Professional Service Jobs: Highly Paid but Subject to Disruption?

Professional service jobs are attractive because they pay well and, because of advanced skill requirements, have been relatively resistant to disruption. This research questions the job security of professional service workers in healthcare, higher education, legal services, and management. Specifically, we explore the potential for new and advanced information technologies to allow lower-paid employees to do the work of service professionals. We do this by empirically analyzing job characteristics that might justify the higher pay of professional service jobs and then evaluating whether those characteristics are truly distinctive of professionals. We consider job characteristics pertaining to low task structure and high decision impact, which theory suggests inhibit automation and justify professional training. Specific contributions of the research include (1) a model depicting three modes by which advanced information technologies (expert systems) impact professional service jobs, (2) clarification of what is meant by “professional service” in a way that we can operationalize empirically, (3) hypotheses about characteristics of professional service jobs that might justify higher pay, and (4) tests of the hypotheses across and between the aforementioned professional service job categories. Results show that professional service jobs are distinct according to the considered job characteristics but that the distinctions are not universal across industries. Healthcare professions are the most distinctive on these characteristics and, thus, are seemingly less likely to be disrupted. Professional jobs in education, legal services, and management are less distinctive and, thus, more susceptible to be taken over by less-trained and lower-paid workers supported with advanced technologies.