Returning to Work : The Role of Soft Skills and Automation-Resistance on Unretirement Decisions

Human workers and machines often compete against each other for jobs. In light of the growing unretirement (i.e., post-retirement employment), we explore the linkages between the individuals’ skill-specific automatability and their unretirement decisions. The skill-specific automatability is measured by how routinized their skills are and how little non-routine analytical adaptability, non-routine social intelligence, non-routine physical adaptability, and non-routine interpersonal adaptability (i.e., soft skills in which human workers hold a comparative advantage over the machines) their skills encompass. Using 2000-2016 Health and Retirement Study, we find that the retirees who are more automatable are discouraged from unretiring by 2.0 percent. Among the unretirees, those who are more automatable tend to be hired into jobs whose task-contents are also more automatable. We contribute to the unretirement literature by providing empirical evidence that retirees’ high automatability poses a hurdle in their returning to the labour force and aspiring for productive aging