Probability of Automation of Occupations 2036
Description
We used a similar CBTC methodology to Frey and Osborne (2017), Autor and Dorn (2013), and Caines et al. (2017). The US Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupations Titles (DOT) classification system and the 2010 Standard Occupation System (SOC), which allowed for the respective data sets to be cross-referenced. The 2010 SOC system classified 840 detailed occupations with similar job duties, skills, education and training into 461 broad occupations, 9 minor occupations and 23 major groups (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010). We also used a secondary data set, namely US Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) data as it contained detailed occupational descriptions and employment statistics per occupation for the US economy, broken down per industry according to the NAICS classification system. The NAICS is an industry classification system that grouped organisations into industries based on similarities in production processes. It used a six-digit coding system to classify all economic activities in the US across 20 industry sectors and 1 057 detailed industries (U.S. Office of Management and Budget, 2017). Employment data was classified according to the 2010 SOC system that contained 820 occupations. With the emergence of new roles and reclassification of the SOC system over the same duration, certain classifications needed to be cross-referenced (“crosswalked”) to provide comparable figures across different years. In their studies, Frey and Osborne (2017), Caines et al. (2017) and Autor and Dorn (2013) aggregated the occupations slightly differently. For example, Frey and Osborne (2017) aggregated specific “postsecondary teaching” occupations into a single category and omitted occupations containing “all other”, whilst Caines et al. (2017) omitted selected “farm and agricultural” occupations. In total, Frey and Osborne (2017) calculated the probability of job automation for 702 occupations. Autor and Dorn (2013) calculated job routineness for 330 aggregated occupations. Caines et al. (2017) calculated job complexity for 315 aggregated occupations. Our approach combined and cross-referenced all of the above-mentioned data sets to produce a total of 291 occupations for the analysis. In projecting the change in workforce structure from 2016 to 2036, the 2016 OES employment numbers were adjusted for the “probability of job automation” at an occupational level, and aggregated to illustrate the relative change in workforce structure for the entire US economy. Occupations which did not have a corresponding measure of “probability of job automation” were omitted from the analysis. After omissions, this analysis represented 96.3% of the US workforce in 2016.