Is it time for a career rethink?
Learn then earn
Reality and the notion of a career are at war. It appears that reality is winning. The learn – work – retire model is fraying and has been for some time. The 20th century idea that a predefined level of educational frontloading would enable you to jump on an ascending career conveyor belt that gracefully took your gene pool to new socioeconomic heights is now a genre of nostalgia.
Unlike some of my university friends, who saw graduation as the jettisoning of their career rocket booster, I had no idea what I wanted to do. As an unexceptional astrophysics graduate, science wasn’t an option, so I drifted into software engineering.
Bureaucratically in the eighties getting into the startup world was not dissimilar to seeking permission to build a casino in your rented accommodation.
Failure is not an option
The option to instantly create a pre-IPO startup with one Chat-GPT prompt wasn’t an option. Bureaucratically in the eighties getting into the startup world was not dissimilar to seeking permission to build a casino in your rented accommodation. So graduates generally headed off in the direction of the professions – law, architecture, medicine and so on, whilst some decided to take their chances in ‘big industry’.
There was a sense that you had to get this right first time otherwise you had better enlist a speechwriter to help you craft an explanation for your failed mission at the next reunion. This of course was a problem for many people who had been pushed into the professions by parents seeking dinner party validation. It took a great deal of courage to jump off the socioeconomic conveyor belt, given the associated social shame.
Look back in anger?
At the other end of the spectrum, we read the heartfelt stories of people embarking on retirement. Some of these stories are of course underpinned by a non-disclosure agreement, whilst others are an attempt to make sense of what just happened and how the professional path they took was in some way elegantly designed. These stories usually come from people who have entwined their identity and their career to such an extent that what they now feel is a sense of partial paralysis.
Standardisation of the employment framework within sectors enabled people to have one career spanning several organisations.
Au revoir certainty
My rambling point is that careers are largely over. Careers require societal stability and predictability. This enables organisations to chart their courses accurately and thus implement an employment framework that from an employee’s perspective looks like a career. At one point, one could have a complete career with one employer. Standardisation of the employment framework within sectors enabled people to have one career spanning several organisations.
Today society and the market are no longer stable and predictable. This has been the case for some time. But such is the nature of exponential change, that the changes are largely imperceptible until the tsunami is upon us.
So those of us who acknowledge this reality will be better able to adapt to the chaos that lies ahead. This will be the thrust of subsequent editions of this blog. One could say that we are now in a world where we have multiple careers with multiple employers. But I believe we are even past this and so it would be better to think multiple gigs, multiple clients. Given the precarity of employment the difference between permanent and temporary employment is now blurred.
Today’s barrister is tomorrow’s intelligent legal agent.
Why bother?
So what are we to think? Is it pointless to think in terms of careers? Yes and no. In my view traditional careers are dead or dying. Today’s barrister is tomorrow’s intelligent legal agent. A piece of software that will interact with other judicial software agents. Today’s heart surgeon will be tomorrow’s car tyre fitter. The tech tsunami is upon us.
We can make sense of our existence, at least professionally, by choosing a path that on reflection will look like a good return on our labour.
Following your passion is a mistake.
Pick a path
So at best, we can choose a north star even if we don’t know what the associated path will be. So what are our north star options? Common aspirations include:
- Pay the bills
- Become rich
- Be famous
- Help others
- Acquire mastery
- Make a difference
- Maximise free time.
These are not mutually exclusive. But know that if you optimise for one you might de-optimise for others. Ultra-distance runners accept optimising for endurance is de-optimising for speed. But of course rich and famous is possible. And such people can even make a difference. But they probably had to prioritise one initially and the others become fortuitous by-products.
Mastery is an interesting one. My initial goal was to become a database expert. This made economic sense at the time. However the commoditisation of database technology forced a rethink.
Following your passion is a mistake. Identifying market supply-demand imbalances is the way forward. We will get into this in subsequent editions.
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