A management scientist explains why personality matters as much as skill for the future of work

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

The vast majority of discussions about the future of work focus on “reskilling”—that is, equipping workers with knowledge and skills that are in demand and at the technology frontier. Ranging from the OECD (i.e., the “The Case for 21st Century Learning”) to the U.S. Office of Science Policy and Technology (i.e., “Interagency Roadmap to Support Space-Related STEM Education and Workforce”), there is bipartisan, interagency, and international support for reskilling.

To be clear, these aims are important and filled with good intentions, but focusing on skills, especially technical skills, risks overlooking what’s right in front of us: personality. There is no debate that skills matter in the workplace—an industrial engineer without the technical know-how could make an error that causes a building to become structurally unsound.

But overemphasizing skills, which are easily attainable, oversimplifies the career journey by creating a moving target for a goal post: Today it’s AI that’s in demand, but tomorrow it’s blockchain. An alternative strategy is to focus on the personality characteristics that lead people to not only acquire the requisite technical know-how, but also work well with others and persevere through trials.

My newly released research shows that personality matters at least as much as skills in explaining differences in compensation across jobs and over time. Using data from the Department of Labor that measures 16 occupational personality requirements—that is, personality constructs that can affect how well someone performs a job—we constructed two general indices that we refer to as intellectual tenacity and social adjustment.

On one hand, intellectual tenacity encompasses achievement/effort, persistence, initiative, analytical thinking, innovation, and independence. For simplicity, let’s call this attribute persistence. On the other hand, social adjustment encompasses emotion regulation, concern for others, social orientation, cooperation, and stress tolerance. These span the spectrum of personality traits and their construction is anchored in a mountain of research from the psychology literature.

We subsequently linked these data on personality requirements across occupations with data on over 10 million individuals between 2006 and 2019 to study how differences in personality requirements are valued across occupations. Crucially, we found that individuals working in occupations that rank higher in persistence earn substantially more than their counterparts, and that the economic return—measured through annual earnings—was increasing over time. We did not, however, find similar effects for individuals working in occupations that rank higher in social adjustment, although occupations that rank high in both persistence and social adjustment earn the most.

One concern is that we are not comparing apples to apples. People who work in occupations ranking higher in persistence differ in other ways from those who work in occupations ranking higher in social adjustment. While that is true, we control for a wide array of demographic factors, including age, education, race, gender, and family size. Furthermore, we isolate comparisons among people in similar industries and broad occupations to ensure more reasonable comparisons, ensuring that we are not comparing, for example, CEOs with cashiers.

Another concern is that occupations that rank higher in persistence also rank higher in their skill requirements, so our focus on personality is simply a mask for skills. However, we also control for differences in cognitive skill requirements across occupations and continue finding a strong positive association between persistence and annual earnings. And the link between persistence and earnings is roughly as large as the association with cognitive skills. The relative and growing importance of persistence is especially striking given a slowdown in the returns to cognitive skills.

What do these results mean for policymakers and managers?

Strengthen Persistence

First, increasing persistence is a promising avenue for workforce development and education to help workers become “future proof” in the emerging digital economy. Economic and labor market outcomes depend on the capacity of individuals to learn and adapt in the face of automation and artificial intelligence.

While personality is commonly misperceived as fixed, it continues to evolve throughout the lifespan. Interventions aimed at developing the mindsets, skill sets, and contexts that encourage persistence are timely targets for education reform and workforce development, which may have the greatest impact in the early stages of childhood development.

In fact, my recent book with Goldy Brown III investigates a wide array of best practices for strengthening persistence in early childhood development. For example, after school programs that allow children to practice skills outside of the classroom and others can be effective in cultivating good habits and keeping children, especially those at risk in low-income neighborhoods, out of otherwise dangerous situations. Similarly, my recent handbook chapter also highlights the role of music education in early childhood in building the habit of persistence and cognitive skills.

Second, persistence is an important developmental target for everyone—not just skilled workers or the more educated. The effect of occupational persistence requirements on earnings was consistent among both college graduates and individuals without college degrees. Industrial-worker jobs are still valued in the economy as long as they require persistence. That means organizations, even those that require less skilled workers, should be mindful of inculcating a culture of continuous learning and improvement independent of the degree of digital intensity of the tasks.

Formally Assess Personality

Third, in addition to assessing relevant skills when hiring, organizations may also find it useful to conduct formal assessments of personality. While that insight is not new, and indeed The Gallup Organization (among others) has developed a sophisticated assessment, personality is likely to play an increasingly important role in technology organizations, especially as more work is done remotely and the need for clear and cohesive communication grows.

There has been much discussion and debate about how to reskill the labor force. That discussion is good and important, but organizations and policymakers should not make technical skills the priority at the expense of the underlying personality traits that sustain life-long learning and resilience to trials and adversity. We always knew personality mattered. Now we finally have robust quantitative evidence on exactly what dimensions matter most for career progression.

Christos A. Makridis is a research affiliate at Stanford University, among other institutions, and holds doctorates in economics and management science and engineering from Stanford University.