Hybrid jobs and the future of work: towards a labour market polarisation

2016 has been called the year of hybrid jobs. Four years later, the combined health and economic shocks of 2020 have seriously damaged worldwide economies, profoundly changed employment structures and fully revealed the unpreparedness of the majority of the companies. And just like that, Covid-19 pandemic has created a highly uncertain prospect in the labour market and accelerated the arrival of the future of work: hybrid jobs. The major purpose of this master thesis is to explore how and to which extent hybrid jobs are actually pervading workplaces nowadays, changing the portfolio of competencies required to workers, leading to an increased polarisation between high and low-skilled ones. This research objective can be attained by answering questions like “to which extent different jobs are becoming hybrid?”, “how did the introduction of hybrid skills in traditional jobs increase the divide between high and low-skill jobs?”, “how is it possible to detect at which step the labour market is along the path toward polarisation?”. In this dissertation we present an original model, the hourglass of hybrid jobs, able to detect the role of hybrid skills in the increasing divide between high and low-skill occupations. Starting from a research conducted in October 2018 by Osservatorio Professioni Digitali in collaboration with Veneto Lavoro we investigated two information, fundamental for the development of the model — hybrid skill’s frequency of use and level of knowledge. These variables were propaedeutic for the hybridization centroid computation. This indicator permitted us to divide occupations in the dataset characterised by high hybridization, low hybridization, cognitive effort or organizational effort. Moving a step further, we analysed the processes which lead occupations to be classified in one of the four categories just presented, namely, upskilling or down-skilling processes (in case of polarisation-accentuating mechanisms) and cognitive or organizational redesign ones (in case of polarisation-mitigating mechanisms). Applying our model to the Osservatorio database we found that the sample was very polarised: approximately three-quarters of the observations collected (74,6%) were experiencing upskilling or down-skilling processes. This data brought evidence that hybrid jobs are actively contributing to the accentuation of labour market polarisation. Moreover, our findings confirmed previous research regarding the polarisation trend: younger (under 40) and more educated workers (college workforce) are more favoured in upskilling processes than older (over 40) less educated ones (noncollege workforce), which are more frequently attracted towards the negative pole of the hourglass (down-skilling processes). Another interesting result we highlighted is that, while the sample is very polarised, more than 20% of workers surveyed are experiencing polarisation-mitigating mechanisms, in particular, cognitive redesign processes. This finding suggests that workers who, at the time of data collection, had not the adequate hybrid skillset needed to operate in highly hybridized jobs, are actively enlarging their portfolio of skills through learning processes able to give them that advanced level of hybrid skills their traditional jobs now require. They understood that the only exit strategy they have to not be caged in down-skilling processes is “going back to school”. The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to help all the stakeholders involved, in primis employees, to be aware of the changing requirements of the labour market: awareness is the only route to be able to shape and activate adequate investment policies supporting workers damaged or displaced by the spread of hybrid jobs and the consequent accentuation of labour market polarisation.