by no͞o kŏl-ər
A job that requires specialized skills, but not necessarily a college degree, and that is becoming more important in emerging high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
Move over, blue collar. And white collar, pink collar and green collar.
There’s a new necklace in town.
“New collar” 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 their jobs to technology, especially artificial intelligence, in the coming years. But “new collar” optimists (including those at companies looking to hire) frame things in a more positive light: There are also real opportunities ahead for skilled workers who know how to operate the machines.
“Someone has to program, monitor and maintain those robots,” said Sarah Boisvert, founder of New Collar Network, a national workforce training program based in New Mexico.
Even if millions of high-tech jobs are created in the coming years, the disruption to workers who lose their jobs could be significant. For the many Americans without four-year college degrees — more than half of adults, according to census data — the new job market will require training.
Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, is credited with coining the “new necklace.” in 2016. At the time, he said, IBM was having trouble filling cybersecurity jobs, in part because outdated criteria required candidates to have college degrees.
“Because we had too many credentials for those cyber jobs, we were overlooking an entire pool of qualified and available candidates,” he 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 go 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 four-year degrees.
“It’s helpful to have a concise term that helps encourage companies to do something innovative,” he said. Colleen Ammerman, director of the Race, Gender and Equity Initiative at Harvard Business School. She pointed to the electric vehicle industry as an example that will require many skilled workers. (In the past, these may have been hailed as “green” 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 fields such as cybersecurity.
“It’s great that there are alternative models to the four-year college,” said 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’ anxieties, framing the changing labor market and tech companies as more utopias, less “The Terminator.”
