Question

Employment has been rising faster in occupations requiring more preparation. As of 2015, some 83 million people worked in jobs that require an average or above average level of preparation (including education, experience and job training), up from 49 million in 1980-a 68% increase. This was more than double the 31% rise in employment in positions requiring a below average level of job preparation. Employment in these jobs increased from 50 million to 65 million over the same time period 2 Employment and wages have increased most in occupations that require higher social or analytical skills. While employment grew by 50% over all occupations from 1980 to 2015. this growth was much higher among jobs that require average or above average social skills (83%), such as interpersonal, management and communication skills, and those that require higher levels of analytical skills (77%), such as critical thinking and computer skills. Meanwhile, employment is up by only 18% in occupations depending more on physical skills such as manual labor, machinery operation or tool manipulation.

Summary

Answer 1

Traditionally, the skill level that were used to assess the workers was totally based on two characteristics. These were production workers and non production workers. However, overtime this classification has became limited to act as per the skill requirement. The recent decades have witnessed a huge technological change in both industrial and service sector. Now, the workplaces operate under latest computer technologies which has led to change in the skill requirements. Due to this, this era has also witnessed a major increase in supply of educated workers.This shift has resulted in increase in the level of earnings. Education and training is now used as an input that can provide higher level of returns in future.

In addition to this , the growing competition has raised the demand of analytical skills among the workers. Analytical skills can be defined as the ability of workers to think, reason and solve the day to day problems at the workplace. The analytical skills play a major role in deciding about how an individual handles different situations at the workplace. Though there is limited substitution between analytical and communication skills. However, it is the combination of education and analytical skills that define the perfect skill requirement at the workplace.The workers possessing these skills have a comparative advantage over all other workers.The recent decades have witnessed  that with increase of use of computerization, there is greater increase in the demand of analytical skills.