Job Skills: How to Innovate Your Marketplace Offering

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Job skills are the tangible and intangible competencies that enable workplace performance, and that support or advance one’s opportunities for growth and reward within the professional domain of one’s life.

Obstacles to Improvement

“Learning to code” isn’t easy. And improving your potential for wage command in the marketplace as a laborer is not that straightforward. I have found that skill acquisition, and likewise job training, are integrative and transdisciplinary endeavors that require the secondary skill of knowledge building and integration on top of the primary skill that directly improves labor value. ¹

Time, opportunity, capability, and work-life balance all mitigate against employment-adjacent self-improvement.

Directions for Development

Through these articles, I attempt to build a knowledge base of job-related skill acquisition that enables better learning, faster integration, and a more rapid deployment cycle of those skills into the workplace and the job market. Skill acquisition was never something that was built into the economy that we were handed, but it is a task that is being doubly handed to us now, and it is incumbent upon us to learn how to do it without slipping into play-acting a facade that we can do more than we really can. ²

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	And most tech-focused STEM graduates transition out of tech at one of the highest rates of any graduate discipline, as reported in Deming et. al. report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics: “the earnings premium for college graduates majoring in technology-intensive subjects such as computer science, engineering, and business declines rapidly, and that these graduates sort out of faster-changing occupations as they gain experience.” David J Deming and Kadeem Noray, “Eearnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2020): 1965–2005.
↑2	One study comments: “The main finding from the recent literature is that we should prioritize, and shift our priorities, in a marginal fashion by redirecting a given total sum of expenditure on skill investment to earlier ages relative to how it is currently allocated toward disadvantaged populations that do not provide enriched environments for their children.” Flavio Cunha, et. al., “Interpreting the Evidence on Life Cycle Skill Formation,: Handbook of Economics of Education, Vol. 1, ed. Eric A. Hanushek and Finis Welch (New York: Elsevier, 2006).

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