A management scientist explains why personality matters as much as skill for the future of work

The vast majority of discussions about the future of work focus on “reskilling”—that is, equipping workers with knowledge and skills that are in demand and at the technology frontier. Ranging from the OECD (i.e., the “The Case for 21st Century Learning”) to the U.S. Office of Science Policy and Technology (i.e., “Interagency Roadmap to Support Space-Related STEM Education and Workforce”), there is bipartisan, interagency, and international support for reskilling.

To be clear, these aims are important and filled with good intentions, but focusing on skills, especially technical skills, risks overlooking what’s right in front of us: personality. There is no debate that skills matter in the workplace—an industrial engineer without the technical know-how could make an error that causes a building to become structurally unsound.

But overemphasizing skills, which are easily attainable, oversimplifies the career journey by creating a moving target for a goal post: Today it’s AI that’s in demand, but tomorrow it’s blockchain. An alternative strategy is to focus on the personality characteristics that lead people to not only acquire the requisite technical know-how, but also work well with others and persevere through trials.

My newly released research shows that personality matters at least as much as skills in explaining differences in compensation across jobs and over time. Using data from the Department of Labor that measures 16 occupational personality requirements—that is, personality constructs that can affect how well someone performs a job—we constructed two general indices that we refer to as intellectual tenacity and social adjustment.

On one hand, intellectual tenacity encompasses achievement/effort, persistence, initiative, analytical thinking, innovation, and independence. For simplicity, let’s call this attribute persistence. On the other hand, social adjustment encompasses emotion regulation, concern for others, social orientation, cooperation, and stress tolerance. These span the spectrum of personality traits and their construction is anchored in a mountain of research from the psychology literature.