How We Define “Skilled” Work

And the problems with our classification systems

What occupations are considered “skilled”? Maybe it’s the jobs that require a college degree. Or the ones with the highest wages. Perhaps it’s the level of judgement required.

Although “skilled” and “unskilled” remain common terms used to describe and analyze the workforce, there isn’t a consistent way to classify work into those categories. Whether or not it’s productive to define skills in this way, it’s useful to understand when we started categorizing jobs by skill level, what are the prevailing measures we use today, and the consequences of those measures.

Early Use of Skill Level in American Labor Analysis

Back in 1938, a statistician named Alba Edwards published a report that had been decades in the making. He first took over the occupational statistics division of the United States Census Bureau in 1910, but in this most recent document, his new framework for occupational classification took its most explicit and cohesive form.

Edwards’ report was called the Social-Economic Groupings of Gainful Workers of the United States. It was his attempt to segment the complex labor market into simple categories, based on employee skill level. According to his definition, occupations which involved a long period of apprenticeship or formal training belonged within the “skilled” or “semiskilled” categories. And those which, “require no special…