GSM visa applicants are assessed on the basis of a points-test that takes into account a range of characteristics, including the applicant's age, education, skills, occupation, experience, and language ability.
First, despite their high levels of formal education, immigrants were initially employed in low-skill occupations, and moved up the occupational ladder only a number of years after arrival.
It finds that immigrants in recent years are most pominant in low-skill occupations, with a significant presence amongst high-skilled occupations as well.
From 2007 to 2009, the paper said, there was relatively little net change in total employment for both high-skill and low-skill occupations, while employment plummeted in so-called middle-skill occupations.
In recent decades jobs requiring middling skills have declined sharply as a share of total employment, while employment in high- and low-skill occupations has increased.
To take one prominent example, medical paraprofessional jobs — radiology technician, phlebotomist, nurse technician — are a rapidly growing category of relatively well-paid, middle-skill occupations.
The high- and low-skill occupations to which employment is polarizing either do not experience contractions, or if they do, rebound soon after the turning point in aggregate output.
Those spurts of change are economic downturns: Dr. Jaimovich and Dr. Siu have found that in the United States since the mid-1980s, 92 percent of job loss in routine, middle-skill occupations has happened within 12 months of a recession.
Indeed, even as formerly middle-skill occupations are being "deskilled," or stripped of their routine technical tasks (brokering stocks, for example), other formerly high-end occupations are becoming accessible to workers with less esoteric technical mastery (for example, the work of the nurse practitioner, who increasingly diagnoses illness and prescribes drugs in lieu of a physician).
Motor vehicles can spend more time in use, with less human error, but there will be no human operator to share in the gains.At the same time labour markets are hollowing out, polarising into high- and low-skill occupations, with very little employment in the middle.
High-skill occupations comprise ISCO major groups 1 3, medium-skill occupations include ISCO major groups 4 8 and low-skill occupations are elementary occupations (ISCO major group 9).
