Steal These Thoughts!
Let me tell you something, a year ago today I had a vision. Not a dream, but a vision of building a passion project to satisfy my creative needs.
I created a platform to satisfy my own creative love of writing. It was meant to be something just for me, and maybe that one other random person who might land on it by mistake through a random Google search.
Before we begin:
If you’ve read any of my stuff before, particularly my work on Steal These Thoughts!, then you’ll know I have a somewhat obsession with human development and the exploration of meaning.
I’m of the opinion that having meaning in life is more important than happiness. Mainly because happiness is an emotional state, one that is fleeting and cannot be sustained. Whereas meaning is something that drives us, gives us a sense of being and will more likely provide the moments of happiness we seek.
This is going to be a quick post on the key lessons I’ve learnt in 2018. I hope in sharing these that you can take something from them and maybe learn something new in 2019.
I’ve put together this impromptu post after I contributed to a Reddit conversation on how to build a great cv and why recruiters aren’t contacting you about that dream job.
How many times have you been asked the question, “So, what do you do?”
I wonder if people even know what they mean when they ask that.
I usually respond to this question with comical answers for my benefit. Sometimes I revert to my completely sarcastic self. I’ll say, “Well, I’m a confused late-thirty-something with no clue what’s next, worries about the future, and now I’m trying to find my best self…what about you?”
They often respond with blank stares.
When I try to explain what I actually do for work, those stares become even deeper.
Although impressive in my head, explaining to others that I juggle 10 different job roles to make cold hard cash complicates things. The problem is that we use a ‘job’ as the reference point for the explanation. Whereas, the title means nothing. I deploy a diverse set of skills to create a career I enjoy.
But that doesn’t sound as sexy or aligned with the ‘societal view.’
So, I just mumble something like, “I work in learning and development. What about you?”
Conversations with strangers at parties, events, or whatever always turn into unexpected learning experiences. The weird intro of ‘Who are you and what do you do?’ has always felt odd to me.
Do they ask me what I do as a human, or do they just want to know about the job that pays me and provides my standing in society?
Come to think of it, why do we make professional occupation the first thing we ask people we’ve just met? Who even made this the norm? – so many questions.
We often use them to determine how to value someone and what they’re good at. Most of us know they don’t work, yet we still play the game. They form the wrong metric on any playing field. Value comes from many measurements and is incredibly context-specific.
For work in the modern era, job titles mean nothing.
Skills act as the currency we must focus on in the career economy. Many companies have woken up to this in the last few years.
We’ve seen an explosion of “skills-based organisations” like they’re some newfound religion. In reality, skills have always driven success. The corporate world just chose to ignore them.
If you didn’t focus on skill improvement all this time, what were you doing?
We now play in a new economy of skills, and digital technology has only advanced this shift.
Era-defining tech innovations often bring this shift. We saw it in the eras of modern computing and the internet. We’re experiencing it now with the rise of generative AI technology.
New tech always enhances the way we do tasks. I think the word ‘job’ is where people get stuck. For so long, people moved through company tiers based on a job title.
We should step back to deconstruct what we mean by the term “job.”
Jobs basically consist of a collection of tasks for which you’re responsible. In exchange for financial compensation, you provide skills to complete these tasks. Today, we talk more about skills than titles. This makes sense because when tasks change, roles change.
For example, 20 years ago, the role of Social Media Manager didn’t exist.
Although commonplace today, the technology required to create the demand for this role had not yet exploded. We hadn’t become glued to our screens in a hypnotic state of doom-scrolling. These roles eventually came along to amplify that.
This role emerged due to the demand for new tasks.
Thus, the ‘job’ of social media manager was born. Over many years, it replicated into a family of roles to manage social media platform-related tasks. This family of roles is now evolving with the introduction of generative AI tools. The way people perform these tasks is changing, so the nature of these roles changes too.
Here we have the circle of life or the circle of work…something like that.
That sounds like a ‘captain obvious’ thing to say, but hey, it’s written now.
Each new digital tech innovation brings job destruction and creation. Again, a natural cycle in the shifting demands of life and work. I believe that in the long term, we’ll use generative AI, and other models, to manage boring tasks. This gives us the space, energy, and focus to do more human stuff.
I see Gen AI enabling more builders.
Not everyone can or will want to be a builder. However, the choice will be more accessible than before. This will offer a host of new skills, tasks, and jobs.
For L&D, we could enable more of us to design better solutions across the spectrum of our industry effectively. Finally, leaving behind L&D teams as a dumping site to take care of all the bits and bobs. Let AI do that.
In some ways, I hope Gen AI can enhance our skills and tasks, so we can be more strategic and meaningful in where we put our effort.
My last three years of exploring and experimenting have made one thing clear: The need for diverse human and tech skills is growing at a pace I’ve not experienced in my lifetime.
Outside of Gen AI’s potential to enhance learning, the value of your skills has been (and always will be) a big focus of my work.
I positioned the idea of skills being the currency in the career marketplace in my book.
I’ve seen many examples of this in my nearly 20-year (shit, I’m getting old) career. Those who do well and create the career they want all crafted a diverse set of skills. They didn’t rely on being so and so at x company.
To thrive in the modern era, we must leave behind what we know about the career economy.
“What got you here won’t get you there”
Technology will continue to change how we complete tasks. Focusing on our skills will yield better opportunities than aiming for a title.
Skills killed the job title and that’s not a bad thing.
The most popular question at the time I write this is, “Will AI take my job?”
As we’ve discussed, it’s not the jobs that are shifting, but rather the tasks that form that job. So, the job will likely change. You can take out the word AI and replace it with all these innovations from our history:
We know what happened here.
For some, it did, but then they had new tasks which formed new roles. Those who did well were the ones who had diverse skills and adapted. In the early ’90s, accountants feared Excel. Now they wield it like some dark magic which has greatly enhanced how they work.
To ride the wave of inevitable change, craft the best skills for the era you work in.
The answer to this is incredibly subjective based on your industry.
From a broader perspective, we can look at high-value skills that will serve us well in the future across any industry. I spent 12 months reviewing over 20 global skills reports to answer the ultimate question: “What are the 5 skills that matter for the future of work?”
Here they are:
I’d strongly recommend reading the full article (of course I do, I wrote it so I’m biased), plus the accompanying piece I wrote on the power of unlocking the right connective skills to build out your capabilities.
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
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