Job XP has been implemented. The more officers perform a job, the more experienced they become in that job, adding 1 XP point for each task performed:
This in turn can give some bonuses, depending on the job. Many of them will receive a speed bonus. Some others, like production-centric jobs (cooking in the screenshot) now divide their recipes into difficulty tiers, and you need more experience officers in order to reliably make more difficult recipes. But getting to high levels of expertise involves being specialized and some sacrifices, like in real life. This leads to a new major feature, officer specs. The concept of an "officer spec" is now in the game, and all officers start in a certainly familiar one:
Redshirts are jack of all trades, masters of none. The spec of an officer dictates what jobs they can perform, and initially there's no restrictions, but it enforces a cap on how much XP (and thus benefits) can be gained from a certain job. The staff UI now exposes the possible upgrades to the current spec:
In the screenshot, the redshirt officer has 4 possible upgrades, but none of them is ready yet. They must first reach a certain amount of XP in one or more jobs to make the cut. For example, to make a scientist, we can set one officer to be a fulltime cook in our kitchens. After it reaches the required XP, a message will pop up:
We can now visit the staff screen again and see that we can now perform the upgrade:
After the upgrade some jobs will become forbidden for the officer, but the XP cap for some others will be raised, enabling them to tackle more difficult recipes and to work faster. And it will also allow the to further specialized one more time, into a very focused tier 3 spec if desired.