Maintain professional knowledge or certifications
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 19 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Updating and Using Relevant Knowledge (4.A.2.b.3) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 19 occupations that perform it.
- Participate in continuing education classes to maintain current knowledge of industry.
- Specialize in a particular type of treatment, such as dentistry, pathology, nutrition, surgery, microbiology, or internal medicine.
- Maintain knowledge of, comply with, and enforce all institutional policies, rules, procedures, and regulations.
- Maintain knowledge of fire laws and fire prevention techniques and tactics.
- Maintain knowledge of current firefighting practices by participating in drills and by attending seminars, conventions, and conferences.
- Study communication code languages or foreign languages to translate intelligence.
- Learn the location and purpose of street traffic signs within assigned patrol areas.
- Participate in continuing education to stay abreast of industry trends and developments.
- Stay informed of the latest styles and hair care techniques.
- Stay abreast of latest industry trends, products, research, and treatments.
- Become familiar with digging plans, machine capabilities and limitations, and efficient and safe digging procedures in a given application.
- Earn and maintain appropriate certifications.
- Maintain knowledge of first-aid procedures.
- Attend meetings on driver and passenger safety to learn ways in which job performance might be affected.
- Maintain government-issued certifications, as required.
- Learn to operate new technology systems and procedures through instruction, simulators, or models.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
19 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Ambulance Drivers and Attendants, Except Emergency Medical Technicians
- Barbers
- Bus Drivers, School
- Captains, Mates, and Pilots of Water Vessels
- Crossing Guards and Flaggers
- Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining
- Firefighters
- First-Line Supervisors of Correctional Officers
- First-Line Supervisors of Entertainment and Recreation Workers, Except Gambling Services
- First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Passenger Attendants
- First-Line Supervisors of Personal Service Workers
- Intelligence Analysts
- Sailors and Marine Oilers
- Shuttle Drivers and Chauffeurs
- Skincare Specialists
- Spa Managers
- Subway and Streetcar Operators
- Veterinarians
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.