NICO Lightning Talk - Unpacking Human Capital Using Occupational Data

I was among a wonderful lineup of scholars at the "Wednesday@NICO" (Northwestern Institute on Complex System) Lightning Talk.
Here's the title and abstract of my talk:“Unpacking human capital using occupational skills”

How do we become more valuable workers? We invest in education and training to acquire skills, knowledge, and abilities that make us better at what we do. However, the acquisition of skills is not a series of independent events but is rather cumulative and interdependent among previous attainments. Certain skills are foundations for others— such as arithmetic for calculus— while there are skills like bodily coordination and orientation that can be mastered relatively independently. We ask whether such interdependencies determine the value of skills by analyzing skills' usage distributions across occupations.

Check out all presentations on YouTube— mine starts around the 41st minute.