http://www.theatlantic.

com/business/archive/2015/08/job-advice-be-cool/401954/

Job Advice: Just Be Cool

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

theatlantic.com

What does it take to get ahead in todays job market? While it might seem like specialized
technical skills are the only way to compete in an increasingly difficult economy, thats not the
case. To really get ahead, what a worker needs is social skills.
The Age of the Robot Worker Will Be Worse
for Men
Hows that? Over the next two decades, nearly
half of U.S. jobs may become obsolete due to
automation, one recent study found. What are
workers to do? Become more human,
suggests David J. Deming of Harvard. Deming
argues that social skills have already become
increasingly important in recent decades,
especially for those looking for high-wage, competitive positions.
According to Deming, positions that require both cognitive and social skills have shown more
wage growth in the past few decades than those that require high-levels of mathematical or
analytical training but little social prowess. And those wage gains hold true across all levels of
employment.
In the future, the jobs that are least likely to be automated increasingly are those that demand
lots of interaction with coworkers or clients, not just the performance of rote analytical tasks.
These jobs also call for the ability to perform innately human exerciseslike pondering another
persons point of view. These nuances of human interaction are something that computers
have yet to master.
Social skills have the most value when it comes to the ability to work on a team, trading off
tasks based on skill sets or ability. Human interaction in the workplace involves team
production, with workers playing off of each others strengths and adapting flexibly to changing
circumstances, Deming writes. Such nonroutine interaction is at the heart of the human
advantage over machines.
The paper also suggests that the heightened value of social aptitude might be responsible, in
part, for helping bridge some of the gender wage gap, since women tend to exhibit higher
levels of emotional intelligence than their male peers. In conjunction with increasing
educational attainment, that might mean that better social skills have helped women thrive in
the workplace.
Page 1 of 1

Sep 02, 2015 07:49:44AM MDT