6 signs you are hitting a career dead-end
Like the mythical boiled frog, you may be oblivious to the fact that your career is about to come to an abrupt halt. The transition from the industrial to the digital age is tectonic in nature. But in this age of distraction, unless it is served up in Ultra-High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound, many are likely to miss what is happening around them.
So, here are six indicators that your career is in jeopardy:
- Your skills can be automated, whether by a robot and / or an algorithm. It’s early days, I know. And yes, waiterbots are spilling the soup, but its just a matter of time.
- You like order. You perceive Lean and Six-Sigma as belief systems rather than a set of techniques / methods. If that is the case, you will soon be pining for the industrial era.
- You assume we live in a certain world, ie the skills and services that have made you and your organisation successful in the past will continue to do so in the future. The status quo is over. Disrupt or be disrupted.
- You haven’t come across the term holacracy. Well that’s going to hurt, if you have a ‘boss fixation’, or you thrive on ‘learned helplessness’. You will need to get your personal brand act together, or you might find yourself known around the office as ‘Billy no colleagues’.
- You have career goals. As if the market will stay still long enough for you to chart a neat path to an intended career destination. You might counter this point with sailing-related tacking analogies. By all means do that (against the backdrop of the perfect storm).
- You think you have a career. We live in a world where the notion of a career for life is being replaced by a life of careers. Many of these will run in parallel – author in the morning. Software developer during the day. Dubstep dinner-jazz DJ in the evening. And the duration of these micro-careers will be the order of months or years, rather than decades.
If you have answered yes to one or more of these questions, you might want to put some time aside to see how the future of work is panning out. This is not a one-off exercise. I suggest you review your economic relevance with the same diligence, and frequency, as you apply to crossing the road.
Technology-induced road-kill is the new redundancy.