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In recent years, the [information technology] IT industry is considered to be undergoing work standardization towards open and modular structure that are tailored for mobile workers and outsourcing. We conjecture that in this industry, companies may be transforming themselves to achieve industry standards with regard to required employee skills and evaluation criteria for these. Bearing this hypothesis in mind, we conducted case studies of two IT companies and looked in detail at the state of the modularization of work and skills evaluations. As a result of this research, we have found that the standardization of skills evaluation has progressed to a significant extent, but that the modularization of work is proving difficult in some areas, depending on the attributes of the job, and that some companies are clearly choosing not to restructure jobs towards a modular design in certain areas. We conclude that these companies are strategically custom-designing work process and skills evaluation in order to differentiate themselves from others.

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