The Platinum Workforce: How to Train and Hire for the 21st Century’s Industrial Transition

Artificial intelligence is already causing a major shift in the nature of work. Countries, colleges, or employers are not prepared to continuously train billions of knowledge workers to compete in this new economic reality. But that’s not all. More change is coming due to the polycrisis of pressing challenges such as sustainability, social inequality, and geopolitical instability. Figuring out what career paths, skills, and talents we need to nurture has never been more urgent, especially for those who aspire to leadership.
In The Platinum Workforce, futurist and technologist Trond Arne Undheim reveals how to be a changemaker in the ongoing re-industrial transition. Industrial principles such as lean manufacturing, technological advancement, and production at scale meet significant sustainability challenges, increased risks, and intricate inequality concerns from the Global South as well as from workers in advanced societies who also feel left behind. Undheim has spent the last decade examining the technologies, risks, and trends shaping the future of work. Helping startups, shaping governance policies, teaching students, and building educational programs, he has found that there are two core skills and ten complementary skills that will define both individual and collective success in the future of work. The core skills are deft human–AI collaboration and an innate interoperability mindset, but teams together mastering the ten complementary skills—eco-awareness, maker skills, mediation skills, megascale operations, mobility, risk aptitude, R&D hacks, psycho-resilience, sociotechnical finesse, and systems thinking—is what will define future leadership.
Leading the 21st-century workplace will require unprecedented levels of human–AI collaboration. But evolving new forms of augmented intelligence will not be easy. We all have to train for it, constantly adapting to new interfaces and watching out for risks that could derail progress or create new problems. But the challenge does not stop there. Tackling the cascading effects of evolving hazards requires astute risk management. Transdisciplinary skills such as an entrepreneurial approach, megascale execution ability, and socio-technical skills will need to be constantly honed. Leaders and workers alike need to develop an interoperability mindset. Success requires adapting to, and helping others adapt to, the fundamental shifts in the materials, methods, tools, and technologies fueling the intricate cultural machine we call society. No matter our degrees, experiences, resources, or current skill sets, to compete in this new world, we need a reset.