How might we invest in career adaptation for career evolution?

My friend Rumei Mistry and I talk about career things over lunch. She shared this article that offers a model of changing jobs as a series of sigmoid curves representing cyclical patterns of capability development over time.

This model provoked me to think about different implicit models I see in career development that reflect different degrees of development ambition built upon a growth mindset. It also pushed me to think about some of the specific traits adapted by the legal profession, my profession, that may not serve us looking ahead. Let's get weird.

I observe legal professionals strongly favor exploiting known good approaches over exploring new good approaches. This is an adapted trait. It has served professionals operating in mostly static environments, where change invited risk and paid little premium. Legal professionals are skeptical about the value of investing in change because we probably have not seen returns that made it worth our investments.

Our common career investment approach probably looks like:

• explore a broad set of new skills early;
• rapidly narrow our focus;
• primarily exploit existing skills for most of our career span;
• apply sustaining investments that deliver incremental capability improvements that keep us viable; and
• get to economic independence ASAP.

People who focus on optimization probably see the savage exploration-exploitation dilemma in our experience.

Our classic career investment patterns are maladapted for the hyper-dynamic environment our world is becoming. I believe we will need to change our approach to thrive. Let's explore some of the classic and emerging investment models.

Master a durable skill and ride it out

You expect your career is insensitive to the way the world will change. You front load the learning you need. You rely on any decay to be below your viability threshold to remain employed.

Master a durable skill and maintain it

Your career has low sensitivity to the ways the world will change and/or you need to avoid unacceptable skill decay. You front load the learning you need and make sustaining investments. You adjust your investment level to offset decay or follow work that migrates into adjacent opportunities. Is this how we think about continuing education programs? ??

Build a new skill as the prior one declines

Your career has medium sensitivity to the ways the world will change, you need to avoid rapid skill decay, and/or you need to open new markets with material subject matter change. You make a series of transformative investments. You space the start of new cycles after the prior investment begins to decline to string together a continuous curve. You invest substantially more than a sustaining effort.

Build a new skill before the prior one declines

Your career has high sensitivity to the ways the world will change and/or you must constantly deliver increasing value. You make a series of transformative investments. You space the start of new cycles before the prior investment begins to decline to create a discontinuous curve that abruptly halts decline before the natural nadir and restarts rapid growth. You invest as much per cycle as the successive transformative investment of the prior model, but you do so while doing the prior job!

Comparing the models suggests they have different investment costs and outcomes. The outcomes looking across a career suggest why organizations preparing for hyper-dynamism are trying to instill learn-it-all cultures that incent and support constant growth. Attracting people who are compatible with these successive transformation patterns can have great long-term impact. But this also means supporting people with the time and resources to transform, and embracing their career transformation pivots might produce temporary periods of reduced output while they adapt and learn.

Human capital measured through time, attention, and cognition will be our fundamental constraint for knowledge work going forward. We can adapt our career investment hypotheses, so we are more fit for the opportunities ahead. We can adapt our leadership practices in parallel.

We can generate more capacity (output volume) and capabilities (output types) from our organizations' constrained human capital. We must attract and invest in people with necessary current ability, growth potential, and desire to adapt. We must support their careers with opportunities that stretch them and resources that support and sustain them through growth and recovery phases.

Adaptation is always choice. Until it is not. Invest wisely.

Note: The first two diagrams were originally published in Our wicked problem: Building the future of the practice of law (210) | Legal Evolution. Companion concepts appeared in Designing knowledge work (159) | Legal Evolution.

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