Report: US industry’s digital transformation unevenly distributed
Going digital has remade the American economy and how people work, but for all of the major changes, there hasn’t been much data to track how different industries have adopted new technology, the Brookings Institution said in its latest Digitalization and the American Workforce report.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the Brookings report quantifies the spread of digitalization by analyzing the rapid changes in 545 occupations between 2002 and 2016 based on O*NET, or the Occupational Information Network, the most comprehensive database on U.S. occupations sponsored by the Labor Department. O*NET includes highly detailed, task-level information on hundreds of occupations. The 545 occupations Brookings studied accounted for 90% of the U.S. workforce.
Occupations were assigned a digital score between 0 and 100. High digital occupations are those with scores over 60, like software developers (91) and financial managers (61). Medium digital occupations included automotive service technicians (55) and registered nurses (55). Low digital occupations have a score below 33 and include security guards (31), restaurant cooks (18) and construction laborers (17).
The report had three main takeaways:
• The changes have not been evenly distributed across occupations, industries or geographic areas.
• Digitalization is increasing job creation and wages in occupations at the high and low ends of the income spectrum while helping to hollow out those in the middle
• Digitalization is changing the skills that less-advantaged workers need to secure good jobs.
Read the full Brookingseport, and the Wall Street Journal analysis here.
