The Future of Skill: What Is It to Be Skilled at Work?

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of being skilled at work by emphasizing the active, intertwined practices and collaborations that constitute skill, moving beyond traditional notions of intelligence and task automation.

Contribution

It introduces a new perspective on skill as an active, entangled process involving multiple practices, challenging conventional views focused on intelligence and automation.

Findings

Skill involves active, intertwined practices and collaborations.

Designing for future work should focus on enabling skill development.

Skill offers a broader understanding of effective work beyond systems of intelligence.

Abstract

In this short paper, we introduce work that is aiming to purposefully venture into this mesh of questions from a different starting point. Interjecting into the conversation, we want to ask: 'What is it to be skilled at work?' Building on work from scholars like Tim Ingold, and strands of longstanding research in workplace studies and CSCW, our interest is in turning the attention to the active work of 'being good', or 'being skilled', at what we as workers do. As we see it, skill provides a counterpoint to the version of intelligence that appears to be easily blackboxed in systems like Slack, and that ultimately reduces much of what people do to work well together. To put it slightly differently, skill - as we will argue below - gives us a way into thinking about work as a much more entangled endeavour, unfolding through multiple and interweaving sets of practices, places, tools and collaborations. In this vein, designing for the future of work seems to be about much more than where work is done or how we might bolt on discrete containers of intelligence. More fruitful would be attending to how we succeed in threading so many entities together to do our jobs well - in 'coming to be skilled'.