The new world of work

In a paper called Racing With and Against the Machine: Changes in Occupational Skill Composition in an Era of Rapid Technological Advance, Frank MacCrory, George Westerman and Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School and Yousef Alhammadi of the Masdar Institute studied the U.S. governments O*NET database of occupational skill requirements in 2006 and 2014 and analyzed the types of skills that jobs required in both years. Their paper was named the best conference paper at the 2014 International Conference on Information Systems. The researchers found that there were significant changes in skill requirements over the 2006-2014 time period. As computers take over more routine work, jobs involve less supervision of people (since more and more people are, in effect, supervising machines rather than humans). For instance, the researchers note that in the past, an architect might have supervised draftsmen; today's architects instead work with CAD software. The authors advise that, given the extremely rapid progress taking place in digital technologies, people in all lines of work should strive to be flexible about acquiring new skills and even about changing their occupations