Specialisation in the future

The importance of specialisation was first recognised in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations". In "The Wealth of Nations", Smith explained how specialisation could improve productivity and encourage innovation and increase the overall outputs of the economy or the nation. Nowadays when we re-consider his explanation, some differences are actually happening.

Firstly, specialisation may encourage innovation to some degree; however, in general, specialisation dis-encourage innovation and prevent innovation from taking place. Very deep specialisation does not require workers to have very deep knowledge about their work, they are only asked to repeat some very basic work every day and they may not need to know why they are asked to follow the required process. Under such situation, many of these workers may start to lose some of their knowledge and skills because of their lack of practice. From this point of view, specialisation does not require workers to have rich knowledge and workers with poor knowledge are not likely to create innovation or invention, especially when the technology is developing rapidly nowadays. Secondly, specialisation could lower the costs of production, as companies no longer need to hire expensive skilful and experienced workers. However, when the machinery can be used to replace human workers' positions, the workers hired by companies are required to have knowledge skills that cannot be done by pure machines. These skills are usually complicated and require knowledge from many different fields. Therefore, due to the development of technology and machinery, workers with general knowledge are more preferred than those with a single specialised skill. Moreover, when workers are more productive than previous as they are receiving the better education and people are expected to increase their education time continuously, hiring workers with multiple skills can increase the productivity as they can handle multiple positions and works. Thirdly, over-specialisation could lead to an increase in the complexity of the market. When a market is over-specialised, companies have to access to multiple layers to conduct their productions and have less control of their production when there are too many layers.

Therefore, I believe that workers with multiple skills and rich knowledge of different fields are and will be more preferred than workers with a single specialised skill.