For years, one line turned up in almost every office job advert. Secretary, sales assistant, accountant: "office software skills essential". Word, Excel, the in-house system.
That line is becoming rarer and rarer. And it is not because these jobs are disappearing.
That is the surprising conclusion of a study by two economists at the Paris School of Economics, Marie-Renée Andreescu and Éric Maurin, who combed through job adverts posted with France Travail.
What recruiters no longer ask for
Between 2023 and 2025, the share of office adverts requiring IT skills fell by around 40%. The decline mainly affects proficiency with office software.
The most interesting part is what is not moving. The number of posts on offer is holding up. Salaries are not falling by a corresponding amount. Companies are still hiring secretaries and accountants. They are simply no longer asking them to know how to do certain things with a computer.
The researchers did not settle for reading adverts. They analysed more than 600,000 new vacancies per quarter, from the end of 2021 to the middle of 2025, and cross-referenced them with declarations made to the Sécurité sociale. The result: they know not only what companies were asking for, but also whom they actually hired. That is what makes the study solid: it tracks hires, not just intentions.
Why the change
Think about what a tidy table in a spreadsheet required only three years ago. You had to know the formulas, the formatting, the shortcuts. It was a real skill, and it showed immediately in an interview.
Today, you can ask an assistant to build that table from a sentence. The skill has not disappeared, but it no longer sets two candidates apart.
According to the authors, generative AI makes ordinary users more efficient, and the least qualified in particular. It lowers the level of skill needed to do the job. Recruiters draw the obvious conclusion: why demand what the tool allows anyone to do?
Good news, and other news
The good news is that a barrier is coming down. Someone who is not comfortable with computers can now apply for jobs that were closed to them. It is rare for a technology to open doors rather than close them.
The other news is that the advantage of those who mastered these tools is eroding. Years spent becoming the person who can do anything in Excel are worth less than before. As we described on Sunday: when a machine can do a task, the price of that skill falls.
And for IT jobs themselves, the study paints a darker picture: vacancies there fell sharply about a year after ChatGPT arrived, not before.
What it means for you
If you are looking for an office job, stop counting on "proficiency in Microsoft Office" to set you apart. Everyone can now claim it, and recruiters know it.
The study does not say what is replacing those lines in adverts. But the logic suggests a lead: what matters is what the tool does not do in your place. Knowing the trade, knowing whom to talk to, and above all being able to spot when the machine's output is wrong.
In the United States, tech job cuts are making headlines. In France, for office jobs, this study tells a quieter story: the employment is still there, it is the ideal CV that is changing.