It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.
These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.
You can develop a high level of skill at anything, is more a question of how important that is. In particular, you might say how important that is to people doing the hiring. It is clear for many jobs, they don’t care. Some minimum wage jobs they will virtually take anyone with a pulse.
With white collar jobs it is a little more complicated. Project management is software is a position where i’ve often seen people with absolutely no skill helpful to the job. They may have needed a certain amount of political skill, or ass-kissing skill, or knowing how to say the right things, sling buzz words kind of skill. Skills that don’t actually help be effective at the job itself.
I’ve also met entirely unskilled projects management but the organizational and people skills needed to do well absolutely are skills
I can complete the tasks for a project manager. But have neither the organizational skills nor people skills to do it well
Coming up on annual review time at work, one of my successes this year was to persuade a project manager to take up my initiative- while the work needed is easy for me, now I have someone applying it across 50 teams and I can’t compete with that
It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can’t move yourself. It’s not that you can’t be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it’s not like you couldn’t figure it out very quickly.
These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional “unskilled labor” required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.
You can develop a high level of skill at anything, is more a question of how important that is. In particular, you might say how important that is to people doing the hiring. It is clear for many jobs, they don’t care. Some minimum wage jobs they will virtually take anyone with a pulse.
With white collar jobs it is a little more complicated. Project management is software is a position where i’ve often seen people with absolutely no skill helpful to the job. They may have needed a certain amount of political skill, or ass-kissing skill, or knowing how to say the right things, sling buzz words kind of skill. Skills that don’t actually help be effective at the job itself.
I’ve also met entirely unskilled projects management but the organizational and people skills needed to do well absolutely are skills
I can complete the tasks for a project manager. But have neither the organizational skills nor people skills to do it well
Coming up on annual review time at work, one of my successes this year was to persuade a project manager to take up my initiative- while the work needed is easy for me, now I have someone applying it across 50 teams and I can’t compete with that