What’s Trending: Knowledge and Intellectual Workers

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Did you know that there are different types of workers? The world isn’t necessarily divided into blue-collar and office jobs, as no two jobs are exactly the same. The different types of workers that make up the workforce have different careers, and they should plan accordingly to ensure they achieve the most in their daily lives and overall for the maximum benefit.  

So, what are the knowledge workers and intellectual workers? Are these just synonyms, or is there a clear difference? Read this mini article to explore this information along with the insight of some of the top publications.

Indeed

The workforce is no longer what it used to be. Once upon a time, people took up manual professions and skilled labor as a living, but this has been slowly replaced by the knowledge worker. In an article, the Indeed Editorial team gives a breakdown of knowledge workers, who they are, and what they do.

First things first, what is a knowledge worker? They are workers who have expertise in a particular field, and they make their living through “thinking.”

Are there any other types of workers? Indeed lists four different types: knowledge, information, task, and skilled workers. According to them, the difference between the types of workers is that knowledge workers lead the others to apply information, complete tasks, or perform skills.

Now, this doesn’t mean that only knowledge workers use their thinking skills; all types of workers do, but their jobs tend to rely on this knowledge a bit more. Indeed lists as examples IT consultants, physicians, research scientists, financial analysts, marketing consultants, teachers, and construction managers.

“Knowledge workers perform a variety of job duties to help solve problems and retrieve, share, teach, and apply information for successful work activities.”

So, if you want to transition or highlight the skills that an intellectual worker has, you should develop these skills:

• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Interpersonal communication
• Project solving
• Project management

Forbes

Joseph Ours begins his piece for Forbes with a bold claim: “The knowledge worker is dead.” So, how did he come to that conclusion? Is it true that the new type of worker, the intellectual, is here to replace it?

First, what is an intellectual worker? He defines it as someone who uses AI less as a tool and more like a partner to process information faster. These workers are different because they can balance and create where AI has weaknesses.

“As AI takes over more routine tasks, the value of human work is evolving. The most successful people will be intellectual workers.”

These new workers will ensure that the future is both machine and human, finding new perspectives through the blend of machine thinking and humanity’s creativity. Through translation skills, they’ll help companies move beyond AI’s limitations to reach companies’ potential.

Anyone can transition into being an intellectual worker by just following these steps: focus on human skills like creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. Collaborate with AI, learn how to frame problems, and draw your own conclusions. Synthesize information to ensure that you see the different patterns through varied points of view. Learn to translate for AI to gain leverage beyond its limitations. Become adaptable, move with every change to ensure that there’s always a skill you can use.

Fast Company

Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic writes a long article for Fast Company about the farce of work and its productivity. Many articles, books, and even TV shows have criticized the brutality of the office farce: the water cooler conversations, the pretending to work just to ensure that people put in the hours. So what does this have to do with knowledge or intellectual workers?

With the rise of knowledge work, productivity became harder to track, as a lot of the times there isn’t a big final product by one person, just a collection of tasks. Skilled labor, for example, produces a tangible product, such as a ring by a jeweller, a crop of apples for a farmer. As such, the harder it is to explain what people do at their jobs, the easier it is to fake productivity.

How do people pretend to be productive at work? Scheduling meetings, taking time to carefully track productivity on a specific page, and more. This is “work” but has no impact on the overall production of a company. Not only that, when productivity reviews come in, studies show that managers tend to evaluate the performance of work rather than the actual productivity, meaning that they rely on recent events, likeability, and self-confidence.

“As work becomes more cerebral, we also become better at gaming the system. Impression management has become a meta-skill: not the work itself, but the ability to make others believe that we are working, and working well.”

So, where does AI come in this reality? Well, AI has been hailed as a big revelation that can bring down knowledge workers’ time working on something by 40-50%, and for intelligence workers up to 75%. In reality, this hasn’t been achieved, not because people aren’t working faster, but because it all falls into the perception of productivity. People still have to go to meetings, fill out productivity reports, and answer emails—they need to look busy, and just being productive doesn’t always mean looking busy to managers. It’s not all about output, but also the input.

So the bottom line is that appearing busy and talking about your achievements is actually a much better strategy towards a promotion rather than actual impact, as this can be hard to measure. A way to even the playing field is in the hands of managers and leaders, by learning to measure outcomes rather than being obfuscated by the perception of work, but as a worker, you must be your greatest cheerleader.

The takeaway

Work has changed a lot over the years, with knowledge workers being some of the most important employees in the modern labor market. Still, the advent of AI will give rise to a new kind of worker, one that leverages their knowledge along with the most cutting-edge tools to improve in all areas of work. Still, there is a factor to be considered, as the most productive people aren’t necessarily the ones advancing at work, since knowledge work isn’t as easy to understand and quantify.

If workers want to advance, they must learn to adapt to new technologies and advocate for themselves and their achievements, even if these aren’t quite understood.