deskill

present singular third person deskills · participle present deskilling · participle past deskilled · past deskilled · alternative de-skill

1. transitiveTo redesign (a job) so that less skill is required to carry it out, for example through the introduction of new technology.

   The impact on workers is fairly obvious but I believe that managerial jobs have also been deskilled by the adoption of controlling systems and procedures.

   3 more examples

   “Word processors are wonderful to make us more productive, but employers tend to take this to an extreme,” she said. “Some secretaries are very pleased with automation, but it's the larger number whose jobs are deskilled, made more redundant.”

   1985 August 4, Elizabeth Kolbert, quoting Deborah Meyer, “Computers Ease the Load — At Times”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   But the data she presents “suggest a more complicated reality.” Even where “control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures.

   1988 April 21, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, quoting Shoshana Zuboff, “When Your Colleague Is a Machine”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   [Henrik] Örnebring concluded that there had not been a de-skilling of journalism so much as a more complex process of re-skilling, and this is hard to dispute in relation to the use of technology to undertake a broader range of journalistic duties in the newsroom.

   2020, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, chapter 5, in After the Fact?, Repeater, →ISBN

2. transitiveTo change the role of (workers) so that they are no longer required or able to use the skills that they have acquired.

   Tragic, too, is the gradual deskilling of teachers, loss of excitement about the profession, and loss of gifted teachers to other pursuits.

   1 more example

   In this transition from an economy built on energy-guzzling heavy industry toward a 21st century society of energy-sipping high technology, millions of Americans and Europeans are being “deskilled.”

   1983 June 12, Bruce Nussbaum, “‘Reskilling’ Workers”, in The New York Times, →ISSN