Reframing the narrative of workers’ agency in Industry 5.0 manufacturing through reskilling, upskilling and craftsmanship

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the evolving worker agency and skilling in increasing smart manufacturing environments, through three configurations: reskilling, upskilling and craftsmanship. It challenges the dominant technocentric models that frame workers as passive executors of predefined tasks and processes, while technology is treated as the driving force of change. Instead, this paper underscores workers’ role in sustaining, adapting and co-developing technological systems in everyday production contexts, arguing for tacit, distributed and relational forms of knowing as central to realising effective human–robot work configurations. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on a two-year qualitative inquiry involving 87 stakeholder interviews and six multi-actor workshops with over 100 participants across Europe. The dataset includes perspectives from large firms, SMEs, trade unions, robot manufacturers, academic researchers and ethicists. The analysis combined thematic and framework analysis to examine how skill is conceptualised and enacted across different roles and organisational settings. Findings The results reveal three interrelated forms of skill-in-practice that demonstrate how workers actively respond to shifting task boundaries and knowledge hierarchies: reskilling operates at the task level as contextual adaptation, upskilling at the process level as real-time systems engagement and craftsmanship at the product-workflow level as embodied knowledge and care. Additionally, the results shed light on how collaborative robotic systems act as a powerful catalyst for rethinking how knowledge circulates, stabilises and evolves across organisational levels, redefining the boundaries of human agency. Originality/value This paper foregrounds a deeper understanding of workforce skilling in Industry 5.0, grounded in embodied and situated organisational knowledge. It introduces craftsmanship as a critical but underexplored dimension of increasing smart manufacturing, enriching current debates on human agency and skill formation. The study contributes theoretically to the literature on skilling in Industry 5.0, while also offering practical insights for designing adaptive learning ecosystems and inclusive skill development strategies.