Second, the pessimists assume jobs are made up of just one critical task. But many jobs have more than 20.
And third, and perhaps most important, tasks within any occupation change over time.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Davis and his Vanguard colleagues found there are more than 18,000 daily work activities performed in the U.S. across 974 occupations. From there, they scrunched those occupations into 41 unique tasks and put them into three broad buckets—basic, repetitive and advanced.
The basic category includes things like growing, harvesting, digging, moving objects, and recording information.
The repetitive grouping comprises tasks such as inspecting, monitoring, assembling and processing information.
And the advanced bucket—the largest of the three broad buckets—entails training, developing teams, strategizing, thinking creatively, solving problems, and assisting/caring for others, among other things.
“The common distinctions between blue-collar and white-collar jobs lose meaning when you look at work this way,” Davis said.
In the U.S., only 10 percent of our collective time is spent on basic tasks, versus 80 percent during the period of the Civil War, according to Davis. By 1940, American workers did repetitive tasks 80 percent of the time in settings such as factories and in offices, which led to the rise of the middle class. Technology has slowly automated away those tasks ever since.
The advanced category comprises 26 of the 41 unique tasks delineated by Vanguard. “Rather than advanced, I like to use the phrase ‘uniquely human’ because human beings have a strategic advantage in doing these tasks regardless of how smart a computer ever becomes,” Davis said. “These tasks can’t be automated away by computers.
“Thinking creatively is the top job requirement for a number of occupations not even related to the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics),” he continued. “Examples include cooks and chefs, sales managers, program directors, tool and die makers. Other jobs that are immune from automation can involve social skills. Arguably the most important skill in the future isn’t IQ, but EQ, or emotional intelligence involved in maintaining relationships, managing teams, and developing and coaching others.”