This study concerns a crisis management team (CMT) that has been set up in France at SNCF to make the company more agile in the face railway incidents that cause passenger flow management problems. From the crisis management literature, the sociology of professions and an in depth ethnography, this study investigates the professionalization and de-professionalization of the CMT through its story of success and failure.

Core findings reveal three key episodes from the creation of the CMT to its decline. For each of these phases, the data show how organizational and professional logics can support or hinder each other. The balance between normal and agile organization always appears delicate to find and maintain. Results question the relevance of integrating crisis management as a profession in railway organizations and highlight the difficulty to maintain agility within “bureaucratic” organization. It finally provides some practical outcomes by comparing the agility of two models (professional group model vs. expert network model) in managing crises.

Then, a quantitative investigation of the future development of skills and qualifications is presented. Due to the many variables that need to be taken into account in such an assessment (e.g. long-term investment planning), the study has been limited to the Swedish railway industry and the part of the sector related to infrastructure for which detailed employment data was available. This part of the investigation focuses on the influence on human capital from innovations in Shift2rail Innovation Programme 3 (IP3).

Results indicate that IP3 will have an overall impact at system level (e.g. increased productivity enabled by improved long-term maintenance planning and operation) rather than affecting specific professional roles. In contrast, the impact of the technological development of Shift2rail IP2 and IP5 is anticipated to affect specific operational jobs (e.g. train drivers, train attendees, train operations managers, etc.) both with respect to employment levels and skills requirements.