Jonas Prising has a new job lined up. For the head of a staffing company, this ought to be an unremarkable development. Yet the timing supplies a pleasing little twist: after years urging employers and workers to prepare for what comes next, he is preparing to change his own role.
On October 15, 2026, ManpowerGroup announced that Becky Frankiewicz would succeed him as chief executive on January 1, 2027. Prising will become executive chair. He has run the Milwaukee-based workforce business since May 2014. The company’s next CEO will be only its fifth in almost eighty years. In an industry devoted to movement, the corner office has been a comparatively settled address.
The handover offers a useful moment to consider the question that keeps surfacing in his public life. When work changes, who helps people become ready for it? A vacancy can be filled. A career requires more sustained attention. Prising’s story sits in the space between those two obligations.
A career with more than one language
His international credentials are unusually literal. He speaks Swedish, English, French, German and Italian, and has lived in nine countries across Asia, Europe and North America. His family’s moves began during childhood, when his father’s business career took them to Germany and Switzerland before a return to Sweden. Crossing a border was part of ordinary family logistics long before it became a professional advantage.
He studied at the Stockholm School of Economics, earning the equivalent of an MBA. Before ManpowerGroup came Electrolux, where he worked in international consumer and business markets. His responsibilities included Asia Pacific, sales companies in France and Britain, and global sales and marketing for a business division. It was an education in operating across markets, delivered through actual businesses.
He joined ManpowerGroup in 1999. Global accounts led to running Italy, then North America, the Americas and a broader group presidency. By the time he became CEO, he had experience with the company’s operations on several sides of the Atlantic. The chair’s responsibilities followed at the end of 2015. His route to the top involved a succession of places and assignments rather than a founder’s leap.
There are limits to cosmopolitanism, naturally. During the 2018 World Cup, Prising watched Sweden with his Scottish wife’s family in Glasgow and complained about missed chances. “We missed chances, messed up,” he said. Five languages provide plenty of ways to discuss football. They do little to improve the referee.
The résumé is only the opening chapter
By 2017, Prising was already making a case for “learnability” as a hiring consideration. Technical abilities mattered. So did communication and collaboration. But a person’s willingness and capacity to keep acquiring skills would help determine whether they could remain employable as the requirements changed.
That idea gives a recruiter more to consider than a neat inventory of previous titles. It also makes demands on the employer. If potential matters, someone must provide the opportunity that allows it to become useful. A company cannot reasonably celebrate adaptability while making it impossible for employees to learn anything during the working week.
Prising connected this argument to access. Judging people by their capacity to develop, he suggested, could help employers reconsider familiar assumptions about who belongs in a particular job. It could broaden the search beyond traditional expectations, including expectations shaped by gender. The ambition was practical as well as social: a narrower search leaves useful talent outside the door.
“Organizations have been consuming labor and not growing talent.”
Jonas Prising, 2018
In 2018, he described a changed bargain between organizations and employees. A promise of decades in one job was giving way to a promise that a period of employment would leave someone with more useful skills. Those skills should carry value both inside the company and elsewhere. It is a demanding proposition for management: help people become capable enough to leave, while giving them reasons to stay.
Twelve weeks, and a different kind of offer
The Academy of Advanced Manufacturing supplies a concrete example. ManpowerGroup and Rockwell Automation launched it in 2017 to help military veterans move into technical manufacturing roles. The first program combined twelve weeks of classroom instruction with hands-on laboratory experience at Rockwell’s facility in Mayfield Heights, Ohio.
The point was to connect experience people already had with work that required additional preparation. Training covered the equipment and technical demands of modern manufacturing. Employers needed capabilities. Veterans needed a workable route into civilian careers. The two companies brought recruitment and industrial expertise to the same problem.
At the first graduation, all graduates had job offers; more than half had multiple offers. Some offers doubled previous salaries. Those outcomes gave a rather specific meaning to the otherwise roomy phrase “skills development.” A course had become a route to paid work.
Prising later recalled attending a graduation and seeing how quickly additional training could change a person’s prospects. By May 2021, Rockwell reported more than 225 graduates placed in manufacturing jobs. In 2025, it reported more than 470 veteran graduates. These are program outcomes over time, rather than a claim that every course or graduate has an identical result.
There is useful discipline in this example. “Learn something new” can sound like advice delivered from a safe distance. A program tied to equipment, employers and actual opportunities asks more of the people giving the advice. It requires them to help build the route.
The machine arrives before the confidence
Artificial intelligence has given Prising’s longstanding argument a new setting. In January 2026, he wrote about the difference between installing advanced systems and developing a workforce able to use them effectively. Technical capability can advance while an organization’s habits, incentives and learning opportunities struggle to catch up.
His concern reaches into the design of work itself. Tasks can be reorganized; skills can be used across different assignments; people can move within an organization as demand changes. That requires managers to look beyond a fixed job description. Training becomes part of how the business operates, with consequences for productivity and competitiveness.
The June version of his argument added an especially human complication: confidence. People may feel capable in their present jobs and uncertain about how those jobs will evolve. A new tool adds possibilities, but also questions about expectations, judgment and where an employee fits.
His proposed response combines learning with clarity. Explain the changing work. Show how a new capability connects to a real opportunity. Give people a reason to believe the organization is investing in their future. The manager announcing a technological transformation acquires a teaching assignment along with the software.
At the World Economic Forum’s June 2026 meeting in Dalian, which he co-chaired, Prising emphasized his belief that AI would largely augment human capability. He pointed to creativity, judgment, communication and collaboration as increasingly valuable. That is his stated view of the opportunity, with the practical challenge of developing those capabilities still attached.
Milwaukee is still on the map
For all the international travel in his career, Prising is based in the Milwaukee area. His outside commitments include the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, where he is a board member and former chair, and Kohl’s, whose shareholders elected him to another board term in May 2026.
In January 2026, he also began a three-year term as a Class B director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Member banks elected him to a position representing the public. Reserve Bank directors oversee operations and bring business and economic information into the institution’s deliberations. The appointment gives his labor-market experience another setting in which to be useful.
Education has been a recurring interest beyond the company. In 2021, he was elected chair of JA Worldwide’s Board of Governors. The organization helps young people develop employment and entrepreneurship skills. Its current roster lists him as an emeritus governor. The connection fits a concern that reaches earlier than the recruitment interview: how people prepare for the working world before they have much experience to put on a résumé.
These roles also place him among people with different responsibilities: educators, employers, business leaders and public institutions. A skills problem seldom stays within one organization’s boundaries. The person who teaches, the person who hires and the person looking for work each encounter a different part of it.
A successor, and an unfinished assignment
The CEO transition arrives alongside the familiar demands of running the business. In the third quarter of 2026, ManpowerGroup reported revenue of $4.8 billion, up 4% as reported from a year earlier. Prising described improving trends across its brands. Workforce philosophy still has to share the desk with quarterly performance.
Frankiewicz, who joined in 2017, takes over after serving as president and chief strategy officer. Prising has said he looks forward to supporting her and the team as executive chair. Their continuing partnership puts his next assignment inside the organization he has helped lead for more than a quarter of a century.
A change of title gives this career a convenient punctuation mark. The work he has discussed for years is harder to punctuate. Someone needs a first chance. Someone needs a new skill. Someone with valuable experience needs an employer able to recognize where it could lead. As Prising prepares for his next job, that remains a substantial assignment for the people who arrange everyone else’s.