Be strategic in our skills acquisition
Some individual job switches within the same cluster of work will only require the acquisition of a few new skills.
Research tells us that for someone who has already been trained for or worked in one job, there are up to 44 other different jobs they could do within the same job cluster.
For example, an aircraft baggage handler may already possess most of the top skills required to become a customs and inspection officer except for the knowledge on legal compliance and inspection.
By understanding that jobs are related within the same job cluster and that our skills are more portable between different jobs within the same job cluster, we have the opportunity to be more strategic in the navigation of our dynamic working lives.
This means that rather than seeing learning, training, and personal development as a one-off learning activity, we must continuously upgrade ourselves and strategically build our portfolio of portable skills within a specific job cluster.
This may mean that we should not have any ‘skills mismatch’ if that person has relevant portfolio of skills.
We also have to strategically target our key learning areas to secure our work and open up work and career opportunities throughout our lifetime.
To do so, we need to develop a mindset that thinks about how our existing skills are valuable for multiple different job roles rather than being limited to only one job.
But here’s the caveat.
Low-wage workers can get trapped in largely manual jobs because of the difficulty of acquiring better-paid skills. Some may say that workers whose manual jobs are becoming more automated could learn new skills to stay employed.
But the difficulty of jumping from physical work to a job that requires mainly social and cognitive skills should not be underestimated even if it is within the same job cluster.