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.
BY CHRISTOS MAKRIDIS
For Fast Company
[Photo: Jopwell/Pexels]
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.
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.
We subsequently linked these data on personality requirements across occupations with data on over 10 million individuals between 2006 and 2019 to study how differences in personality requirements are valued across occupations. Crucially, we found that individuals working in occupations that rank higher in persistence earn substantially more than their counterparts, and that the economic return—measured through annual earnings—was increasing over time. We did not, however, find similar effects for individuals working in occupations that rank higher in social adjustment, although occupations that rank high in both persistence and social adjustment earn the most.