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Prior research on skill profiles at work has primarily focused on their variations across jobs and occupations. Yet, for individual workers, it is the combination of skills within a job, rather than between jobs, that directly shapes their role expectations. While recent research highlights increasing skill diversity within high-paying jobs (such as managers and professionals), they fall short of exploring these patterns across the labor market. Does the growth in skill diversity reach the opposite end of the job spectrum? To address this question, we introduce a Skill Embedding framework, which maps a wide range of skills onto a multidimensional space to elucidate their interrelationships. Employing this framework, we extract detailed skill requirements from large-scale job posting data to construct measures of skill diversity within job roles, which are then matched to nationally representative surveys to examine their trends and earnings returns. Our analysis contributes three critical insights to the literature. First, the rise of skill diversity extends beyond high-paying jobs, with an equally notable increase observed in personal service positions. Second, the factors fueling the rise of skill diversity in lower-paying personal service jobs are distinct from those in high-paying jobs: in management and professional jobs, skill diversity grew the most among high-paying, high-skill workers, whereas in personal service jobs, skill diversity exhibits the greatest growth in low-paying, low-skill jobs.  Third, conditional on a host of demographic and educational variables, workers in personal service jobs receive smaller returns to within-job skill diversity than those in management and professional jobs.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Juliana de Castro Galvao, Pablo Geraldo and David Kretschmer.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.