Digital prowess has become one of the most powerful bargaining chips in the American job market over a relatively short period of time, according to a report from the Brookings Institute.
The study — part of a series of reports Brookings published as a 2017 retrospective — looked at jobs in three categories: those requiring high, medium, and low levels of digital skills. Researchers found that between 2002-2016 the percentage of jobs requiring low digital skills dropped from 56 to 30. Jobs requiring medium digital skills rose from 40 percent to 48. Most staggeringly, jobs requiring high digital skills rose from 5 percent to 23 percent.
Although the job market has seen a sharp rise in what researchers call “digitalization,” tech jobs are still largely stratified by region, race, gender, and industry. Men and white people dominate the jobs requiring the highest level of digital skills while African Americans and Hispanics are overrepresented in fields that require medium or low technical abilities.
