Related papers: When Does it Pay Off to Learn a New Skill? Reveali…
The global workforce is urged to constantly reskill, as technological change favours particular new skills while making others redundant. But which skills are a good investment for workers and firms? As skills are seldomly applied in…
This paper examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) acts as a substitute or complement to human labour, drawing on 12 million online job vacancies from the United States spanning 2018-2023. We adopt a two-pronged approach: first,…
Recent waves of technological transformation are reshaping work in uncertain and hard-to-predict ways. However, jobs at the forefront of the digitizing economy offer an early glimpse of these changes and leave rich activity traces. We…
We investigate the motivation and means through which individuals expand their skill-set by analyzing a survey of applicants from the Facebook Jobs product. Individuals who report being influenced by their networks or local economy are over…
We measure human capital using the self-reported skill sets of nearly 9 million U.S. college graduates from professional profiles on LinkedIn. We aggregate skill strings into 48 clusters of general, occupation-specific, and managerial…
Rapid technological innovation threatens to leave much of the global workforce behind. Today's economy juxtaposes white-hot demand for skilled labor against stagnant employment prospects for workers unprepared to participate in a digital…
Reward-free, unsupervised discovery of skills is an attractive alternative to the bottleneck of hand-designing rewards in environments where task supervision is scarce or expensive. However, current skill pre-training methods, like many RL…
Lifelong learning occurs on timescales ranging from minutes to decades. People can lose themselves in a new skill, practicing for hours until exhausted. And they can pursue mastery over days or decades, perhaps abandoning old skills…
Substantial scholarship has estimated the susceptibility of jobs to automation, but little has examined how job contents evolve in the information age as new technologies substitute for tasks, shifting required skills rather than…
The ability to combine known skills to create new ones may be crucial in the solution of complex reinforcement learning problems that unfold over extended periods. We argue that a robust way of combining skills is to define and manipulate…
Pursuing educational qualifications later in life is an increasingly common phenomenon within OECD countries since technological change and automation continues to drive the evolution of skills needed in many professions. We focus on the…
Modern economies require increasingly diverse and specialized skills, many of which depend on the acquisition of other skills first. Here we analyse US survey data to reveal a nested structure within skill portfolios, where the direction of…
Job security can never be taken for granted, especially in times of rapid, widespread and unexpected social and economic change. These changes can force workers to transition to new jobs. This may be because new technologies emerge or…
The rapid growth of technology and computer science, which has led to a surge in demand for skilled professionals in this field. The skill set required for computer science jobs has evolved rapidly, creating challenges for those already in…
As more individuals consider permanently working from home, the online labor market continues to grow as an alternative working environment. While the flexibility and autonomy of these online gigs attracts many workers, success depends…
When learning a new skill, you take advantage of your preexisting skills and knowledge. For instance, if you are a skilled violinist, you will likely have an easier time learning to play cello. Similarly, when learning a new language you…
Adapting general-purpose language models to new skills is currently an expensive process that must be repeated as new instruction datasets targeting new skills are created, or can cause the models to forget older skills. In this work, we…
Skills are essential for unlocking higher levels of problem solving. A common approach to discovering these skills is to learn ones that reliably reach different states, thus empowering the agent to control its environment. However,…
This study investigates the structural embeddedness of skills in the division of labor. Drawing on O*NET data covering 120 skills across 872 U.S. occupations, we identify three skill communities: general, cognitive, and physical skills.…
Freelance workers must continually acquire new skills to remain competitive in online labor markets, yet they lack the organizational training, mentorship, and infrastructure available to traditional employees. Generative AI-powered tools…