It is almost universally acknowledged that ‘the pace of change’ has increased in recent years:
- The pandemic shifted lots of working and living habits, even to the extent that many office workers seem to have forgotten that 9-6, monday-friday, in a physical office, wearing smart clothing was almost the universal normal pattern just a decade ago
- ‘Digital’ roles have gone from outliers to being the foundation of many companies
- Trends that are seen as taking over the world come and go in months now (remember that Facebook/Insta/WhatsApp came up with the name ‘Meta’ at the point ‘the metaverse’ was thought of as being about to take over our entire lives)
In this context it has become harder and harder for organisations to plan, and the skills they believe they need from one year to the next often no longer fit in traditional job titles.
Even very traditional roles like postmen and postwomen have gone from being one person that delivers on the same route every day, to a mix of different services, often from people like Amazon drivers who do a few add on deliveries outside of Uber work, or childcare or other activities through the day. The vanishing of traditional roles has even reached the state that people reminisce over even the most basic things: the days of ‘proper binmen’ and the times when you knew your doctor’s name are spoken about fondly across Facebook groups.
But this factor has affected ‘white collar’ work even more. While working in one company for an entire lifetime largely disappeared long ago, it was still fairly common until recently to follow the ‘executive, manager, director’ career path, jumping across different companies. Today even that has become rare.
The Impact of Digital Work
One of the biggest factors behind this is, of course, the rise of digital work. Digital work enables flexibility and, as some areas in an industry become more flexible, the other areas have to react. If it takes 10 seconds for a partner to send you a request, rather than a couple of days, then you must also react more quickly. And with this flexibility comes complexity: different technologies, different methodologies, niches within niches, layoffs and hiring freezes and hypergrowth all mean the time horizons on which companies plan have dropped, and changes take place from one month to the next, or one week to the next, rather than revolving around quarterly or yearly planning.
We see this everywhere. School leavers wondering whether university makes any sense, in a world where they’re not sure what job titles will look like in 5 years time. Mid-career people try to rethink their careers in areas where they realise the jobs they entered 15 years ago no longer exist, and wonder if AI will ‘steal their jobs’ in the next year or two. And companies themselves bring in consultants to assess how their workforce should look, and whether they can ‘gain efficiencies’ in one area and reuse that money on hiring new roles to compete against new startups in their sectors.
Skills-Based Career Paths
So what does the future look like?
One answer is the ‘skills based’ career path. This is something that is often present in conversations, even without realising. A company hiring a new role discuss the type of person they’re looking for, where once they may have just known the job title. They discuss whether a job title itself should be ‘Head of Ecosystem’ or ‘Head of Community Growth’ or ‘Affiliate Marketer’, to try and fit the skills they need the person coming into the role to have, rather than because it’s a standardised job.
In this context, collecting these skills becomes important for those looking to tread a less reactive career path. Understanding where the overall market may be going so that you can add and grow new skills to bridge forward into the roles that may be available five years from now becomes an important task. And being able to ignore the hype of short term trends, and spot the skills that will last, becomes more important still.
The recruitment market has not fully caught up with this: While companies are hiring for skills, most recruiters are still geared around job titles. Being able to hire someone who is ‘a bit biz devvy’, knows their way around ecommerce, and maybe can do some of their own copywriting for partner collateral is something we could all imagine in the current world, and it’s likely there are lots of people out there like that, but it doesn’t sum up neatly into a job title.
The market has not caught up yet, but it will, and recognising that your career may be defined by the hard and soft skills you’ve built, more than the job titles you had ten years ago, may both bring comfort, and put you in a good spot for whatever work looks like in the 2030s.
