Sydney (TIP): The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labour, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold.

Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace of change is picking up, threatening to leave large numbers of workers unemployed and unemployable.

New technologies also create new jobs, but the skills they require do not always match the old jobs. Successfully moving between jobs requires making the most of your current skills and acquiring new ones, but these transitions can falter if the gap between old and new skills is too large.

We have built a system to recommend career transitions, using machine learning to analyse more than 8 million online job ads to see what moves are likely to be successful. The details are published in PLOS ONE.

Our system starts by measuring similarities between the skills required by each occupation. For example, an accountant could become a financial analyst because the required skills are similar, but a speech therapist might find it harder to become a financial analyst as the skill sets are quite different.