Definition of "deskill"

deskill

verb
third-person singular simple present deskills, present participle deskilling, simple past and past participle deskilled
1. (transitive) To redesign (a job) so that less skill is required to carry it out, for example through the introduction of new technology.
  Quotations
  “Word processors are wonderful to make us more productive, but employers tend to take this to an extreme,” she said. “Some secretaries are very pleased with automation, but it's the larger number whose jobs are deskilled, made more redundant.”
  1985 August 4, Elizabeth Kolbert, quoting Deborah Meyer, “Computers Ease the Load — At Times”, in The New York Times‎
  But the data she presents “suggest a more complicated reality.” Even where “control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures.
  1988 April 21, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, quoting Shoshana Zuboff, “When Your Colleague Is a Machine”, in The New York Times‎
  [Henrik] Örnebring concluded that there had not been a de-skilling of journalism so much as a more complex process of re-skilling, and this is hard to dispute in relation to the use of technology to undertake a broader range of journalistic duties in the newsroom.
  2020, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, chapter 5, in After the Fact?, Repeater
2. (transitive) To change the role of (workers) so that they are no longer required or able to use the skills that they have acquired.
  Quotations
  In this transition from an economy built on energy-guzzling heavy industry toward a 21st century society of energy-sipping high technology, millions of Americans and Europeans are being “deskilled.”
  1983 June 12, Bruce Nussbaum, “‘Reskilling’ Workers”, in The New York Times‎