In this episode of Work in Progress, Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, joins me to discuss the how changing skills are disrupting the way we work, and what every job seeker and employer should do next.

In a report released December 1, How Skills are Disrupting Work, the Burning Glass Institute looks at how fast-emerging skills are disrupting the labor market. "These four skills – AI / machine learning, cloud computing, product management, and social media – are now required in 1 in 8 job postings representing 5 million job openings just over the last year," according the the research.

"What we were interested in looking at is the skills that are doing the most to disrupt work," Sigelman tells me. "These skills – by virtue of the fact that they're spreading so fast – are coming to be foundational."

These skills are growing the fastest and spreading the widest, says Sigelman, and that has the potential to be disruptive.

"Those sets of skills are where we see surging demand, where we predict continued surge in demand, and where we're seeing them spread across sectors, across geographies. Those are the sets of skills where we probably already don't have enough supply of talent and it's going to get worse.

"That's where you wind up upending the apple cart. These sets of skills are coming to define a set of jobs. Those jobs are hard to fill and they're gonna get harder to fill."

What does this mean for employers and workers?

"These are skills that are spreading from Silicon Valley to Main Street. If you're an employer, this says you better be building that pipeline of talent, particularly if you're an employer in a industry where maybe you actually don't need this talent yet. They're moving from the tech industry to every industry. Coming soon to theater near you, right? You need to be developing that pipeline today."

"F or workers, this is an opportunity to put yourself in the cat bird seat in your career to be able to say, okay, where is the market going? What are the sets of skills that offer me not only the greatest value, the greatest pay premiums, and so forth, but what are the skills that are most likely to move me up."

Sigelman and I dive deeper into the skills that are becoming fundamental and foundational, discussing how each applies in today's job market.

You can listen to the entire podcast here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 253: Matt Sigelman, President, Burning Glass InstituteHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Download the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts