Step aside, blue collar. And white collar, pink collar and green collar. There's a new collar in town. "New collar" jobs are those that require advanced skills but not necessarily advanced degrees, especially in emerging high-tech fields like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity (网络安全), electric vehicles and robotics.
There are real fears that workers will lose jobs to technology especially artificial intelligence, in the coming years. But "new collar" optimists think in a more positive way: 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 Sarah Boisvert, the founder of the New-Collar Network.
Even if millions of high-tech jobs are created in the coming years, the impact on workers who lose jobs may be significant. For many Americans without four-year college degrees, according to census (人口普查) data, the new job market will require training.
Ginni Rometty, a former chief executive of IBM, is believed to have created a "new collar" in 2016. At the time, she said, IBM was having trouble filling cybersecurity jobs, partly because outdated criteria required that candidates have college degrees.
"Due to our high qualifications in these online jobs, we overlooked a large number of qualified and available candidates," she wrote in an email. "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."
Christopher M. Cox, a researcher who has written about the new-collar economy, said, "The alternative model of four-year universities is really great." However, he added that "new collar" may also be a clever term that relieves the anxiety of workers by defining the constantly changing labor market and technology companies as more ideal rather than "terminators (终结者)."
