The Future of Work – Job Transition Pathway Optimization Model for reskilling and upskilling

As the types of skills needed in the labour market change rapidly, individual workers will have to engage in life-long learning if they are to achieve fulfilling and rewarding careers. For companies, reskilling and upskilling strategies will be critical if they are to find the talent they need and to contribute to socially responsible approaches to the future of work. For policy-makers, reskilling and retraining the existing workforce are essential levers to fuel future economic growth, enhance societal resilience in the face of technological change and pave the way for future-ready education systems for the next generation of workers.

Yet while there has been much forecasting on transformations in labour markets, few practical approaches exist to identifying reskilling and job transition opportunities. Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All provides a valuable new tool that will help individual workers, companies, and governments to prioritize their actions and investments. Using big data analytics of online job postings, the methodology in this report demonstrates the power of a data-driven approach to discover reskilling pathways and job transition opportunities. The methodology can be applied to a variety of taxonomies of job requirements and sources of data.

Job Transition Pathway Optimization Model

Viable and Desirable Job Transitions

Condition 1: Similarity scores between jobs
are suf ciently high

Assessing viable job transition opportunities requires an understanding of the requirements necessary to perform a given job and an ability to compare these requirements to the requirements of another job. The requirements of a job fall into a number of categories:
— Work activities: The range of tasks that need to be accomplished within a job role.
— Knowledge: Knowledge is the body of facts, principles, theories, and practices that acts as a foundation for skills.
— Skills: Skills are used to apply knowledge to complete tasks.
» Cross-functional skills: Common, non-specialized skills required by job applicants to be considered for a role (applicable to broad categories of jobs).
» Specialized skills: Skills particular to an industry or a job that are not easily transferable. For the purpose of refining the requirements of a job in the calculations used in this report, we separate out software skills (the use, design, maintenance and repair of different types of software).
— Abilities: The range of physical and cognitive capabilities that are required to perform a job role.
— Education: Education is a formal mechanism for acquiring skills and knowledge.
— Work and Job Family Experience: Experience plays a crucial role in forming and improving skills to apply a given knowledge.

Condition 2: Job transition does not require huge leaps in education and experience

When assessing job transitions, similarity scores are the main but not the only way of assessing viable job paths. Other elements that we take into account are the level of education (i.e. the formal mechanism for acquiring skills and knowledge) required and the level of experience (i.e. forming and improving skills to apply a given knowledge) required, both as measured in years.

Condition 3: Job transition opportunity involves moving to target jobs that are not expected to decline in number

Assessing viable job transition options requires taking into account the long-term sustainability of these job transition moves. Figures on current employment and expected employment per job reveal which jobs might present viable employment options for workers in the future and which jobs are expected to decline in number. In this report, we use data on employment in 2016
and expected employment in 2026 from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Condition 4: Job transition opportunity leads to a level of wage continuity (or increase) that allows individuals to maintain (or improve) their present standard of living

When assessing opportunities for job transitions, one of the
key desirable conditions is that living standards of the individual do not decrease after the transition to the new job. This is best assessed by the comparison of wage levels between the starting and subsequent job, and the preference is for this to remain stable or increase after the job transition.

The leadership lens perspective utilizes a job transition model, based on the viability and desirability conditions set out above, to simulate job movements using a Linear Programming Model that maximizes the value of a utility function and is restricted by a certain set of constraints.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Towards a Reskilling Revolution | World Economic Forum