Skill Disruption Index – The key skills in the average job have changed 37% in five years

The key skills in the average job have changed 37% in five years. Track the change with our new Skill Disruption Index.

Based on analysis of more than 15 million job postings, this research demonstrates that the top 20 skills requested for the average job in the US have changed in the last five years, some becoming more in demand, some less. One in five of these skills is entirely new to their occupation since 2016. This means that existing jobs and the jobs being recruited for, are changing quickly. How can employers and workers keep up with that pace of change? This report identifies how 680 occupations are changing and offers practical advice for employers, workers, educators, and governments on how to keep up with change.

Emsi Burning Glass scans millions of job postings in the US every day and analyzes them using artificial intelligence technologies. The Skill Disruption Index is created by drawing on data sourced from online job postings between 2016 and 2021. The method examines current skill requests as well as their evolution over time. In each year, we looked at the proportion of each job that requires a skill and then tracked that skill to see how the proportion changed over time.

The pace of change has accelerated such that jobs are more disrupted today than ever before: we consider this period of time to be the Great Disruption, a workforce phenomenon that exists alongside the Great Resignation and the Great Recalibration and likewise demands swift and thoughtful action by employers and other stakeholders. Of course, not every job is getting disrupted uniformly – to the same degree, at the same rate, in the same way. Certain sectors (finance; design, media, and writing; business management and operations; HR; IT) have changed faster than others. The jobs that have changed the least are physical occupations, such as laborer/warehouse worker, packager, janitor/cleaner, tractor/trailer truck driver, and shipping/receiving clerk.

We also divided the jobs into quartiles to help summarize how intense skill change has been along the whole set of occupations (see Exhibit 1):

In the top quartile of occupations—the 25% of jobs with the highest SDIs—we saw the most dramatic change: almost 80% of the top 20 skills are either new or have in- creased or decreased in importance. Examples of jobs in this category: accounting supervisor, advertising/promo- tions manager, marketing assistant/associate, software developer/engineer, solar engineer.

By contrast, jobs in the bottom quartile have changed the least at less than 15%. Many of these are physical occupations. Examples: laborer/warehouse worker, pack- ager, janitor/cleaner, tractor/trailer truck driver, shipping/ receiving clerk.

In reviewing the five-year data, we detected an acceleration in the pace of change. Nearly three-quarters of jobs changed more from 2019 through 2021 (during which time the compound annual growth rate was 22%) than they did from 2016 through 2018 (19%).
We attribute this increase during our review period to the pandemic, which forced businesses to rethink operations and people in all kinds of occupations to embrace new ways of working and new skills. The pandemic has shown how quickly organizations can adapt to a crisis—and how quickly that impacts their workforce.

Looking at the data across job families reveals four big trends in skill change
• Digital skills in nondigital occupations • Soft skills in digital occupations
• Visual communication
• Social media skills

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @  Speed of Skill Change – Emsi