Lecture 5: Skills and Expertise

Major Messages
 Skill is a significant component of work, but it is complex
- Hard to define, measure and assess trends
 Socially constructed and contested
- People help create definitions of skill
o Who is skillful? What skills are most important?
- Shaped by ideology and social values
 Skill trends are debated
- But, contradictory trends of skill increase and skills decrease (underemployment are
both evident)
o People in jobs that aren’t using the skills they have

Why Important?
 Work that requires skill enhances sense of mastery, self-esteem, pride and status
 Skilled work seen as more fulfilling
 Work identified as requiring skill pays better
 Skill is often linked with autonomy

Theoretical Predictions
 Foundation is due to Adam Smith (1770s)
- Division of labour, technology and repetition narrows skill but enhances it
o Leads to more productivity
- Smith believes workers are enhanced in the modern era
 Marx (1860s) – use technology to take skill away from the job
- Organizational change to produce more with less-skilled workers
- Skilled workers are more expensive workers
o Takes longer to train them
 Weber – skill change as inevitable with the growth of capitalistic society
- Skilled workers are replaced by semiskilled workers
o They require training but more narrow
- Specialists in narrow areas

The ‘Knowledge Economy’

 Education, knowledge and skill are prized, rewarded and essential for economic survival
- Economy needs knowledge workers
o They must be learning and constantly adapting
- If you don’t have knowledge, you will be left behind in the economy
o Knowledge essential to economic and social value
 Job growth in areas related to working with people
 Trends are contradictory for job growth at low and high ends of economy
- Jobs in retail, homecare, cleaning  regarded as less skilled
 - Any job with technology = high skilled jobs

What is Skill?
 Dictionary: an ability to do something well, based on one’s knowledge and practice
 Generally, more accurate to speak of SKILLS
- Example: manual, social, critical-analytical skills
 Hard skills: more technical in nature
 Soft Skills: more social, interpersonal skills
 Other categories include: cognitive, creative, technical
 Autonomy: also, a component of skill for many
- The independence or freedom to utilize one’s knowledge and experience
- Workers may possess many skills, but if they do not have the autonomy to use their
skills in the conduct of their work, then their ability to exercise skill is limited
 Tacit skills: emerge when one is familiar with work practices, cultures and technology
- The right touch to make a piece of technology work effectively
- The right phrase to win over a client
- Skills built through experience

What is Knowledge?
 Dictionary definition: familiarity with a branch of learning, or a set of experiences, as
well as awareness of facts, principles or a body of evidence
 Component of skill
 Acquire through learning and experience (on or off the job)
 Knowledge is stemming from education, or more informal learning
 Prioritize some forms of knowledge over others
- Example: Western knowledge

Indigenous Knowledges
 Tend not to recognize of knowledge

What is Expertise?
 Special skill, knowledge or judgement
- The skill and knowledge claimed by experts
 Sociology of Expertise – emerging
- Expertise is a social construction shaped by social interaction and networks
- Focuses on organizational contexts and institutional arrangements surrounding the
exercise of expertise

Skills, Expertise and Education

 Connected to education, but not fully
- All can be acquired through formal education and informal learning (practical
experience)
 Educational institutions shapes the acquisition and exercise of expertise
Measuring Skill
 Skill is socially constructed, and therefore hard to measure and assess
 Our cultural understandings about what is worthwhile and important tend to get in the
way
 We tend to prioritize some over others, and we might fail to recognize skills when we
see them
 May confuse acquired skill with natural talent
- For example: an artist
 Skill is also a product of social campaigns and social closure
 Evidence about the gendering of competence
- People assess skills of men higher than women
- Similar trends occur by race and ethnicity
o Minority women in medicine highlight their competence, credentials and
toughness are frequently questioned
o Male job applicants perceived to be gay were less likely to receive job offers
when the job called for assertiveness
o Immigrant workers skills and training often not recognized in the Canadian
labour market

Education as a Measure of Skill

 Common way of measuring skill is via education
- These are proxy measures
- Don’t assess how much workers know or how well they execute their tasks
 Problems?
- Some skills are acquired through informal learning, practical experience and on the
job
o Employers require high educational credentials from workers despite the lack
of any significant change in the education required to do the job
- Education may not actually reflect skill used or required on the job
o Just because we have a degree doesn’t mean we are in a job where we use
one

3 Relevant Concepts to Keep in Mind

 Credential Inflation – education required to do jobs is increasing
- Characteristic of labour market
- Employers will take the most educated people for the job
o A degree may be taken as something else
 Dependability and stability
 Underemployment – workers have more skills than their job demand
 Over qualification – workers have more qualifications (education) than their jobs
required
- Have masters when only needed a bachelors degree
Other Measure of Skill
 Looking at the job itself
- What skills are required in a job
- Many job classification systems have skill assessments built into them
 In Canada, we have the NOC (national occupation classification)
- Skills and competences taxonomy
 O*NET – US
 Can be useful, but they have been changing over time to be more inclusive
 They aren’t ideal, more ideal measures will look at the individual within the job
- Who does what varies depending on person and place
- Hard to look at the person
Assess jobs/people to look at trends in skills

Skill Trends
 Deskilling: work is fragmented, simplified and controlled (working requires less skill than
it once did)
- Manual, trade and clerical occupations have experienced deskilling
o Clerical work is a routine occupation done by women
o Also, known as a “dead-end job”
- Areas of law (ex. Preparing wills) can now be done by less skilled assistants or the
consumers themselves
- Studies that compare today’s workers to the craftsmen of the past are likely to find
evidence of deskilling
 Skill upgrading: work requires more skill than it once did
- Studies that compare today’s workforce to the lower-educated manufacturing and
service sector worker of 50 years ago are likely to find more evidence of skill
upgrading

Debates:
 Braverman: control of work is increasingly being removed from worker
- Thought workers are becoming more controlled in work
- Two trends: deskilling and skill polarization
 Bell: labour market change with the expansion of the service economy leads to skill
upgrading
- More employment in jobs requiring skill
 Today, service sector is associated with skill polarization (distribution is bifurcated)
 Knowledge economy argument – technologic change makes the workforce more
educated
- Deskilling and skill-upgrading are happening simultaneously
o This causes greater social inequality
o Those with technological skills may be the only ones lucky enough to hold
steady, well-paying employment
 - Some believe there are enough skilled jobs to go around
o Why Canada implements selective immigration policies

Historical Evidence
 Professions: raising training length to reduce number of practitioners, increase status
 Trades: raise training length to reduce entry, increase bargaining power
 Organized workers better able to define work as skilled
- Unorganized and less powerful workers are not as successful
 Hard to tell sometimes whether skill changes are real or apparent
- Especially when looking only at education

Empirical Findings
 Evidence from a variety of jobs
 Skill trades, clerical work, computer programming
- Became more routine over time
- Job growth over time though
 Contradictory info for autonomy
- Conducted surveys, asking workers to which extent they can plan their own work
(having own autonomy) – based on Livingston’s find
o Upper managers can, but less of a third can plan their own in service workers
o This trend has gone down, but service and industrial workers trends have
gone up
 Upper managers still have more autonomy but theirs have gone down
 Livingston suggests counter to the polarization thesis
- Managers and workers are closer than before

Story of Skill Change

 Focusing on deskilling and skill upgrading is not helpful – need to focus on skill changes
- Not enough information
 Registered nurses – their work has changed a lot
- Nurses have expressed a loss of skill
o More computer planning than patient care
o Managing the work of others
o Losing some skills, but acquiring others so it’s a skill shift

Story of Skill Mismatches

 People not using post-secondary education in the workforce
- 45% of Canadian workers are over-qualified
 Our skills are going faster than the jobs are
- Feeling of underemployed
- 35% of Canadian workers report they are underemployed (have more skill than they
use)
 At the same time, policy reports skill shortages
 - Immigrant policies are to recruit the skills we are missing
 Canadian labour force is among the most education in the world
- May be oversupply of educated workers

Future Trends?
 Hard to predict
 Technological change will result in more skill or less skill
- Depends on how it is represented
 Potential for artificial intelligence to replace both skill/less skilled workers

Who is Skilled?
 Look at distribution of skill – via different industry
 High skill: business and public services, high technology
 Semi-skilled: manufacturing, some technical jobs
 Low-skilled: food services, personal services, recreation and accommodation
- Sometimes these jobs require skill whether based on experience of education
o Not valued
 Age affects perception of skill
- Old and young are discounted
o Young in less-skilled jobs, old seen to lack skill (seem to be out of date)
- People out of university start at entry level jobs
o Moving up the ladder to a job where you use your skills
- Middle ages appear more skilled
 There is no recent research on gender and skill
- Men would predominate in high skill, whereas women in middle skilled jobs
o Increase of women in high status professions and management
o Gender balance
- Similar levels of education with others, they may be placed in jobs that don’t pay as
much and where they don’t use their skills as much
 Race: evidence workers of colour have skills downgraded
 Immigrants: lower returns to education
- Skills and credentials sometimes not recognized
 Engineering profession survey where their education/skill is the same
- Less women than men participate in decision-making
- Knowledge they exercise on the job very complex – women less likely to agree with
this
- More clear differences (matter of sample size too)
o Sizeable difference
o Working hours, decision-making, planning own work and complex knowledge
– racial majority workers are advantaged

Skills and Training

 Skills crucial to economic success
  In Canada, a lot of skills and training, we are expected to get on their own or through
formal education
 People learn after post-secondary school
- Example: take courses
 Employers expect us to learn on our time
- Less likely to allow employees to learn on the job
 Some employers train, whereas most don’t
- Most argue it’s a waste of time and money
- Better to hire those who are already trained

What Does This Mean for Skill Acquisition?

 If workers must learn on their own, how do their skills change?
 Most learn on their own time, may spend lunch hour on the internet trying to learn or
review things on their own time
- Informal learning stretching into their own hours
 Increase emphasis on learning quickly
- Need to do a task on a deadline
- A lot of engineers learn via google
- Very superficial – learn just enough to complete the task, then they are onto the
next task
 What is the impact on technology?
- Technology can replace workers, but it can also help workers become more skilled
- The overall message – technology can increase or decrease skills
o Impact depends on how it is implemented
- Deskilling easier when products are standardized
- Products are unstandardized in upgrading
o Still want creativity because they need to change all the time
o Technology produces information that only a skilled worker can interpret

Expertise
 Emerging interest because there is a duality
- It’s increasing with advanced division of labour and growing specializations
o Could take too long to learn everything so less people who specialize now
 Live in an information age
- May rely on experts
- Some much information, experts can help us interpret it
- Separate the good/accurate information from the bad
 Leads to backlash
- Information on climate change, doctor’s advice
- We question them
- We live in an age where expertise is valued and dismissed
o So much information out there, it’s hard to know who to believe
 o If you have a health problem, are you going to seek advice from a doctor, a
nurse, a naturopathy, will you go online?
 Expertise is a social construction hence subject to social contestation
- Choice becomes about our values and politics
- If anti-medicine, you go to an alternate healer
- Personal experience of someone we know may be more compelling than someone
we don’t know

Challenges to Expertise
 Expertise by crowd: likes and popularity are a way of judging effectiveness of advice
 We rely on likes to make assessments on other social things
- Example: what we restaurant we go to/what movie we see
 We experience a crisis on expertise
- Links this crisis to 2 trends:
- Scientization of politics
o Increasing reliance on science in policy making in the mid-to-late 20 th century
o Led to concern that ‘experts’ had too much sway
- Politicization of science
o Politicians efforts to alter science to meet politic agenda
o Points to research (STATS CANADA), these groups are going to assess the
Canadian population so we can have more policies
- Hard to tell difference politics based on science and science based on politics
- Leads to a disrespect to expertise
 Many are cynical about politics, and the more science is linked to politics, the worse it
gets
- Government polices to reduce funding for experts and institutions that house them
- Impact on crisis of expertise
o Rejection and reduction of funding

Overall
 Skills tends to be rewarded in the labour market as human capital theories would
suggest
 Not all skills are rewarded to the same extent
 Skill trends are complex and variable
 Expertise alternately valued and dismissed