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

There is a new collar in town.

“New collar” jobs are those that require advanced skills but not necessarily advanced degrees. They can be found especially in emerging high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), cyber security, electric vehicles and robotics.

There are real fears that workers will lose jobs to technology, especially AI, 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 handle machines.

“Somebody has to program, monitor and maintain those robots,” said Ms Sarah Boisvert, the founder of the 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 jobs may 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.

Former IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty is credited with coining “new collar” in 2016.

At the time, she said, IBM was having trouble filling cyber security jobs, partly because outdated criteria required that candidates have college degrees.

“Because we over-credentialed for those cyber jobs, we were overlooking an entire pool of qualified, available candidates,” she wrote in an e-mail.

“Unless millions of people are trained in the skills employers need now,” she added, “they risk being unemployed even as millions of good-paying jobs go unfilled.”

Many employers seem to have received the message.

Hiring managers are increasingly using skills-based filters on LinkedIn to find candidates, a LinkedIn spokesperson said, adding that 155 million of the platform’s more than 930 million users are workers without four-year degrees.

Ms Colleen Ammerman, the director of the Race, Gender and Equity Initiative at Harvard Business School, said: “Having a pithy term that helps companies get energised about doing something innovative is helpful.”

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 collar” jobs.

In 2017, 2019 and 2021, the House of Representatives introduced – but did not pass – versions of the New Collar Jobs Act, which aimed to promote jobs and training in fields including cyber security.

“It’s great there are alternative models to four-year college,” said researcher Christopher Cox, who has written about the new collar economy.

But he added that “new collar” might also be a clever term to downplay workers’ anxieties, by framing the changing labour market and tech companies’ ventures as more utopia, less The Terminator. NYTIMES