--- title: "Keeping Up with AI, Leaving Jobs? AI-Oriented Human Capital Updating, Occupational AI Exposure, and Employee Turnover · AI Fault Line" url: https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-7282-t3-pmdy-ex04/ description: "AI Fault Line is a neutral, evidence-cited field guide to why experts looking at the same developments disagree about AI's effect on productivity, jobs, inequality, regulation and the pace of change." --- [Research](https://aifaultline.com/research/) # Keeping Up with AI, Leaving Jobs? AI-Oriented Human Capital Updating, Occupational AI Exposure, and Employee Turnover Qizhong Yang · Rutgers University Community Repository (Rutgers University) · 7 Oct 2026 [Read original source](https://www.proquest.com/LegacyDocView/DISSNUM/32903904) Open access Where this sits in the debate - [Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?](https://aifaultline.com/debate/jobs/) Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model ([AI-written](https://aifaultline.com/about/)). ## Key takeaway [AI-written](https://aifaultline.com/about/) Drawing on 106,822 person-year resume records from 29,341 job seekers on a Chinese recruitment platform (2020-2025), this study finds that workers who add AI-related skills to their resumes are more likely to change jobs afterwards, even with two- and three-year lags. The link is stronger for more experienced workers and grew in recent years, but does not vary with education or with the AI exposure of current or desired occupations. ## Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming both the content of work and the capabilities workers present to the labor market. This study examines whether AI-oriented human capital updating, annual increases in AI-related signals in resume-related text, is associated with subsequent turnover. Drawing on strategic human capital research and signaling theory, I argue that AI-oriented updating makes AI-related human capital visible to external employers, thereby increasing workers’ marketability and likelihood of subsequent turnover. I further examine whether this relationship is conditioned by the AI exposure of individuals’ current and desired occupations and by traditional human capital characteristics, including education and tenure. Using 106,822 person-year observations from 29,341 jobseekers, drawn from annual resume and work-history records from a large Chinese online recruitment platform from 2020 through 2025, I construct a person-year panel and estimate first-event discrete-time hazard models. The results show that AI-oriented human capital updating is positively associated with subsequent first observed turnover, and this relationship remains significant when updating is lagged by two and three years. The positive relationship is stronger among individuals with greater accumulated work experience, but it does not vary significantly by education, desired-occupation AI exposure, or current-occupation AI exposure. Supplementary analyses further indicate that the association between AI-oriented updating and turnover became stronger in more recent years. By documenting the labor-market value of AI-related human capital, examining its consequences across occupational contexts, and demonstrating its consistent role in worker mobility, this study advances research on strategic human capital, labor-market signaling, turnover, and the role of AI in shaping careers and workforce flows. ## About this publication **Academic journal.** Published in an academic journal — typically peer-reviewed before publication, though indexing alone doesn't guarantee review depth. Published 2026 (recently) Citations 0 (OpenAlex) 0 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2026 papers in this collection for a fair comparison. [Chart: published 2026] ## More on this topic Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion. - [The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-2139-ssrn-4945566/) SSRN · 2024 - [GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-48550-arxiv-2303-10130/) arXiv · 2023 - [Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1126-science-adh2586/) Science · 2023 - [The simple macroeconomics of AI](https://aifaultline.com/research/p/doi-10-1093-epolic-eiae042/) Economic Policy · 2024 Overview assembled automatically from collected metadata. [How this site is built](https://aifaultline.com/about/).