The differences in labour market over time

I discussed why I believed labours with broader knowledge would be more preferred with labours with narrow but specialised skills. My belief is that in the future the demand side will prefer specialisation in order to meet different customers' different preferences and demands but the supply side will prefer generalisation in order to hire labours with broader skills to reduce their costs of using labours when it is cheaper and cheaper to use machinery to replace labours in some basic positions.

Many differences have been made since Adam Smith wrote his famous book, "The Wealth of Nations". Firstly, as I mentioned previously, the labours nowadays are better educated than the labours during Adam Smith's period. People have longer education periods and more knowledge has become available to the general public. Such education environment is much better than the past. Secondly, the costs of receiving the education have been partially passed to individuals rather than employers. In the past, high levels of education were the privilege of the elite classes, employers had to pay the costs of training their employees. Nowadays, employees receive a large part of their training at schools by spending their private costs. Thirdly, though employers still need to train their employees to fit into specific positions, the overall time taken becomes less. Fourthly, the use of machine only requires fixed costs and is playing a larger and larger part in the production and the use labour forces require continuous spending on hiring labour. In some fields, the increase in using machinery can reduce the costs of production, so the employers are more interested in hiring expensive and elite workers which cannot be replaced by machines.

Overall, the quality and characteristics of labours have been changing over the last several centuries due to increase in the population education.