Media releases

New research about the nature of skill in work has been released this week by Professor Erica Smith of Federation University Australia.

The controversial research challenges conventional views about skills and highlights the hidden skills in jobs traditionally dismissed as unskilled or low-skilled. 

Professor Smith’s work has been published in Britain this week in the prestigious ‘Journal of Education and Work’. It took two years for the paper to be accepted.

“Two journals refused to publish it, with reviewers completely opposed to the challenge that it posed to the conventional view that only jobs in traditional trade areas – generally undertaken by men – contain skill,” Professor Smith said.

“This research project focused on three service sector jobs: retail assistant, kitchen-hand, and hairdresser.

“These jobs are generally regarded as lacking in skill, but we found many complex skills; and also found substantial career paths in these occupational areas.”

In the paper Professor Smith and Julian Teicher from Central Queensland University have identified discrepancies between perceived skill in the jobs and the actual skills required.

“We have added to existing theories about perceptions of skill to show four extra factors that affect whether people think of jobs as being skilled or not,” Professor Smith said.

“These are the proportion of young people doing the job; the proportion of casual and part-time jobs in the workforce; the presence of a wide range of levels at which a job may be performed; and the appearance of what we called everydayness – that is, the extent to which people see the job being performed every day.

“All of these factors tend to make people think the jobs cannot be skilled.”

The paper argues that these are not just academic debates. Perceptions of skill affect the status of people’s jobs and hence the self-esteem of people doing the jobs that are dismissed as ‘unskilled’; they affect the government funding available for training in those jobs; they affect the calibre of people entering the occupations; and, of course, they affect pay rates.

“As service sector jobs form more and more of the economy, with manufacturing industry employment declining in the western world, the effects of incorrect assumptions about skill become more important,” Professor Smith said.  

“If perceptions of skill do not change to reflect reality, Australia will end up with a lack of respect for a greater and greater proportion of its workforce.”

Given the unpopularity of the findings of the project with the academic establishment, Professor Smith has found that reactions to her research findings are more favourable in the United States than in Australia.

As a result of a more recent larger-scale research project on the same topic, which was funded by the Australian Research Council, she has been invited to speak at a major American conference early next year.

“I have been invited as the opening speaker in a stream on the politics of skill, which contains some of the main North American thinkers in this area,” Professor Smith said.

“I hope that as a result of this participation I will come back with new arguments to help to change people’s views in Australia.”