Avoiding Career Irrelevance.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 223.

The conflation of five major forces from 1)technology to 2) demographic change, to 3) the growing importance of marketplaces where one can access both resources or customers with minimal to no capital, to 4) the rewiring of work due to Covid and 5) the rise of an economy of free-lance workers and rise of the side hustle, will impact every job but particularly those of knowledge workers very significantly.

The Career Implications.

While the future is often hard to predict one can be quite sure that in less than 500 days the current waves of change will grow into a tsunami, and everybody will be impacted in some way or the other.

1.     We are now going to have 50-year careers: Extended life spans, limited government pensions, incentives for elder people to stay in the workforce, machine enabled work will have us working for multiple decades versus a 30-year career. Here is how to prepare for 50 year careers.

2.     Life-Long Training and Education: Even three decades into a career well into the 50’s one may need to go back to school, re-skill and re-tool. And the days of saying “We will be retired before all these new things happen” will not be realistic. Investing in continuous learning will be key to stay relevant. Here is how to learn.

3.     Jobs replaced by tasks:  A job will not be a title, a position and a static role but a constantly changing  number of tasks, outcomes and deliverables  In a globalized and connected marketplace of unbundled and distributed work we will all become gig workers even if we spend long time in a firm since all firms will become increasingly agile and connected, looking to put the best people on the most appropriate tasks very much like the way Hollywood  or TV production works.

4.   We will be work in tandem with machines: Almost every job will leverage AI, and we will need to be comfortable with intelligent agents as co-workers. A company or individual working without AI will be like trying to compete without electricity and access to the Internet.

5. The trend towards “De-bossification” will intensify: The rapid delayering we see around us will accelerate as tenure, seniority and knowledge will give way to expertise, agility and ability to learn. More on De-bossification.

The keys to success will be a) what expertise one has, b) what do we make, create, build, and what outcomes do we deliver, c) how good are we at leading, training, and growing talent to unleash their potential and d) how rapidly can we learn and unlearn.

The big corner offices, the gauntlet of handlers, receptionists, and other awe-inspiring fear mongering scaffolding of the pre-2020’s will all be seen as the crutches of the insecure and the fearful causing most talent to rapidly re-route around such blockages and blockheads.  

People’s “zone of influence” and “zone of impact” will be far more important than their “zone of control” or “size of kingdom”.

Three ways to ensure one remains relevant.

Here are three keys to thriving and remaining relevant.

1. Being in charge of our own career.

Today most people will work for 50 years while most companies last fewer than fifteen.

Even if your company has been around for a hundred years the talent team in any company is focused on serving the company you work for first versus you. They need to hire to their strategy, retain talent in some areas and exit talent in others, invest in skills the company needs now and for the future which might not be consistent with your career strategy, your continued need for income and different than the skills you need for now and the future.

Human Resource and Learning and Development teams are critical and important and can be a huge benefit to everyone, but the individual must decide how to utilize, leverage and strategically incorporate the resources of these teams. 

Do not outsource your future to your company.

To oversee your own career is to have the optionality of leaving your existing company at any time with a high likelihood of improving your position and income.

Paradoxically when you do this you can focus on your job, stay long in your company and even adapt to soap opera drama at work because you know you have options. 

Optionality will be the key to career power.

And your company by knowing that will also treat you well.

2. Thriving at our current gigs by operating like we are looking for one.

Too many people end up not being prepared when their company downsizes or their career stalls. They find that they do not have the skills that make them marketable, and their reputation and networks are deeply limited and often over indexing in their own industry which might be in secular decline.

a) Every individual should Google or ChatGPT themselves and work to improve the results by developing their own web presence, by being active on social channels, and participating in industry activities.

b) Begin another career while you are working on an existing career: There are many parallel careers one can run which are not in any way conflicted with or need to be hidden from your management.

These include writing, teaching, public speaking, advising non-profits or being active in industry or personal passions such as art, music and other civil or charitable events.

These help one build skills, create goodwill by helping others and giving back, expose oneself to new people and thinking which can help one’s current job and much more.

c) Build a reputation for expertise and generosity.

Leo Burnett taught us that relevance and likability are key to any brand.

Every individual should have relevant skills in transformative times and be known for their ability to help and work with others.

People known to have skills that are in demand and who are pleasant to work with tend to be the most successful

Expertise is essential and it is critical that one is known to be excellent in a few areas while being a generalist in many. Increasingly people will hire for tasks and needs and will not fill jobs and roles and it is far easier to fit if one is well positioned.

This 9 word exercise will help you discover what you should focus on and the skills you should hone.

Generosity is a great strategy for the following reasons:

1) being good to people who need help when we had a job will help us when we are in need 

2) we should not make the mistake of conflating our company and position with our own reputation. People are genuflecting to our role not us, so we need to build our own expertise and brand in addition to the halo of our company.

3) If one focuses only on oneself without building one’s company’s brand or helping others build theirs it will backfire. We work for companies and if we do not keep them in focus they will note it. And our reputation is built on the quality of our work and relationships not just our postings. 

Do the things you would do if you lost a job and had to find one.

Don’t wait.

Till it is too late.

3) Investing in four key skills.

a) AI: Whether we are an intern or a CEO we should allocate a few hours a week to keep honing our understanding of AI. This is too important to outsource completely to “experts”, “consultants” or someone else. Of course, many companies will need strategic advisors, technology consultants and more but unless one uses and builds AI muscle we will not be able to direct them or truly understand why AI even now is still under hyped. Read AI is Under-hyped and Upgrading our AI Quotient for more.

b) Communication Skills: Forget learning Mandarin or Coding but rather learn how to hone writing skills and become a great presenter in one’s native language. If the future is AI +HI a big part of HI will be world class communication skills. It can be learned, and it will make a difference. When everybody has the same knowledge it will be how we convince and inspire that will make the difference.

c) Making/Creating/Imagining/Building: Sooner rather than later all knowledge will be free so much of our existing expertise will matter less. Quantify how much of one’s job is about allocating, measuring, monitoring, delegating, and researching. These tasks which often are the majority of many jobs, but all these will be be done 100 X faster and 10X cheaper by technology.

We should ask how much time we spend making and creating things or asking questions to re-imagine our business and ourselves or building other people or our clients business versus processing stuff and sitting in meetings watching the same PowerPoint updated with new numbers every month!

d) Continuous Re-Invention: The day one believes one is a Master is the day one begins the road to disaster.

A key skill will not just be learning constantly but also unlearning and detaching from some past ways or beliefs. There is no going back but only moving ahead. Imagine if we came out of school today, would we act and behave the way we do or are we doing what we do because we believe 1) we will retire before change hits us, 2) we cannot learn new things because they are complicated or 3) because we do not have time.

We should not sell ourselves short.

Everybody regardless of age can re-invent. The ability to learn is cheap and there are many real world and online resources to tap.

Finally, growth and learning is key to life since the day we stop learning is the day we start dying.

Unless we plan to end our career in a year or less, we will have to begin future proofing right away whether we like it or not.

Photography by Edward Riddell

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