Currently, education policies are trying to address the changes that artificial intelligence is bringing to labour markets (OECD 2023; Unesco, 2022). The threat of automation is challenging the purpose and value of different educational pathways. While policy discourse emphasises upskilling and retraining as responses to technological change (Schiff, 2022), little attention is paid to understanding how education actually functions in middle-skill occupations already undergoing transformation.

Middle occupations, administrative, secretarial, and skilled trade roles, employ around one-fifth of the UK workforce yet have experienced significant decline. Economists have long attributed this to technological change, particularly routine-based technological change (RBTC), which predicts that routine cognitive tasks concentrated in middle occupations will be automated, leading to an "hourglass" labour market with growth at both ends but "hollowing out" in the middle (Goos and Manning 2007; Autor et al 2006). This framework has become central to understanding labour market shifts across developed economies.

Yet alongside this decline, middle occupations have undergone dramatic "graduatisation": university graduates in administrative roles rose from 3.8% in 1991 to 32.5% in 2021. This simultaneous decline and educational upgrading presents a puzzle that challenges both RBTC theory and education policy assumptions. This raises critical questions: What role does education play in these evolving occupations? How do formal qualifications relate to actual skill demands? What are the implications for vocational/higher education and lifelong learning?

Our theoretical framework draws on literature challenging some of the  RBTC theory's core assumptions (e.g. Brown et al 2020). We examine whether middle-skill work is genuinely "routine" and thus automatable, or whether this characterisation oversimplifies occupational realities. We also engage with literatures on credential inflation (Araki, 2020; Tholen 2020) and skill formation (Sung and Ashton) , asking whether increasing educational requirements reflect genuine skill demands or serve primarily as screening mechanisms.

This study examines administrative roles, legal, medical, and HR, as a critical case for understanding education's evolving role in middle-skill work. These occupations are particularly instructive because they span multiple sectors, show variation in growth patterns, and are central to automation debates given their assumed "routine" character. The UK provides a valuable case: it combines mass higher education expansion with vocational education challenges faced across Europe, making findings relevant to broader European debates about education system reform in the AI era.

Understanding the actual relationship between education and middle-skill work, rather than assumed relationships, becomes crucial as policymakers consider how to prepare workers for technological change.

The study examines middle-skill occupations by analysing the role of technology, workplace skills, and education. It addresses three questions: How have educational composition and work characteristics changed over time? How do workers understand skill demands and technology's role? How do they view education's importance in their jobs? The research focuses on administrative occupations (SOC Group 4), a 3-million-strong workforce (UK) experiencing significant decline despite its size. We examine three administrator types to capture occupational variation and differing growth patterns: legal administrators (primarily in law firms), medical administrators (mainly NHS), and HR administrators (across diverse sectors). Data collection occurred December 2023 to March 2025 through 22 in-depth interviews: 12 legal, 7 HR, and 3 medical administrators. Participants were recruited via LinkedIn, snowball sampling, and public organisational contacts. The sample was predominantly female (15 of 22), represented diverse ages and experience levels, and concentrated in South England. Online interviews lasted 35 to 80 minutes, exploring skill demands, technology impacts, education's role, occupational access, daily responsibilities, and career trajectories. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, anonymised, and analysed using thematic analysis.

Our findings challenge RBTC theory and education policy assumptions. First, administrative work proves far less routine than assumed. Administrators report substantial autonomy and varied responsibilities that expand beyond formal job descriptions, contradicting routinisation premises underlying automation predictions. Second, capabilities administrators identify as most essential and AI-resistant (communication, empathy, contextual judgment, adaptability) are developed primarily through work experience, apprenticeships, and vocational training rather than formal higher education. University degrees function increasingly as screening mechanisms rather than sources of job-relevant competencies, revealing a critical disconnect between credential requirements and actual skill development. Third, AI adoption remains limited and uneven across organisations, but where present is consistently framed as augmentation rather than replacement. The human-centred, relational aspects of administrative work remain irreplaceable precisely because they resist routinisation. Administrators emphasise that emotional intelligence, judgement, and interpersonal understanding remain crucial to effective work. Effective policy responses to support administrative workers could lie in recognising diverse learning pathways, strengthening vocational-higher education bridges, supporting sector-specific development, and moving beyond credentialism towards human-centred capabilities complementing technology.

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