Preparing for the future of work: strategic responses to uncertainty in labour markets

The future of work is uncertain with various developments that are difficult to foresee. Despite this uncertainty, governments need to prepare the labour market for the future. This article identifies four types of government responses to uncertainty: robustness, resilience, agility, and anti-fragility. These policy responses are differentiated according to the intention and timing of governments’ considerations of uncertainty. Document analysis shows that this typology is a useful conceptual tool for comparing how governments anticipate the future of the labour market. This typology might also serve as a powerful heuristic to analyse governments’ responses to uncertainty in other domains.