June 05, 2026
The Josh Bersin Company Launches Frontline Workforce Taxonomy to Replace HR Guesswork with Precision
Frontline workers make up 70–80% of the global workforce, and 60% of these roles require highly skilled people who are not easily replaced or automated. Despite representing the lion’s share of employment, frontline workers receive far less organisational attention than their desk-based counterparts.
When it comes to skills investment, for example, organisations spend roughly $400 per frontline worker annually, compared to over $1,500 for office-based roles.
This has created a significant disconnect between leaders and frontline employees. Axonify research finds that far more leaders than workers believe feedback is acted on, that important communications reach the people who need them, and that staff shortages are not a problem.
The frontline workforce has, it seems, become the forgotten workforce. And so to address this, The Josh Bersin Company has launched a new research-based taxonomy that breaks the frontline workforce into five distinct categories. The goal is to help employers better understand the disparate needs of this sprawling, heterogeneous group.
Why Do Organisations Need a Frontline Workforce Taxonomy?
Most organisations view frontline workers as a single unified group – ‘non-office-based workers’ – and their talent and engagement strategies reflect this simplistic perception.
“Organisations tend to overlook how complex and multidimensional frontline roles are,” says Nehal Nangia, Senior Research Director at The Josh Bersin Company.
Skills, hiring difficulty, pay, and career prospects vary widely across this lumped-together group. Electricians, plumbers, and vocational nurses, for example, earn two or even three times more than unskilled workers. Extreme turnover is a particular problem in hospitality – up to 265% for restaurant servers and 160% for fast-food crews. Meanwhile, in healthcare, staff shortages are severe, with a global shortfall of 10 million licensed workers projected by 2030.
When organisations fail to understand these nuances, they are ill-equipped to properly support and engage their teams.
“The lack of prioritisation around the frontline workforce is the primary reason organisations lack a precise understanding of the distinct talent risks and engagement drivers of this workforce,” Nangia adds.
Frontline Worker’s Don’t Feel Recognised
The data bears this out. A Workvivo study shows 87% of frontline workers doubt a clear career path exists for them, and 49% feel their contribution to company success goes unrecognised.
According to Perceptyx’s proprietary benchmark data – comprising 23 million survey responses – frontline workers are 11 points less optimistic about their organisation’s future than senior leaders and 26 points less favourable on believing that growth opportunities are awarded fairly.
It is a picture of neglect, underinvestment, and a failure to understand the frontline workforce in all its complexity. And those aggregate figures only tell part of the story.
“Underneath those aggregate patterns, analyses by industry, role, geography, and tenure reveal different motivations, technology demands, skills, and behaviours, each calling for a distinct response,” says Lauren Beechly, VP of Workforce Transformation at Perceptyx.
One example is the clinician’s experience. A 2026 Perceptyx study found that physicians improved operational efficiency over the past year, but their comfort with speaking up fell significantly.
“Those trends for Credentialed Professionals look nothing like the patterns we track for frontline roles in other industries,” Beechly notes.
Without a clear picture of who frontline workers actually are – their different risk profiles, skilling needs, and what motivates them to stay – many organisations default to treating them as a uniform group. The result is a workforce that is consistently under-served and under-supported.
What Is the Frontline Worker Taxonomy?
To bring structure to this complexity, researchers at The Josh Bersin Company worked through more than 600 frontline occupations listed in the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, condensing them into five distinct workforce types. Each calls for a different approach to talent strategy and technology support.
- Customer-Facing Associate: Entry-level, front-of-house roles with high customer interaction. Examples include retail associates, fast-food crew, call centre agents, restaurant servers, and hotel attendants.
- Back-Office Associate: Entry-level, back-of-house roles with little to no customer contact. Examples include warehouse pickers, kitchen prep staff, laundry attendants, and stockroom clerks.
- High-Skilled Specialist: Experienced workers in operational or technical roles that don’t require formal licensing. Examples include retail managers, pastry chefs, and wind turbine technicians.
- Licensed Specialist: Roles requiring formal licensure to practise. Examples include vocational nurses, commercial vehicle drivers, HVAC technicians, and hair stylists.
- Credentialed Professional: Advanced knowledge workers holding ongoing professional certifications. Examples include doctors, pharmacists, pilots, and attorneys.
How Can Organisations Use This Frontline Workforce Taxonomy?
The taxonomy has been designed as a practical framework to help organisations adapt their operating models and attune their talent strategies to the distinct needs of different frontline workers.
“It gives organisations a common, shared language around who their workers are, and how they can truly optimise the value of each of these workers,” says Nangia.
The framework provides a starting point for more strategic people investment. It helps leaders identify which frontline segments exist within their business, understand the specific needs and challenges of each group, and design more tailored employee experience (EX) interventions as a result.
“Use the taxonomy as the foundation, then listen to your own people to find the nuances it cannot anticipate and tailor recruitment, development, and retention accordingly,” says Beechly. “AI now makes that level of personalisation possible at scale, so every employee, whatever their role, gets the support they need to perform and to move the business toward its goals.”
A More Precise Approach to the Frontline
The case for a more differentiated approach to frontline workforce strategy goes beyond better HR practice. As AI continues to reshape white-collar work, more job seekers are exploring frontline and trade pathways that were previously less visible – and, in many cases, better paid.
For organisations, that creates both an opportunity and an obligation to understand frontline workers as five distinct groups with distinct needs, risks, and potential.
The Josh Bersin Company’s taxonomy will not solve the frontline engagement problem on its own. But it gives HR leaders something they have long lacked – a shared language, a structured starting point, and the basis for investment decisions that are genuinely attuned to the people they affect.
