Navigating the skill diversity frontier: How skill complexity explains worker resilience

Abstract

As artificial intelligence transforms labor markets, understanding what makes workers adaptable has become increasingly important. Existing approaches typically characterize human capital using occupations, educational credentials, or predefined skill taxonomies, providing limited insight into how the structure of workers' skill portfolios shapes resilience to technological change. We develop an agnostic network based framework that reconstructs the hierarchy and diversity of skills directly from observed patterns of skill co occurrence. Using longitudinal data on 2.4 million United States workers and 16,753 distinct skills from LinkedIn, we introduce three complementary measures of skill complexity: specialisation, capturing productive depth; diversity, capturing adaptive breadth; and the diversity frontier, measuring the highest attainable diversity conditional on a worker's level of specialisation. We show that these dimensions predict distinct career outcomes. Specialisation is most strongly associated with sorting into higher wage occupations, whereas diversity is associated with broader skill accumulation and occupational mobility. Workers closest to the diversity frontier are significantly more likely to acquire new skills, receive promotions, transition into occupations with lower exposure to automation than workers with comparable levels of specialisation but narrower skill portfolios. These findings distinguish productive from adaptive capital and demonstrate that workers' adaptive capacity depends not simply on possessing specialised expertise or broad capabilities, but on combining both. More broadly, our framework provides a data driven approach for measuring workforce resilience and identifying reskilling pathways, offering new tools for understanding human capital in rapidly changing labor markets.