Many Futures of Work and Skill: Heterogeneity in Skill Building Experiences on Digital Labor Platforms

Platform workers face the paradox of skill building: they bear full responsibility for addressing increasingly intricate, unpredictable, and undervalued skilling demands, while simultaneously grappling with limited access to structured, guided skill-building opportunities. While prior studies within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community acknowledge the paradox, they do not provide much insight into these worker's experiences. And, the contemporary literature provides limited insight into how workers' professional and personal circumstances such as occupational position and family arrangement leads to different sorts of outcomes. To address these gaps, we bring attention to the evolving nature of skill building experiences among platform workers. In this paper, we (1) expound upon four major shifts in skill building experiences in platform-mediated work, (2) highlights the significance of demographic heterogeneity as a lens to unravel the intricate narratives of skill building experiences in platform-mediated work, and (3) discuss three research implications for the HCI community. Our work contributes to the emerging body of skill literature in the HCI and cognate community by (1) providing a comprehensive elaboration on the evolving conditions surrounding skill building among platform workers and (2) offering insights for future research endeavors pertaining to supporting worker-centered skill building experiences.