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Which job skills are most employable?
- claudiulodro 9y ago> A skill could be highly paid, but only useful in a narrow range of jobs, giving you few options if you change your mind about what to do. Makes sense. If you focus on coding there isn't much it applies to (in terms of employment) other than coding for a living or working near coding-related things (CTO, manager, etc.) That being said, accounting also only really applies to a handful of jobs and nobody has ever said being an accountant is risky. Unrelated, but jbreckmckye your email is in the URL.
- ahmadss 9y agoGood catch, re: email in the URL. I'm likely to the blame the sender of the email for including PII in the Google Analytics UTM parameters, which is is a clear violation of GA's terms and best practices [1]. If it's 80000hours.org that sent the email and created the tracking params, then the OP should contact them and hope that they remediate this. [1] - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en
- robertwiblin 9y agoWe'll fix this going forward.
- jbreckmckye 9y agoThank you for bringing that to my attention.
- taormina 9y agoVery click-baity title. The most employable skills for a human to have are the ones that are hardest to automate away.
- makosdv 9y ago>According to this analysis, the most valuable skills could be summed up as “leadership” skills >What are the most valuable combinations of job skills? >David Deming found that the jobs with the greatest growth in employment were those that required both social and mathematical skills. I think these are the key takeaways. STEM is very important, but it appears the market is saying we have a lack of leadership skills, which are not really emphasized in a typical education.
- UK-AL 9y agoLeadership skills are harder to prove. There are some terrible leaders that somehow get into leadership positions
- wcr3 9y agoYou might wanna take the query string off this link...
- alanbernstein 9y ago"Coding" is mechanical. "Judgement and decision making", "Critical thinking", "Complex problem solving", the actually difficult parts of doing long-term programming work, are at the top of the list.
- zeta0134 9y agoI could not agree more. Programming isn't an employable d skill by itself. What you're actually doing for the business is problem solving, and in order to be good at that, you need to have people skills to a certain degree. You listen to the managers, or are otherwise invested in the inner workings of the company. Using those skills of intuition, you gather the business objectives, and then write code to solve those needs in the manner most appropriate to the environment in which you work. Of course, often you're writing more than just code, and will contribute to documentation, and test with your users to gather feedback and improve your solution. Good programmers spend less of their time writing actual code, and much more of their time understanding the problems their code is meant to solve.
- supercoder 9y agoUltimately that's a job for the designers though. The coders job should be to just implement what they're told in a robust performant, but also pragmatic way.
- arvinsim 9y agoThe number of designers learning to code seem to be increasing so it behooves programmers to be familiar with the design part too.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoCoding is not mechanical. Or to say, what do you mean by coding? The ability to write programs that successfully solve problems good judgement and decision making, critical thinking, complex problem solving...it sounds like coding is just a meaningless term without the others.
- ldp01 9y agoMost of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant to make that generalisation. Reaching a basic level of success in employment is way more holistic than these bar charts would indicate. Statements like this are just silly: > "A skill like “judgement” could make you highly employable, but be hard to improve, and so offer poor returns per hour spent learning." How about this for a pretty generic plan: - Know your trade: Understand whatever system you are using in depth. - Understand how you create value within the specific business you are in. - Have an O.K understanding of how your work interacts with others, and be O.K at explaining your understanding to others. - Try to consistently interact with others in good faith and try to score runs for your project/business/whatever. Subjugate your own ego as much as possible and remain friendly when things get hectic.
- im3w1l 9y ago> How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense? You don't. You listen to someone trustworthy vouching for the person having good judgement.
- Qantourisc 9y agoWhich is very likely affected by how much you like/trust the person, as such not an objective way to measure ? So then the employability might just read "how much people like you".
- nine_k 9y agoI may severely dislike certain people but acknowledge their undeniable good judgment. Being reasonably honest, I'll tell as much if asked for a reference. Anything that involves a word like "good" instead of something numeric is hard to objectively measure. But if your aim is not science but hiring, you learn to trust your gut and other unscientific instruments. (Human vision is very much flawed as a scientific instrument, but it helps do complex things nonetheless. Same with human judgment.)
- 9y ago
- aub3bhat 9y ago>As well as looking at income, we rated skills on satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability. Translation: We cooked up data by adding our biases, but since we teamed up with a "data science fellow", thus our findings must scientific! This is worse than the average feel good pop pscyhology that appears in NYtimes. Reminds me of this good bit from an EJMR post: "Any approach that claims to recover the distribution of individual utility parameters from aggregate data based on arbitrary distributional and functional form assumptions is dubious at best,"
- hacker_9 9y agoWow, i don't even.. this is the kind of article that, after several years, is making me wonder if HN is even worth reading anymore.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- paultopia 9y agoThis is a fairly silly list. Consider: "Reading comprehension": at a moderate level that's basically everyone in the industrialized world. At a high level, what are the jobs where this is going to be the skill that makes a difference, as opposed to prior training and learning ability re: the things you've read? Consider: "Management of personnel": in a world in which middle management are the first to be laid off, it's hard not to think that the allegedly high incomes are unstable and/or only for the best performers. Consider: "Service orientation." Uh, like in the service industry? Sure, that's "employable," for a can't-make-rent sense of the term. Generally, the list seemingly fails to take into account the extent to which a skill is already saturated. It's striking, for example, that the top few are skills characteristically developed in advanced degree training in the humanities, law, etc., who haven't, shall way say, had the best few years in the job market lately, due to rampant overproduction...
- sopooneo 9y agoMy experience with reading comprehension is that it is moderate across the board in white collar jobs. But general writing ability is horrific. Almost half of the professionals I have worked with seem unable to put coherent thoughts into words.
- paultopia 9y agoMine too---it's striking that writing is so much lower than reading comprehension. (Maybe that makes some sense, if employers care so little about writing that they routinely hire those who can't do it.)
- nopinsight 9y agoHigh level reading comprehension is certainly beneficial for understanding complex matters and making decisions based on them. Does an average person in industrialized nations have reading skills at the level of a partner at law firms or a successful consultant?
- paultopia 9y ago
- justonepost 9y agoI'm confused. Is having a long blue bar low risk or high risk for automation? Equipment maintenance seems low risk, unless robots start repairing themselves. In which case..
- antonvs 9y agoEquipment maintenance may not be low risk for automation. If you look at modern automation trends in software, a key property is that they rely on throwing things away that don't work, and replacing them with known-good new "instances". The same approach is already used widely for physical goods as well - the "disposable society". It's not difficult to image equipment "maintenance" being automatically performed by replacing major parts, instead of worrying about trying to diagnose and fix precisely what went wrong.
- dilemma 9y agoWhy is the title changed from the original?
- Clubber 9y agoThe two best skills you can have: 1. Be good at your job. 2. Don't be an asshole.
- azangru 9y ago"Coding isn't one," they say in the title — but programming is there on the diagram (right above mathematics). Is there a difference between programming and coding?
- osrec 9y agoPerhaps I have been unlucky in my past jobs, but the single most important thing that allowed me to be successful in my investment banking career was bowing down to my boss's ego, even when he/she was wrong. A few of my colleagues had perfected this "skill", and got promoted super quick. Talent, ability and reliability are all okay, but giving your interviewer/boss the impression that you will never show them up seems to make you super employable! I remember a particular interview, where me and my then boss were looking to hire a new market risk guy. The first guy we interviewed was super talented, and actually quite a nice guy - I thought he deserved the job - he even corrected our misunderstandings on a newish risk model. The second guy we interviewed, not so great. My boss gave it to the second guy; when I asked him why, he fobbed me off with a vague response, but it was clear to me that he felt threatened. Had the first guy acted a bit more average in the interview and pandered to my boss's ego, he would have almost certainly got the job. Personally, I have also had much more success in interviews/jobs by trying to be distinctly average. Eventually I was sick of playing that game so I started my own company and never looked back!
- jarsin 9y agoI have come to see this sort of thing as a symptom of the extreme advantage incumbents have in the marketplace. This is why most companies become straight up high palace drama. They can do this because they rule the kingdom and everyone will pay their tax (do business with them) like it or not. If you threaten the king and show you are smarter you are toast and will be killed. Every established business I have worked with is like this.
- osrec 9y agoVery true - it's really quite annoying and unnecessary. Funnily enough, even when ex-employees from such firms establish a start up, much of this culture comes with them. I know I had elements of it engrained in my psyche, much to my detriment. It took a good 6 months to train myself to not feel threatened by my own employees. I like to think I'm mostly rid of this mentality now and can celebrate/cultivate the strengths of my team!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- user5994461 9y agoCheapness. Companies have limited money and budget, especially the small and medium ones. When choosing between candidates, the ones who is cheaper is much more likely to be given the advantage.
- anotheryou 9y agoIs there many leadership positions that do not benefit greatly from some specialisation (or technical skill set)?