They’re definitely a new breed!
Don’t call them blue collar and don’t call them white collar. Blue, many perceive as life-long drudgery with a wasted body by the age of fifty, and white as onerous college debt with the worst ROI imaginable.

They avoid large factories and mega warehouses where for every robot deployed three jobs go missing. Besides, those gigs are way up there on the blue-collar drudgery meter. They also shun white-collar offices that track keystrokes, screen email, and surveil worker productivity.

Around them, the world is just beginning to make room for their kind and see value in their non-traditional worldview. Colleges have dropped the SAT. Law schools jettisoned the LSAT. And now employers large and small are dropping the college degree requirement on resumes. A move that seems reasonable since 66% of the country’s population is without a college degree.

See related: States Are Leading the Effort to Remove Degree Requirements from Government Jobs.

As the NYT blared in a headline, which must have put a smile on the faces of all these new-breed contrarians: “Emerging fields like AI, EVs, and robotics feel like a new age in jobs is beginning to settle in, jobs that require advanced skills but not necessarily advanced degrees.”

Somewhere background music from X Ambassadors’ Renegade suddenly rises up full: “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, living like we’re renegades. Two kids like you & me. Go forth and have no fear. Our time to break the rules. Let’s begin…”

Some have called them the future of manufacturing in America. “If industry is to invigorate and revitalize manufacturing, it must start with the new-collar workers who essentially make digital fabrication for Industry 4.0 possible.”

Back in 2016, IBM’s then-CEO Ginny Rometty gave them the moniker: “New Collar” workers. She said, “that new-collar jobs in many industries remain largely unfilled. The surprising thing,” she added, “is that not all of these positions require advanced education or require a traditional college degree. What matters most is that these employees have relevant skills, often obtained through vocational training.”

For nearly a decade after Rometty’s new-collar appellation, a germination process set in, helped along by the lingering aftereffects of The Great Recession of 2008, COVID, work from home, return to office, work-life balance, quiet quitting, digitalization, the rise of machine learning, and a heavy dose of inflation.

Suddenly, there they were by the millions, savvy, new-collar workers needing training and upskilling. They are smart, energetic, and most of all, they are young. A perfect combination for any American manufacturer. And now with the democratizing effects of generative AI (GenAI) influencing most everything there is that matters, they have an unparalleled opportunity to upgrade themselves and all of Industry 4.0. In fact, as pundits have long decried the “hollowing out of America’s middle class,” these young men and women workers may well be its revival and ultimate salvation.

New data from a Cengage Group survey indicates that the increased interest in hiring new-collar workers is more than a passing trend. “Rather, it represents a systemic shift in the way the future workforce will take shape. In short, the need for generative AI expertise is changing conventional wisdom in how we recruit, interview and hire tech talent, leaning into candidates with the right skills and competencies needed to work with AI and machine learning, no matter where they learned them.

The Era of the New Collar Worker survey polled 700 tech hiring managers and decision-makers in the U.S. Its goal was to explore whether employers were considering unconventional candidates for AI roles, the impact of these employees on their organizations and how hiring practices are evolving due to AI’s rapid rise. The findings provide a snapshot of just how dramatically AI is upending traditional hiring practices.