Workforce transition is institutional design, not training.

Reskilling programmes are a useful instrument. They are not a strategy. A country that confuses one for the other will spend the next decade running courses while the underlying institutions that govern work drift further from the reality of the labour market.

The harder conversation

The harder conversation is about the institutions that organise work. Employment services. Adult education. Collective bargaining structures. Unemployment systems. Career advisory services. These were built for an industrial labour market with well-understood transitions. They are being asked, almost without notice, to serve a labour market where general-purpose models are a routine input.

What a redesign would actually touch

A serious institutional redesign would revisit how public employment services match people to work, how unemployment insurance is triggered, how adult learning is credentialed, how unions represent workers across professions that did not exist five years ago, and how firms are expected to report on human-AI task composition.

This is not science fiction. It is the kind of policy work that quietly defines whether the next decade of the labour market is legible.