Wanted: ‘Nieuwe Kraag’ workers

no͞o kŏl-ər

A job that requires specialized skills, but not necessarily a university degree, and is becoming increasingly important in emerging high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Step aside, blue collar. And white collar, pink collar and green collar.

There’s a new collar in town.

“New jobs” are those that require advanced skills but not necessarily advanced degrees, especially in emerging high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, electric vehicles and robotics.

There are real fears that workers will lose jobs in the coming years due to technology, especially artificial intelligence. But “new collar” optimists (including those at companies looking to hire) see things in a more positive light: There are also real opportunities ahead for skilled workers who know how to handle machines.

“Someone has to program, monitor and maintain those robots,” said Sarah Boisvert, the founder of the New Collar Network, a national workforce training program in New Mexico.

Even if millions of high-tech jobs are created in the coming years, the disruption for workers who lose their jobs could be significant. For the many Americans without a four-year college degree — more than half of adults, according to census data — the new labor market will require training.

Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, is credited with inventing ‘new collar’ in 2016. At the time, she said, IBM was having trouble filling cybersecurity jobs, in part because outdated criteria required candidates to have a college degree.

“Because we were overqualified for those cyber jobs, we overlooked an entire pool of qualified, available candidates,” she wrote in an email. “Unless millions of people are trained in the skills employers need now,” she added, “they risk becoming unemployed even as millions of good-paying jobs remain unfilled.”

Many employers seem to have gotten the message. Hiring managers are increasingly using skills-based filters on LinkedIn to find candidates, a LinkedIn spokeswoman said, adding that 155 million of the platform’s more than 930 million users are workers without a four-year degree.

“It’s useful to have a concise term that helps companies get energized to do something innovative,” he says Colleen Ammerman, the director of the Race, Gender and Equity Initiative at Harvard Business School. She cited the electric vehicle sector as an example, which requires many skilled workers. (In the past, these jobs may have been hailed as “green collar jobs.”)

In 2017, 2019 And 2021the House introduced – but did not pass – versions of the New Collar Jobs Act, which aimed to promote jobs and training in areas such as cybersecurity.

“It’s great that alternative models exist for a four-year degree,” says Christopher M. Cox, a researcher who has written about the new-collar economy. But he added that “new collar” could also be a clever term to downplay workers’ concerns, framing the changing labor market and tech companies’ ventures as more utopia, less “The Terminator.”