Careers have their ups and downs. Often this can be driven by changes in the macro market, but this is generally personal. Many of us rely on our identity from work. Work provides us with a sense of social interaction and productivity that we desperately need – and remote work may not give us that full requirement.
Whether you’re late career or mid-career, it’s important to think about tactical approaches to think about how to leap into a whole new field; especially when it comes to a new approach to Remote Working.
Even before COVID-19, the future of work was very unpredictable. In 2019, there were global surveys where around 60% of responders felt that their current jobs would be affected by technology. It’s already a digitally disrupted world.
Many industries and executives within those industries identify that digital disruption is real. Another major trend to understand is that we are living longer than our grandparents. Wealthier people have a 50/50 chance of living beyond 105 years. What this means is that we’re going to be living within a digitally disrupted environment but also a workplace that we’re expected to be in for longer than previous generations.
One of the books that we personally like, is a book by two professors from London Business School called the “100 Year Life”. That talks about the story that we’ve been used to a 3 phase career plan; we go to school, we work and then we retire. But now we have a longer time to work, how do we keep our motivation up to work for 70 years or more? If you place that in to a marketplace that is continuously disrupting, it means that this model no longer works. That means we need to relearn constantly because the external market keeps changing, and at the same time we need to re-skill. The skills we learn at the beginning of our careers are no longer practical or viable later on.
The other thing that we need to be aware of is that the three phase stage is very linear. We’re in a highly uncertain marketplace now, and we now need to think about multiple transitions. We think about re-skilling while we’re in our current job; or even parallel jobs. We’re starting to think about multiple transitions, rather than just linear sequencing. So if you are looking for a remote role or simply a career change, check out Careersaas to help you on your journey.