In Globalization 1.0, countries had to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. In Globalization 2.0, companies had to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. In Globalization 3.0, individuals have to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. This requires not only a new level of technical skills but also a certain mental flexibility, self-motivation, and psychological mobility. Each of us, as an individual, will have to work a little harder and run a little faster to keep our standard of living rising.

In the flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides. The key to thriving, as an individual, in a flat world is figuring out how to make yourself an “untouchable.” “Untouchables” in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced, digitized or automated.

And they fall into three broad categories: First are people who are really “special or specialized,” like Michael Jackson or Madonna. Second are people who are really “localized” and “anchored,” like the many, many people whose jobs must be done in a specific location like gardeners, electricians et al. The third category includes people in many formerly middle class jobs—from assembly line work to data entry to security analyst to certain form of accounting and radiology—that were once deemed nonfungible or nontradable and are now being made fungible and tradable.

What will be the jobs of the new middle, and what skills will they be based on? In the United States, new middle jobs are coming into being all the time; that is why we don’t have large-scale unemployment, despite the fattening of the world. But to get and keep these new middle jobs you need certain skills that are suited to the flat world-skills that can make you, at least temporarily, special, specialized, or anchored, and therefore, at least temporarily, an untouchable. In the new middle, we are all temps now.

The new middlers
What are those skills? In order to answer this question, I worked backward. I went out to successful flat-world companies around America and asked a simple question: “Obviously you have a lot of good middle-class jobs here. Who works here and what sorts of things do they do?” What follows is a general list of categories that many new middle jobs will fall into, or grow out of, and the skill sets they require. To put it in another way, here is what the “Help Wanted” ads look like in the flat world.