The Pathways to Knowledge Work: Occupational Transitions over time
National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER)
This study looks at how the occupational structure of the Australian labour market has evolved over recent years, and how individuals have fared in the process. Underlying aggregate-level change are tens of thousands of stories of individuals coping with adjustment: stories of young people deciding whether to continue their education and training beyond schooling, of mothers wanting to continue their careers after some years where it had been on hold, and of older people receiving redundancy notices and scouring job ads asking for skills they don't have.
How do we make sense of those stories, and detect the underlying factors which enable some people to sieze the opportunities offered? This study takes an avowedly statistical approach to the matter, with two principal components to it. The first is an examination of changes in the occupational composition of the labour market between 1986 and 1996. The second is a retrospective investigation of the factors that enabled some individuals to find themselves working in 1997 in jobs that might be categorised as "knowledge work".
Knowledge work is the bridge between the two components. There has been ample discussion about the emergence of a knowledge economy, but its consequences for the world of work rarely form part of those discussions and, where they do, are put in relatively benign terms: a knowledge economy is constituted of knowledge workers, which must be a good thing.
The transition towards a knowledge economy is best seen as a further stage in the evolution of technological change, exemplified by the rapid diffusion of advanced information and communication technologies. As history has shown, the consequences for work of technical change are likely to be ambiguous. Putting it simply, the fact that more knowledge may now be invested in production and delivery of services does not necessarily mean that more knowledge is required on the part of workers. Knowledge can be codified into a machine or piece of software, the application of which may require little in the way of cognitive skill. At the same time, others will be involved in research and development and the process of codification, undoubtedly tasks requiring a high level of knowledge and cognitive skill. In the first instance, therefore, we had to address the question of whether more or less knowledge was now required of workers.
Mark Cully
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