How to stay relevant for a 50 year career

Here's the Tedx Talk that I did with Hult International Business School at their event #Beyond Tomorrow. I wanted to personally thank all the Hult Team: Nour Abdelaziz, Vera Ortega, Giancarlo Graber Alvarez, Hanns Niedermark, Fabian Hesse, Andrew Meshreky, Dubraska Polignano and the wider team. I've included the script below with all the references.

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“What did you want to be when you grew up” A question that we have been asked many times from our parents, school careers advisors and ourselves. A question so important that myself, and a group of university colleagues tried to turn it into a business to help young people in their transition to working life. Of course, we failed miserably! Interestingly, what we found was the important of having a clear “why” for your career, knowing what relevant skills you need and how you could re-skill yourself. 

My name is Lisa Lyons, I work with organisations develop their people in line with the current and future requirements of work. Today, I am here to challenge your beliefs about what it means to have a career in an era of longevity.

We know that we are living longer. Look at the change in the last 40 years alone. Countries like Chile and Mozambique have made huge gains in this period between 1979 and 2019.

Longer lives, mean longer careers. However, we will no longer be able to rely on the three traditional stages of education, work then retirement. Children born today may delay settling into jobs and have an “explorer” phase from 18 to 30, then change several times in what could be 50 year-plus career journey[1].

Now, let’s contrast with what is happening in our companies. The evidence shows that our large companies are shrinking or disappearing. Companies in the S&P top 500 in 1965 stayed in the index for an average of 33 years, a figure now forecasts it to shrink to just 14 years by 2026[2].

The story goes deeper than this. Not only are companies life spans reducing, but the roles within them are changing faster than ever before. Here is the UBS trading floor in Connecticut in 2006, it was the world’s largest trading floor, with a physical size equivalent to 44 tennis courts. Royal Bank of Scotland had a similar-sized trading floor across the road. Then the financial crisis hit, the two banks were bailed out, and both downsized dramatically.

Moving to another sector, we can see in recent Oscar winning American Factory documentary about the changes to manufacturing roles in Ohio, USA. It provides eye opening insights into the how a Chinese Factory owner and workers view their American employees in terms of skills, work ethic and cultural expectations in their manufacturing operation.

The real-world consequence for people is a decrease in job security and an increased chance of redundancy across a longer career path. For instance, a study conducted in the UK showed that 50% of respondents have now faced redundancy at least once in their careers[3].

While this sounds scary, it doesn’t have to be. There is so much hope and opportunity! Arguably, we have never had before, so many opportunities to learn and ways to access information about what people actually do in their jobs.

The work that I do builds upon the idea that embracing a new and different ways of thinking about our careers puts us in a much better position to navigate through these changes. An interesting concept (originally developed by the foundation for young Australians) puts forward the idea that we can identify and locate ourselves within 7 distinct (and overlapping) job or skills clusters[4]: These includes, Generators, Artisans, Designers, Informers, Technologists, Carers and Coordinators. For example, jobs like Policy Analysts, Teachers and Statisticians are from the “Informer Cluster”, which have overlapping skills in writing, critical analysis, presentation and communication.

In my field, we often think of three aspects needed to be able to do a job: 

• Knowledge – the facts, foundations and principles needed 
• Skills, the portable skills that can be transferred across jobs (for example, giving a presentation, completing analysis, or managing a project) and specialised skills related to a specific function (e.g. plumbing, urban planning or driving a heavy goods vehicle) 
• Abilities, are the range of physical (strength, coordination) and cognitive (memory, inferential) capabilities needed to do a job. 

As job requirements evolve over time; in order to move within and around a particular cluster (or even to cross over into another) – skills are more important than the label of the job. What we do for a living, typically forms part of our identity; for instance, we might label ourselves as a “high school science teacher” or a “newspaper editor”. However, this title can obscure of recognition of the valuable component skills involved in the job, such as presentation, communication, analysis, which could be directly transferable to other jobs. This shows that ultimately your portable skills will become more important to recognise and develop than simply accumulating job titles across a CV and cultivating an identity as say “an accountant” or “a mechanic”.

At the same time, we shouldn’t think of the need for reskilling and personal reinvention as a requirement only for the middle-aged, or even just in relation to employment. The increased role of technology in our society, means that modalities of engagement are changing. What I mean by this is that for example; older people may find it progressively more challenging to keep pace with shifting societal expectations e.g. using internet banking services as high street branches reduce in number, or even registering for essential medical services.

It is great to see a new international movement, called the University of the Third Age (u3A)[5], which aims to focus on education and engagement of mainly retired members of the community — those in their third 'age' of life. My parents have joined in Northern Ireland. You can take part in activities such as mathematics for grandparents, website design and Arabic.

Also, it’s not just the job seekers that need to change their mindset. In cases where employers face particular skills shortages – this approach suggests that it would be prudent for them to be considering a broader range of these sources of these portable skills (in conjunction with relaxed experience criteria) when looking to hire people who may be moving laterally across careers (e.g. hiring an experienced retail sales person to fill the vacancy for a hospitality manager). 

Through my work in large-scale learning and development, I’ve observed that most of the efforts to help accelerate career transitions and reskilling are focused on acquisition of new knowledge. However, in isolation, this is rarely leads to change. There are a number of missing ingredients: 

1.      Motivation – those with a clear motivation about “why” they need to learn are more likely to succeed. Here’s the catch. It is tough to make time for learning, when do you fit it in? Previously, we had made time through time-intensive education, but increasingly we need to integrate much more with life and work on an on-going basis.

2.      Learn how to learn – each person is different! How do you learn best? You may already have a successful approach at school, although perfecting learning that translates into behaviour through practice for a life-long journey of career transitions is difficult. We also know from research[6] that those who believe that they can improve have a higher chance of success of attaining new knowledge and skills.

3.      Learning with others – This is the one that I’ve seen the most progress in my work. First, working with others, leads to more personal accountability and increases chances of completion. Secondly, learning from others generates new insights, people challenge and build on each other’s ideas[7]. This can enable you to develop completely new knowledge and meaning. One great example is CD Projekt Red, a Polish video developer, publisher and distributor based in Warsaw. Over the last decade, they have seen more share price growth than relative growth of Netflix, Amazon and Apple combined (show graph). Known for their recent games, The Witcher and upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077, they have gone from a company making polish translations of games to making some of the best games on the market. Along with harnessing uniquely Slavic identity for the source material for the Witcher, they have focused on re-skilling employees and team learning in the company to vastly improve game quality.

Looking back to when I was young, and I thinking about the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, I wanted to be a teacher, like my mum. I also felt this intense pressure to choose the right career option, and was envious of those who clearly knew what they wanted to do. Now, my advice to my younger self would be, not to worry as much, the job title is not as important. Focus on your skills, strengths and interests. What you do is likely to change over time, you will need to add new skills as you go and will have more options availability to you. Building a career for longevity is different. Instead of thinking of your career as a ladder, think about it like a climbing wall, where there are different routes available to you. You need to know what truly motivates you, how you learn best and incorporate more opportunities to learn from different people around you. I personally like the possibility, that maybe one day, I could have a different career, perhaps as a teacher. Changing the conversation about our careers would reduce the pressure on the young, when asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up”, and puts greater ownness on learning and acquiring skills throughout our careers. With the ultimate goal of building fluid careers suited for longevity and the changing requirements of work.

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References

[1] Gratton, L. Scott, A 2016, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

[2] Innosight 2016, Corporate Longevity: Turbulence Ahead for Large Organizations, link: https://www.innosight.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Corporate-Longevity-2016-Final.pdf

[3] Telegraph, 2015 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/11975788/Britons-in-the-workplace-The-figures-that-lay-bare-the-life-of-an-average-British-employee.html

[4] Foundation for Young Australians, 2017 The New Work Order, https://www.fya.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/fya-future-of-work-report-final-lr.pdf

[5] The University of the Third Age, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JAQrAntfHw

[6] Dweck, Carol S. 2008 Mindset :the new psychology of success New York : Ballantine Books,

[7] Wittrock, M. C. 1974. Learning as a generative process. Educational Psychologist, 11(2), 87–95.Building a Career for Longevity