Industry 5.0 emphasizes human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience while requiring workforce competencies that support technologically advanced and human-centered work environments. This study examined managers’ perceptions of organizational readiness for Industry 5.0 and workforce competency availability at Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and investigated the associations between these two domains from a socio-technical systems (STS) perspective. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted with 96 STC managers using a 24-item questionnaire. Organizational readiness was assessed through human-centricity, sustainability-oriented strategic readiness, and resilience, while workforce competency availability was assessed through problem-solving, working with people, technology use and development, and self-management. The instrument demonstrated high internal consistency (α = 0.920 for organizational readiness and α = 0.927 for workforce competency availability), and parallel analysis supported retention of five factors rather than the seven theoretically specified dimensions. Managers reported very high perceived levels of both organizational readiness (M = 4.36, SD = 0.50) and workforce competency availability (M = 4.31, SD = 0.51). The two overall scores were strongly associated (r = 0.87, p < 0.001), and the three readiness dimensions collectively accounted for 76.8% of the variance in perceived workforce competency availability, with sustainability-oriented strategic readiness and resilience showing statistically significant conditional associations. Because both domains were assessed by the same respondents, common method variance cannot be ruled out as a contributor to this association. The findings provide an STS-informed empirical framework for examining perceived organizational and workforce preparedness concurrently, while emphasizing the need for multi-source, longitudinal, and multi-organization research to test their relationships more rigorously.