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As a middle or high school career readiness teacher, you likely need to teach 21st century skills as part of your curriculum.

While all twelve of those skills are necessary to teach, the "four C's" are often considered to be the most important.
The four C's of 21st Century skills are:

1. Critical thinking

2. Creativity

3. Collaboration

4. Communication

These four skills are essential for modern students to succeed in school and the workplace.

They often make the biggest impact in terms of setting your students apart when applying for and starting their careers.
In this article, you'll discover what each skill entails and why they are so important to teach.
You'll also be able to download a free guide on how you can teach the 4 C's of 21st Century skills in middle or high school courses.

1. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the practice of solving problems, among other qualities.
In addition to working through problems, solving puzzles, and similar activities, critical thinking also includes an element of skepticism.

This is important in the 21st Century because it's harder than ever to verify accurate information (mostly thanks to the Internet).

Critical thinking empowers students to discover the truth in assertions, especially when it comes to separating fact from opinion.

With critical thinking, students don't just learn a set of facts or figures. Instead, they learn how to discover the facts and figures for themselves.

They ask questions. They become engaged in the world around them. They help others think critically, too.

That might be the most important part of critical thinking. Once one student has it mastered, it quickly spreads to their peers.

Whether they learn how to think critically from spending time online or simply asking "Why?" in everyday life, this skill prepares students for a life of independence and purposeful thought.

Still, critical thinking is just one of the four C's in 21st Century skills.

It works just fine when students use it alone. But when students combine it with the next skill, the sky is the limit to what they can achieve.

2. Creativity
Creativity is the practice of thinking outside the box.
While creativity is often treated like a you-have-it-or-you-don't quality, students can learn how to be creative by solving problems, creating systems, or just trying something they haven't tried before.

That doesn't mean every student will become an artist or a writer.

Instead, it means they'll be able to look at a problem from multiple perspectives - including those that others may not see.

Creativity allows students to embrace their inner strengths from big-picture planning to meticulous organization.

As a student learns about their creativity, they also learn how to express it in healthy and productive ways.

More importantly, they also become motivated to share that creativity with others.

Just like with critical thinking, that makes creativity contagious.

One student creates an interesting or innovative solution to a problem. Then, when they share it, the next student can become inspired to try something similar.

That's not to say every single creative endeavor will be a ringing success. Students will fail at some point, and some of their ideas simply won't work.

But that's okay. The point of creativity is to encourage students to think differently than convention demands.

They don't have to do things the way they've always been done.

Instead, they can figure out a better way.

Students don't have to embrace their creativity alone, either.

In fact, creativity works best when combined with the next 21st Century skill.

3. Collaboration
Collaboration is the practice of working together to achieve a common goal.
Collaboration is important because whether students realize it or not, they'll probably work with other people for the rest of their lives.

Virtually every job requires someone to work with another person at some point, even if it's for something as simple as what to get for lunch.

Practicing collaboration and teamwork helps students understand how to address a problem, pitch solutions, and decide the best course of action.

It's also helpful for them to learn that other people don't always have the same ideas that they do.

In fact, as students practice collaboration more and more, they'll learn that they have almost none of the same ideas that others do.

This can affect students in one of two ways. First, it could discourage them since nobody seems to agree with them that often. Second, it could embolden them because they realize they're bringing something unique to every conversation.

As a teacher, it's crucial that you encourage students to look at themselves through that second lens.

That way, students learn that they should speak up when they have an idea.

They may not be on the money 100% of the time - and some of their peers may have strong, opinionated reactions - but it'll teach them to speak up when they're working with others.
Communication is the practice of conveying ideas quickly and clearly.
4. Communication

Communication is often taken for granted in today's society. After all, if you say something, that means you conveyed an idea, right?

Not exactly.

In the age of text-based communications - SMS, emails, social media, etc. - it's never been more important for students to learn how to convey their thoughts in a way that others can understand them.

That's because text-based communications lack tone, which is critical to understanding the context of someone's words.

Still, even in situations where vocal tone is available, students need to learn how to communicate effectively.

That includes minimizing tangents, speaking directly to an idea, and checking other participants to make sure they're engaged.

Reading an audience - even if it's just two other people in a group discussion - lets students determine whether they should keep expanding on an idea or wrap up their point.

Their audience could even be their family at Thanksgiving dinner.

The point is that as students practice communication, they become better at efficiently conveying an idea without losing their point "in the weeds," so to speak.

With communication locked down, students can streamline their ideas and make a positive impression on those around them.

Still, it's important to note that communication isn't enough on its own to help students with 21st Century skills.

To really succeed, students need to use all four of these skills together.
The four C's of 21st Century skills let students create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.
How Do the Four C's Work Together?

That may sound overly-generalized, and you may be right. But the skills themselves are so general that it's difficult to pin down what, why, or how students should learn the four C's.

It's most accurate to say that students need the four C's for any and every reason.

Critical thinking teaches students to question claims and seek truth.

Creativity teaches students to think in a way that's unique to them.

Collaboration teaches students that groups can create something bigger and better than you can on your own.

Communication teaches students how to efficiently convey ideas.

Combined, the four C's empower students to become one-person think tanks.

Then, when those students get together, they can achieve almost anything!

How Do You Teach the Four C's of 21st Century Skills?

Now you know what the four C's of 21st Century skills are and why employers want new hires to have them.
Click below to get your free guide on teaching critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication!
So how do you teach them in your daily middle and high school classes?

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What Are the 4 C's of 21st Century Skills?

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As a middle or high school career readiness teacher, you likely need to teach 21st century skills as part of your curriculum. While all twelve of those skills are necessary to teach, the "four C's" are often considered to be the most important.

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As automation changes the world of work, governments, businesses, and members of the workforce can take action and adapt.

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21st Century skills are 12 abilities that today's students need to succeed in their careers during the Information Age.
The twelve 21st Century skills are:

1. Critical thinking

2. Creativity

3. Collaboration

4. Communication

5. Information literacy

6. Media literacy

7. Technology literacy

8. Flexibility

9. Leadership

10. Initiative

11. Productivity

12. Social skills

These skills are intended to help students keep up with the lightning-pace of today's modern markets. Each skill is unique in how it helps students, but they all have one quality in common.

They're essential in the age of the Internet.
On this page, we'll take a look at what's included in 21st Century skills, how they help students, and why they're so important.
You'll also be able to download a free guide on how you can teach 21st Century skills in middle or high school courses.

To start, let's dive into the three categories that 21st Century skills fall into.

The Three 21st Century Skill Categories

Each 21st Century skill is broken into one of three categories:

1. Learning skills

2. Literacy skills

3. Life skills

Learning skills (the four C's) teaches students about the mental processes required to adapt and improve upon a modern work environment.

Literacy skills (IMT) focuses on how students can discern facts, publishing outlets, and the technology behind them. There's a strong focus on determining trustworthy sources and factual information to separate it from the misinformation that floods the Internet.

Life skills (FLIPS) take a look at intangible elements of a student's everyday life. These intangibles focus on both personal and professional qualities.

Altogether, these categories cover all 12 21st Century skills that contribute to a student's future career.

This is not an exhaustive checklist of career readiness skills - but they're the career readiness skills that overlap with 21st Century skills!

Let's take a closer look at each category.

Category 1. Learning Skills (The Four C's)

The four C'sare by far the most popular 21st Century skills. These skills are also called learning skills.

More educators know about these skills because they're universal needs for any career. They also vary in terms of importance, depending on an individual's career aspirations.
The 4 C's of 21st Century Skills are:

Critical thinking: Findingsolutions to problems

Creativity: Thinking outside the box

Collaboration: Working with others

Communication: Talking to others

Arguably, critical thinking is the most important quality for someone to have in health sciences.
In business settings, critical thinking is essential to improvement. It's the mechanism that weeds out problems and replaces them with fruitful endeavors.

It's what helps students figure stuff out for themselves when they don't have a teacher at their disposal.
Related Resources:
Bonus Resource: Free Critical Thinking Lesson Download
Creativity is equally important as a means of adaptation. This skill empowers students to see concepts in a different light, which leads to innovation.
In any field, innovation is key to the adaptability and overall success of a company.

Learning creativity as a skill requires someone to understand that "the way things have always been done" may have been best 10 years ago - but someday, that has to change.
Collaboration means getting students to work together, achieve compromises, and get the best possible results from solving a problem.
Collaboration may be the most difficult concept in the four C's. But once it's mastered, it can bring companies back from the brink of bankruptcy.

The key element of collaboration is willingness. All participants have to be willing to sacrifice parts of their own ideas and adopt others to get results for the company.

That means understanding the idea of a "greater good," which in this case tends to be company-wide success.
Related Resources: Finally, communication is the glue that brings all of these educational qualities together.
Communication is a requirement for any company to maintain profitability. It's crucial for students to learn how to effectively convey ideas among different personality types.

That has the potential to eliminate confusion in a workplace, which makes your students valuable parts of their teams, departments, and companies.

Effective communication is also one of the most underrated soft skills in the United States. For many, it's viewed as a "given," and some companies may even take good communication for granted.

But when employees communicate poorly, whole projects fall apart. No one can clearly see the objectives they want to achieve. No one can take responsibility because nobody's claimed it.

Without understanding proper communication, students in the 21st Century will lack a pivotal skill to progress their careers.
Related Resources:
But the four C's are only the beginning. 21st Century skills also require students to understand the information that's around them.

Category 2. Literacy Skills (IMT)
Literacy skills are the next category of 21st Century skills.
They're sometimes called IMT skills, and they're each concerned with a different element in digital comprehension.
The three 21st Century literacy skills are:

Information literacy: Understanding facts, figures, statistics, and data

Media literacy: Understanding the methods and outlets in which information is published

Technology literacy: Understanding the machines that make the Information Age possible

Information literacy is the foundational skill. It helps students understand facts, especially data points, that they'll encounter online.
More importantly, it teaches them how to separate fact from fiction.

In an age of chronic misinformation, finding truth online has become a job all on its own. It's crucial that students can identify honesty on their own.
Related Resources: Media literacy is the practice of identifying publishing methods, outlets, and sources while distinguishing between the ones that are credible and the ones that aren't.
Otherwise, they can fall prey to myths, misconceptions, and outright lies.

Just like the previous skill, media literacy is helpful for finding truth in a world that's saturated with information.

This is how students find trustworthy sources of information in their lives. Without it, anything that lookscredible becomes credible.

But with it, they can learn which media outlets or formats to ignore. They also learn which ones to embrace, which is equally important.

Last, technology literacy goes another step further to teach students about the machines involved in the Information Age.

As computers, cloud programming, and mobile devices become more important to the world, the world needs more people to understand those concepts.

Technology literacy gives students the basic information they need to understand what gadgets perform what tasks and why.

This understanding removes the intimidating feeling that technology tends to have. After all, if you don't understand how technology works, it might as well be magic.

But technology literacy unmasks the high-powered tools that run today's world.

As a result, students can adapt to the world more effectively. They can play an important role in its evolution.

They might even guide its future.

But to truly round out a student's 21st Century skills, they need to learn from a third category.

Category 3. Life Skills (FLIPS)
The five 21st Century life skills are:
Life skills is the final category. Also called FLIPS, these skills all pertain to someone's personal life, but they also bleed into professional settings.
Flexibility is the expression of someone's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed

Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal

Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one's own

Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions

Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit

This is one of the most challenging qualities to learn for students because it's based on two uncomfortable ideas:

1. Your way isn't always the best way

2. You have to know and admit when you're wrong

That's a struggle for a lot of students, especially in an age when you can know any bit of information at the drop of a hat.

Flexibility requires them to show humility and accept that they'll always have a lot to learn - even when they're experienced.
Leadership is someone's penchant for setting goals, walking a team through the steps required, and achieving those goals collaboratively.
Still, flexibility is crucial to a student's long-term success in a career. Knowing when to change, how to change, and how to react to change is a skill that'll pay dividends for someone's entire life.

It also plays a big role in the next skill in this category.

Whether someone's a seasoned entrepreneur or a fresh hire just starting their careers, leadership applies to career.

Entry-level workers need leadership skills for several reasons. The most important is that it helps them understand the decisions that managers and business leaders make.
Related Resources: True success also requires initiative, requiring students to be self-starters.
Then, those entry-level employees canapply their leadership skills when they're promoted to middle management (or the equivalent). This is where 21st Century skill learners can apply the previous skills they've learned.

It's also where they get the real-world experience they need to lead entire companies.

As they lead individual departments, they can learn the ins and outs of their specific careers. That gives ambitious students the expertise they need to grow professionally and lead whole corporations.

Initiative only comes naturally to a handful of people. As a result, students need to learn it to fully succeed.

This is one of the hardest skills to learn and practice. Initiative often means working on projects outside of regular working hours.

The rewards for students with extreme initiative vary from person to person. Sometimes they're good grades. Other times they're new business ventures.
Along with initiative, 21st Century skills require students to learn about productivity. That's a student's ability to complete work in an appropriate amount of time.
Sometimes, it's spending an extra 30 minutes at their jobs wrapping something up before the weekend.

Regardless, initiative is an attribute that earns rewards. It's especially indicative of someone's character in terms of work ethic and professional progress.

That goes double when initiative is practiced with qualities like flexibility and leadership.

In business terms, it's called "efficiency."

The common goal of any professional - from entry-level employee to CEO - is to get more done in less time.

By understanding productivity strategies at every level, students discover the ways in which they work best while gaining an appreciation for how others work as well.

That equips them with the practical means to carry out the ideas they determine through flexibility, leadership, and initiative.

Still, there's one last skill that ties all other 21st Century skills together.

Social skills are crucial to the ongoing success of a professional. Business is frequently done through the connections one person makes with others around them.

This concept of networking is more active in some industries than others, but proper social skills are excellent tools for forging long-lasting relationships.

While these may have been implied in past generations, the rise of social media and instant communications have changed the nature of human interaction.

As a result, today's students possess a wide range of social skills. Some are more socially adept than others. Some are far behind their peers. And some lucky few may be far ahead, as socializing comes naturally to them.

But most students need a crash course in social skills at least. Etiquette, manners, politeness, and small talk still play major roles in today's world.

That means some students need to learn them in an educational setting instead of a social setting.

For them, it's another skill to add to their lives.

Now that we've established what 21st Century skills are, let's answer the next big question.

Do employers actually want people with 21st Century skills?

What's the Demand for 21st Century Skills?

While 21st Century skills have always been important, they've become essential in a worldwide market that moves faster by the day.

These skills all double back to one key focus.

Someone's ability to enact and / or adapt to change.

This is because any industry is capable of changing at a moment's notice. Industries are now regularly disrupted with new ideas and methodologies.

Those industries that haven't been disrupted aren't immune though. They just haven't been disruptedyet.

With that in mind, the world has entered an era where nothing is guaranteed.

As a result, students need to learn to guide the change that'll inundate their lives. At the very least, they need to learn how to react to it.

Otherwise, they'll be left behind.

This is especially true as customer demand accelerates in all industries along with expectations for newer features, higher-level capabilities, and lower prices.

In today's marketplace, falling behind means becoming obsolete.

That's a familiar concept to all of today's students as tomorrow's advancements make today's miracles quaint or unimpressive.

Today, the only consistency from year to year is change.

That's why many teachers like you are incorporating the 21st Century Skills Assessment into their career readiness courses.

With 21st Century skills, your students will have the adaptive qualities they need to keep up with a business environment that's constantly evolving.

How Do You Teach 21st Century Skills?
While these skills can be taught at any grade level, we find it's most important to teach 21st Century skills in middle or early high school.
Now you know what 21st Century skills are and why employers want new hires to have them.

So how do you teach them in your daily classes?

Before getting into the details, it's important to identify who should teach 21st Century skills.

This is the time when your students need to hone their career readiness skills before they enter the workforce!

So how can middle and high school teachers teach 21st Century skills effectively?

Click below to download the Ultimate Guide to Teaching 21st Century Skills in Secondary Schools and find out!

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21st Century skills are 12 abilities that today's students need to succeed in their careers during the Information Age. The twelve 21st Century skills are: Critical thinking Creativity Collaboration Communication Information literacy Media literacy Technology literacy Flexibility Leadership Initiative Productivity Social skills These skills are intended to help students keep up with the lightning-pace of today's modern markets.

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The future of work offers unparalleled opportunities, but also significant challenges. Globalisation, technological progress and demographic change are having a profound impact on society and labour markets. It is crucial that policies help workers and society at large to manage the transition with the least possible disruption, while maximising the potential benefits.

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The future of work offers unparalleled opportunities, but also significant challenges. Globalisation, technological progress and demographic change are having a profound impact on society and labour markets. It is crucial that policies help workers and society at large to manage the transition with the least possible disruption, while maximising the potential benefits.

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Work of the past, work of the future

In the last 40 years, less-educated workers in most advanced economies have experienced a sustained fall in real wages. (Dustmann et al. 2009, Acemoglu and Autor 2011, Blundell et al. 2018). In the US, for example, wages have risen robustly among the most-educated workers, but since 1980 they have fallen in real terms among men with no college education (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Cumulative change in real weekly earnings of working age adults 18-64, 1963- 2017
Source: Autor (2019), based on Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
There are many potential explanations for this, including eroding union penetration and bargaining power, falling federal and state minimum wages, rising trade pressure stemming from China's rise as a manufacturing power, and changes in employer practices that decouple the wages of less-educated workers from the productivity and profitability gains of their employers (Card 1996, Lee 1999, Autor et al. 2013, Weil 2014, Autor et al. 2016).

In recent work (Autor 2019), I document another force that has contributed to the declining fortunes of less-educated workers: the rapid erosion of middle-skill employment - both production work and administrative and clerical work - among non-college workers in high-wage urban labour markets.

Many readers will be familiar with the occupational polarisation that has reshaped the landscape of work among less-educated workers: CPS data tell us that in 1980, US employment of non-college workers was roughly split between low- and middle-skill occupations, with 42% in the former category, 43% in the latter, and the remaining 15% in high-skill occupations. Broadly, these groups are: (low-skill) service and manual occupations; (mid-skill) production, office, administrative, and sales occupations; and (high-skill) technical, professional, and managerial occupations. In the intervening (nearly) four decades, the share of non-college employment in middle-skill occupations fell from 43% to 29%. The share in high-skill occupations increased only slightly (15.4% to 16.8%), and so most of the decline in non-college middle-skill employment is proximately explained by the movement of non-college workers into traditionally low-educated, low-paid work. In contrast, for college-educated workers, the decline in middle-skill employment has resulted in an equal outflow into high- and low-skill occupations.

But does occupational change explain the post-1980 divergence in real wages by education (see Figure 1)? A short answer is no. A simple counterfactual exercise that holds the occupational wage structure fixed while allowing the distribution of workers by education and gender to shift across occupations as occurs in the data shows that only a small fraction of the divergence in the data is accounted for by simple movements of education and gender groups across occupations. Thus, changing occupational composition cannot by itself explain most of the evolution of wage inequality between groups. Something else is happening.

The decline of middle-skill jobs in urban areas

The structure of work differs systematically across places, and one of the key predictors of occupational structure is population density. Some activities, such as agriculture, naturally take place in low-density areas, but knowledge-intensive industries tend to locate in cities, where educated workers are most concentrated (Glaeser and Mare 2001, Moretti 2004, Berry and Glaeser 2005).

In the decades following WWII, there was a steep positive urban gradient in the skill and wage levels of workers in non-college jobs in the US. Non-college urban adults disproportionately held middle-skill, blue-collar production and white-collar office, administrative, and clerical jobs. These workers laboured in close collaboration with the high-skill, urban professional, managerial, and technical workers who oversaw factories and offices. This meant that middle-skill jobs for non-college workers were prevalent in cities and metropolitan areas, but scarce in suburbs and rural labour markets.

Figure 2 depicts the aggregate relationship between population density and occupational structure at the level of 722 commuting zones (CZs) covering the contiguous US states between 1970 and 2015.

The three panels of this figure report the CZ-level share of employment among working-age adults into the three broad occupational categories described above: traditionally low-education, low-wage services, transportation, labourer, and construction workers; traditionally mid-education, middle-wage occupations made up of clerical, administrative support, sales, and production workers; and high-education, high-wage, professional, technical, and managerial workers.

The horizontal axis is the natural log of population density (the number of residents divided by CZ land area). For consistency, I used each zone's population density in 1970 throughout, and the data are weighted by the count of working-age adults in each CZ. Each plotted point in the bin-scatter represents approximately 5% of all workers in each year.

The rising set of upward-sloping curves in the right panel show that while denser CZs have traditionally been more intensive in high-skill work, the level and slope of this relationship between density and skill-intensity has risen consistently over multiple decades. The overlapping downward-sloping curves in the left panel show that the fraction of workers engaged in low-skill occupations has historically been much smaller in high-density CZs, and this pattern has changed little over decades. In the middle panel, the fan-shaped set of curves show that the denser CZs were exceptional in the 1970s for having far more middle-skill work than suburban and rural CZs. But this exceptional feature attenuated. By 2015, the densest CZs had less middle-skill work than the suburbs or rural areas.

Figure 2 Occupational employment shares among working-age adults by commuting zone population density, 1970-2015
Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.
We can decompose this into the different experiences of college-educated and non-college-educated adults (Figure 3). For college-educated adults, there was a decline of about eight percentage points in the share of college workers working in middle-skill occupations, and this shift was most pronounced in denser CZs. For non-college workers, at no point was there any meaningful density gradient in high-skill work among non-college workers. But in 1970 non-college workers in the densest CZs were approximately 25 percentage points more likely to work in middle-skill occupations than those in low density CZs. By 2015, the low-skill employment share among non-college workers was several points higher in the most- versus the least-dense CZs, while the middle-skill employment share was several points lower.

Figure 3 Occupational employment shares among working-age adults by commuting zone population density for college and non-college adults, 1970-2015
Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.
Where have all of these middle-skill jobs gone? Two secular demand-side forces have contributed substantially to their disappearance (Autor and Dorn 2013, Autor et al. 2016, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017): one is the decline of manufacturing production work in the face of automation and rising trade pressure; the second is the proliferation of increasingly capable and user-friendly office computing tools that have reduced demand for workers in routine office tasks. While manufacturing had already departed the densest urban areas by the 1970s, the march of office computing has been particularly significant for urban, non-college workers. In 1980, the share of non-college workers in clerical and administrative occupations was 15-plus percentage points higher in the most versus least dense CZs. As office computing capabilities advanced, clerical and administrative employment among non-college workers fell steeply from the 1980s onwards. By 2015, there was almost no remaining (positive) density gradient in office work among non-college workers.

Wage polarisation has been disproportionately urban

It is a robust empirical regularity that urban workers earn more than observably similar non-urban workers (Glaeser and Mare 2001, Moretti 2004, Glaeser and Resseger 2010). Given that land prices are intrinsically higher in dense locations, it is logical that higher urban wages compensate workers for the higher cost of urban living (holding amenities constant). For this to be an equilibrium, however, the productivity of urban workers must also be commensurately higher; otherwise, firms would locate elsewhere.

It is easy to imagine why urban productivity is greater for highly educated workers. In knowledge-intensive work, in-person interactions appear to have few close substitutes, meaning that proximity is critical. It is less obvious, however, why these productivity spillovers accrue to less-educated workers - but historically they clearly did so. One possibility suggested by the evidence above is that, in past decades, less-educated workers performed higher-skilled work in urban areas - specifically, production, clerical, and administrative jobs. If so, the secular decline of middle-skill urban occupations might have served to depress the urban wage premium among non-college workers.

Figure 4 Real log hourly wages among college and non-college adults, 1970-2015
Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.
Figure 4 shows that this has indeed occurred. Between 1990 and 2015, the urban wage premium among non-college workers declined by roughly two thirds, even as the urban wage premium among college workers steepened. A similar pattern is documented by Baum-Snow et al. (2018). As I demonstrate in Autor (2019), this striking pattern is not driven by other obvious confounds such as changes in age structure in urban areas, shifts in the educational composition of the broad 'non-college' category, lingering after-effects of the Great Recession, or artefacts of the rising immigrant share of urban workers. Rather, it appears to be a genuine change in urban wage structures. In short, occupational polarisation has disproportionately occurred in high-wage urban and metro labour markets, and it appears likely that the geography of polarisation has magnified its wage impacts.

Conclusion

Non-college workers in US cities perform substantially less skilled work than they did four decades ago. This change reflects the effects of automation and, to a lesser degree, international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labour markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has shunted non-college workers out of specialised middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations, diminished the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities, and attenuated the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work - many of which are technological in origin - have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.

References

Acemoglu, D and D H Autor (2011), "Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings," in Handbook of Labor Economics 4, Elsevier.

Acemoglu, D and P Restrepo (2017), "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets", NBER working paper 23285.

Autor, D (2019), " Work of the Past, Work of the Future", NBER working paper 25588.

Autor, D H, D Dorn, and G H Hanson (2013), "The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States", American Economic Review 103(6): 2121-2168.

Autor, D H, D Dorn, and G H Hanson (2016), "The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade", Annual Review of Economics 8(1): 205-240.

Baum-Snow, Nathaniel, Freedman, Matthew, and Pavan, Ronni, "Why Has Urban Inequality Increased?", American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10(4): 1-42.

Berry, C R and E L Glaeser (2005), "The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities", Papers in Regional Science 84(3): 407-444.

Blundell, R, R Joyce, A Norris Keiller, and J P Ziliak (2018), "Income Inequality and the Labour Market in Britain and the US", Journal of Public Economics 162: 48-62.

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Labour markets in US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were 50 years ago, but urban non-college workers now perform much less skilled work than they did. This column shows that automation and international trade have eliminated many of the mid-skilled non-college jobs that were disproportionately based in cities.

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Review your researched essay and check your referencing.

Watch the you tube video and use the information in the guide (link below to help you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgqqPvMn0U

When you have finished, post a short explanation of the difference between a citation and a reference on this padlet page.

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Watch the videos on the blog.
Answer the questions on p14

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What motivates staff? Find out in this article in Family Practice Management.

Where is the best place to work? Jason Fried believes that work doesn't happen at work ...

So how would you feel about working at a company like Google?

...and here is the New York office...

What do you think of the new billion-dollar offices of Apple, Google and Facebook ...

Check out these really cool-looking offices, voted the 'best and most innovative workplaces' in Britain.

Dan Pink discusses The Puzzle of Motivation and why the old idea of motivating workers is no longer relevant to the modern workplace...

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What motivates staff? Find out in this article in Family Practice Management. Where is the best place to work? Jason Fried believes that work doesn't happen at work... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs So how would you feel about working at a company like Google? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g_YsLR1wZo ...and here is the New York office...

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3. Watch the videos and do the quizzes on the blog here:

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3. Watch the videos and do the quizzes on the blog here:

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John Lewis is considered to be one of the best employers in the country. So how would you feel to get a big bonus on top of your salary every year? Find out what it feels like in this news report...

Find out more about the John Lewis bonus here...

...and here...

photo credit: Dan Lockton via photopin cc

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John Lewis is considered to be one of the best employers in the country. So how would you feel to get a big bonus on top of your salary every year? Find out what it feels like in this news report&#...