The Newest Report in the Frontline-First Research Initiative
Frontline workers are the backbone of the global economy: from nurses, truck drivers, and warehouse teams to restaurant staff, hotel associates, retail workers, and pilots. With over 100 million workers performing more than 165 million jobs across 20 industries, they’re essential to your organization’s success.
While frontline-heavy organizations face a familiar set of pressures: chronic role vacancies, intense competition for talent, high turnover, and nonnegotiable safety and compliance obligations, this is a complex and multi-dimensional workforce that demands special consideration.
Get a special preview of the Five Types of Frontline Workers via the complimentary tool to better understand why one size does not fit all the frontline. Download here:
Historically, most HR and talent strategies still lump everyone together as “deskless” or “non-office” workers. This imprecise descriptor hides critical differences in skills, risk, and value.
Each frontline workforce category requires unique support, tools, and talent lifecycle planning, thanks to realities uncovered in The Josh Bersin Company’s new in-depth research report, Understanding the Five Types of Frontline Workers:
- Massive variation in pay and career potential, from entry-level service roles to highly credentialed professionals
- Turnover that can exceed 250% annually in some customer-facing roles, driving huge hiring and training costs
- Growing shortages in licensed and highly skilled frontline jobs threaten service quality and operational continuity
With AI reshaping white-collar work, more people are looking at frontline careers—but without a clear framework, HR leaders can’t design the tailored talent and tech strategies required to differentiate the outcomes that drive business results.
Our new report, which is the next installment in our Frontline-First Research Initiative, changes that.
The research dives deep into the specific strategies, tactics, and plans that best align with the needs and realities of:
- Customer Facing Associates
- Back-Office Associates.
- High-Skilled Specialists
- Licensed Specialists
- Credentialed Professionals
Learn More:
Access & apply the new research by:
- Reviewing the complimentary Five Types of Frontline Workers summary, created in collaboration with Paradox, a Workday company, for a preview into how nearly 600 frontline occupations have been distilled into five unique workforce segments.
- Reading the full Understanding the Five Types of Frontline Workers report, written exclusively by The Josh Bersin Company, to begin prioritizing the talent risks, engagement drivers, and skilling needs across different frontline segments and planning direct investments where they will have the greatest impact.
- Activating the research with pre-built Galileo® Agent workflows that help you categorize your frontline employees and build customized tools & resources to implement new approaches for supporting, empowering, and enabling your frontline teams.
- Building critical skills through hyperpersonalized Galileo Learn® programs, including a short course on the five frontline personas.
Discover the Frontline-First Research Initiative and review complimentary resources, including:
- Frontline Initiative: Designed to address these challenges head-on, providing actionable strategies and research-driven guidance to organizations committed to frontline excellence, the Frontline-First Research Initiative kicked off with the inaugural member- and Galileo Suite user-exclusive report, Powering the Frontline Workforce.
- The Amazing Essential Frontline podcast: In this episode, Josh Bersin explores how, while many business and HR leaders support the frontline, our research shows the issues are far more complex than you may realize. From his perspective as a Global Industry Analyst, Josh details some of these important management topics and how the HR Technology market has struggled to meet their needs, and the solution space leader UKG is bringing to organizations.
- The Frontline Conversation, Episode 1 podcast: Josh Bersin and Josh Secrest, head of marketing at Paradox, a Workday Company, and former Global Talent leader at McDonald’s and Abercrombie & Fitch, kicks off their frontline-focused special podcast series by unpacking high-volume recruiting, frontline workforce management, and the ROI of automation for hourly roles. In this episode, these two globally-recognized leaders explore the evolving role of frontline workers across retail, hospitality, and healthcare, revealing data-driven best practices and future trends in technology, leadership, and employee support that transform frontline work environments.
- The Frontline Conversation, Episode 2 podcast: In the second episode of their frontline-focused podcast series, Josh Bersin and Josh Secrest, VP of Marketing at Paradox (a Workday company), preview new frontline workforce research that reveals more than 800 distinct frontline job titles, each varying by industry, skill type and depth, licensing, credentials, and whether they are front- or back-of-house roles—differences that dramatically impact hiring, pay, training, scheduling, and retention strategies.
- The Frontline Conversation, Episode 3 podcast: Understanding the Five Types of Frontline Workers lead analyst Nehal Nangia joins Josh Bersin and Josh Secrest for the third episode of the frontline-focused podcast series to discuss how frontline hiring speed is now a critical competitive advantage. The discussion unpacks these complex benchmarks behind time-to-hire, reveals why fewer than 25% of companies have cracked scalable frontline recruiting, and shows how well-designed AI hiring platforms generate massive ROI and breakthrough gains in retention, candidate quality, and business performance.