Harvard Business Review – Nicole Torres
“As machines increasingly perform complex tasks once thought to be safely reserved for humans, the question has become harder to shrug off: What jobs will be left for people? A new NBER working paper suggests it’ll be those that require strong social skills — which it defines as the ability to work with others — something that has proven to be much more difficult to automate. “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” shows that nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations that are relatively social skill-intensive — and it argues that high-skilled, hard-to-automate jobs will increasingly demand social adeptness….jobs involving a lot of math, but less social interaction, have shrunk in terms of total share of the U.S. labor force over the past three decades. So it still pays to be good at math in today’s labor market, but it’s often no longer enough… it’s not too early to think about whether people are learning the right skills they’ll need to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce.”(more)