This paper examines whether workers’ earnings after trade shocks depend on workers’ skill specificity. We construct a measure for occupational specificity using task information from an official dataset for career guidance and merge this information to a large register dataset from Germany. We find that rising import competition resulted in larger earnings losses for workers with specific skills than for those with general skills, but workers with specific skills profited more from increasing exports. On average, we even find larger positive net effects for workers with specific skills, but they experience lager earnings inequality in response to increasing international trade.