Digitalization and human capital development

The onset of Fourth Industrial Revolution and its related development of digitization processes has created the need to focus more attention on creating the conditions for the development of adequate human resources skills, on which the pace of innovation depends. The digital transformation of economies has become a global trend, so the need to innovate cannot be ignored if countries want to be competitive in international environment. Therefore, particular governments must respond to this situation and take relevant steps to support these processes. However, the situation in each country is diametrically different. Some of them strive to be leaders in a particular field and systematically support the development of ongoing processes. Others are more indifferent to this situation and their progress is much slower. As in the past, at the time of scientific and technical revolution, this attitude is subsequently reflected in their economic situation. There are also significant differences among EU Member States, despite the fact that the EU is trying to set certain development parameters that should be achieved in each country. The goal of this paper is to theoretically define what changes are taking place as a result of digitization, how the current situation has contributed to those changes, and which key areas should be given priority within each country. In addition, our goal is to find out how the population in Slovak Republic is developing in terms of the achieved level of education, what share of expenditures from GDP goes to education area and research and development support, as well as what is the average amount of these expenditures per capita, and thus to point out to the possible reasons of lagging innovation and modernization capacity of Slovak Republic. The method of descriptive statistics, time series analysis as well as the method of synthesis to formulate conclusions were used.