough to result in a significant improvement in the quality of employment for male and female workers.The results obtained provide a recent and/or updated measurement of job quality in Colombia for 2019 and 2020. Likewise, this index is simple, understandable and comparable, can be measured over a long period of time, can be updated annually, allows comparison between groups of employees, has national coverage and measures the quality of employment at the urban and rural levels.At the end of the document there is a section with the conclusions of this study and a discussion on the limitations of this quality indicator, with the purpose of informing future research or contributing to the development of the same indicator.
