The Speed of Skill Change
Every Job in the US is Changing. Are You?
Over the past three years, the average job has seen 32% of its skills change.
It's abundantly clear that the labor market today is much different than the labor market of three years ago—and now, skills give us a lens to see exactly how much. Change in the labor market is often gauged through job transitions, and jobs created and lost. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Even if a job isn’t created or lost, it can still change. And the average job has seen one third of its skills change in three years, and 25% of jobs have seen 75% skill turnover.
Rapid change demands urgent action. This is not a time to wait and see, because by the time you’re done waiting, you’ll see that the goalposts have shifted even further. Standing still when labor market disruption is happening so quickly is a sure way to be left behind—and to understand what actions to take, the first step is to understand the change that’s already happening.
Key Findings
1/3
The average job has seen one-third of its skills change from 2021 to 2024.
75%
One in four jobs (the top quartile) has seen 75% of their skills change.
Disruption
AI is causing more disruption than any other trend, followed by sustainability and cybersecurity.
Acceleration
The pace of skill change is accelerating: the past three years have been almost as disrupted as the previous five.
Three Big Themes
The Skill Disruption Index
The Skills Disruption Index measures how occupations across the United States have changed in terms of employer skills requirements. To calculate this, we analyzed the change in skill share for every Lightcast occupation between 2021 and 2024, and indexed them from 0-100 according to skills change. The higher the ranking, the higher the level of skills change.
The ten occupations below have the top ten highest Skill Disruption Index scores—but there are 589 more occupations to explore in the research, each with its own score. While many of the occupations with the highest disruption are in tech, skill change affects many industries beyond it, with engineering, healthcare, and marketing among the most disrupted industries.
