A friend sent me an article from the Business Times last week. The subject was turquoise-collar workers.
I had to stop and read that twice. White-collar, blue-collar — those I know. But turquoise? That was new. And if it was new to me, with 25 years in practice and AI woven into how I work daily, it was almost certainly new to most people scrolling through their LinkedIn feeds right now.
Which is exactly why it’s worth talking about before everyone else catches up.
What the term means — and why the colour matters
The collar-colour shorthand has been with us since the early twentieth century. White collar for the office professional. Blue collar for the manual tradesperson. Over the decades, more colours emerged — pink, grey, gold, green — each marking a shift in how we understood work, skill, and value.
Turquoise sits between blue and green. That’s not accidental. It describes something genuinely in between — a worker who hasn’t abandoned their core craft or domain expertise, but has deliberately layered AI fluency into how they think and execute. Not an AI specialist. Not a coder. A designer who uses AI to sharpen strategy. A lawyer who uses it to move faster through research. A consultant who uses it to synthesise what would have taken three days into three hours — and then applies twenty years of judgement to the output.
The turquoise-collar worker is not defined by what they do. They’re defined by how they’ve chosen to evolve.
The tension worth naming
Four things are simultaneously true right now, and the fact that we rarely say all four in the same breath is telling.
Most people using AI are users, not thinkers. There is a difference, and it is not a small one. Clicking a prompt and accepting whatever comes out is not integration. It’s outsourcing.
A turquoise-collar worker knows the difference between AI as a shortcut and AI as an amplifier. One replaces thinking. The other sharpens it.
Organisations and individuals are caught in a waiting game. Companies expect their people to upskill. People expect their companies to train them. Both are waiting for the other to move first. In the meantime, the window narrows. This is not a new dynamic — I’ve watched it play out across industries throughout my career. The workers who didn’t wait are the ones who came out ahead every time. The ones who waited for institutional permission are still waiting.
AI is also doing something quietly uncomfortable: it’s exposing who was always adding genuine value and who was always filling time. When a tool can produce a first draft, generate options, and synthesise research in minutes, what’s left for the human is judgement, context, relationships, and creative problem-solving. If those were never truly part of someone’s contribution, that absence becomes visible now in a way it wasn’t before. That’s not cruel. It’s clarifying.
And underneath all of this, the old collar-colour categories are simply becoming inadequate. The divide that matters now is not between office worker and manual worker. It is between those who have adapted and those who are still deciding whether to. That’s the line. Everything else is noise.
Where I sit
I’ll be direct: I’m already there. AI is not something I use occasionally or experimentally. It is part of how I think through problems, develop strategy, produce content, and run my practice. I am not a coder. I have no technical background in any conventional sense. I am a designer and strategist who made a deliberate decision to treat AI as an extension of professional judgement rather than a replacement for it.
My positioning — Strategic by Design. Amplified by AI. — isn’t a tagline. It’s a description of how I actually work.
What I’ve found is this: the tools don’t make you better at what you’re bad at. They make you better at what you’re already good at — if you apply them with intention.
The amplification is real. But it requires something the tools themselves can’t supply: the expertise, the discernment, and the accumulated experience to know when the output is good, when it’s close, and when it’s completely wrong.
That’s what the turquoise-collar worker brings. Domain depth, amplified.
The question nobody wants to answer honestly
Here’s what I keep thinking about.
The term “turquoise-collar worker” is new. The concept is not. Workers have always been divided between those who adopted new tools early and those who waited — or resisted — until adoption was no longer a choice but a requirement. The ones who waited rarely came out ahead. They came out having lost ground they didn’t realise they were losing.
We are in that moment again. Except this time, the pace of change is compressed in ways that previous technological shifts were not. The gap between early adopter and late adopter is narrowing faster than it ever has.
So the real question isn’t what a turquoise-collar worker is. The real question is whether you are one — and if not, what exactly you’re waiting for.
Be inspired not by what is but by what could be. That’s not just a phrase I live by. It’s a practical operating principle for anyone trying to navigate this shift with intention rather than anxiety.
The collar colour you wear is, ultimately, a choice.
What colour are you choosing?
