1. Recreate yourself to be constantly valuable
The future of your career is at risk. The value of your education, your skill-set and your work experience are rapidly diminishing every year.
Rapid advances in technology and emergence of new areas like Artificial Intelligence create business challenges and many jobs are being eliminated or reduced in scope every year. Sooner or later, you will be impacted. At the same time, the Internet is continuously creating innumerable new career opportunities — unrestricted by current access to knowledge and skills, or by physical distance or time and bandwidth constraints. New income opportunities are being created and there is enhanced ability to reach out and connect with the prospective employers.
So you have to continuously unlearn the old and re-learn the new skills and recreate yourself to be constantly valuable in a future that is unpredictable and scary.
2. Generalist vs specialist
As the word goes specialists are irreplaceable and hence you strive to become one so that you may ensure that you earn well. Think again. So, if you are trained to be an accountant and have specialized in audit matters. You are clearly a specialist.
Your typical work-day, 10 years hence, will be nowhere similar to what you are doing today. The laws governing taxes, the applicable regulations, the process of auditing – all would have changed. You will not be able to audit without the use of advanced digital accounting and audit tools. These developments are likely to integrate the various touch points like the regulatory authorities, the vendors and the customers. Due to such developments your status as a specialist will soon become obsolete and will be replaced by a new batch of younger people who are better equipped with their training for the changed world. Your only hope at being extremely valuable as a specialist lies in continuous upgradation of skills at the same pace as the new crop.
Remember that the future belongs to the generalist. So are you spending 5-10 hours a week on your own learning? You must constantly expose yourself to different responsibilities and be willing to rapidly grow up to new roles, integrate a variety of past skills and knowledge, and learn the missing aspects that are required for your job.
3. Knowledge vs application
The future for specialists seems bleak, so you can understand that knowledge is no more the barrier that protects your career. Your current knowledge base has a limited shelf life and is nearly freely available for anyone who wants to replace you. Not re-furbishing your knowledge and the skills will result in reducing your income each year. Your primary value to the world is your ability to deliver results which is directly connected to your ability to put your knowledge to good use. Now the question is, how can your strengthen your application muscle?
Firstly, in each application you will only use a part of the knowledge that you possess. You need to increase your cumulative knowledge and put it to right use. Thus, you must make a habit of continuously learning for a wider application. Secondly, you must spend time to think creatively. The world is crammed with continuous distractions from your phone, emails and numerous entertainment options, which do not allow you to spend time in thinking about what new aspects of your skills that you can work on and what you can’t. The more you think about complex problems and the potential solutions, the better you will get at improved application of your knowledge. Finally, come out of your comfort zone so as to try and implement your thoughts even though it may be comfortable to continue following the traditional way of doing things. Only after this last step, you would be able to apply your knowledge. This is not easy; because your ideas and execution will not work out perfectly every time, and you will fall and fail often. So be willing to embrace being embarrassed rather than be locked up in the habit of always wanting to look Instagram-good.
4. Team vs contributor
The question here is that are you better off as an individual contributor or as an integral part of a team? The future will become unfavorable for specialists and growth as an individual contributor will become quite challenging as you tend to gradually lose the value as an individual player. You will do well only if you are known to be an effective team player. Within the team interactions will keep you updated with latest information and ensure the availability of the required inputs. Also with increased automation the complex problems will be tackled easily in a team rather than individually.
Due to emerging complexities and the need deal with elaborate problem-solving, new teams will continue to be created in organizations and adequately budgeted to bring together people from different backgrounds to find solutions together. So you must shun being uncomfortable in a collaborative setup instead learn to be a contributing team player.
5. New frames vs existing frames
Quick and continuous learning is critical for survival, so you will have to master the process of learning. For this you must begin with “Un-learning”. If you are a coder-engineer, you may be trained to think mathematically, incrementally and rationally. In such a scenario you may not be able to understand the skills required by the HR team or how is the salesperson able to sell the product though he knows so little about it. You need to drop your existing mental frames and begin learning from scratch to build a new set of thinking structures and frameworks so that you can learn fast enough and prove to be continuously useful.
6. The growth mindset
a) It’s about change: Carol Dweck’s popular study on growth mindset says the brain is plastic or that it is capable of continuous growth and change. So, if you possess a fixed mindset it is obvious that you will avoid change or new learning's and thus make yourself redundant faster.
b) Acquiring skills: A growth mindset helps you to accept that any skill can be learnt. However, learning requires (i) good inputs and exposure, (ii) correct methods and habits and (iii) a lot of effort and discomfort. You must actively seek them out because if any one of the three is missing, chances are that either you are progressing slowly or you are not progressing at all.
c) How you speak: A growth mindset changes the manner how you speak. Your conversation changes from the 'impossible hurdles and negative circumstances' to 'interesting challenges and creative solutions'. Change your conversations to trigger belief and the mindset changes.
?d) Wait for success: There is no concept of failure in a growth mindset. Not achieving a goal today is simply a function of skills and thus time. You haven’t failed but rather you haven’t achieved it yet. Remember your past wins, where you put in effort, took the time, got back into the game and succeeded. You can only grow from here onwards.
e) Just a process: The best part is that a growth mindset is simply a process you can adopt. Firstly, reward and praise yourself for putting in structured hard work towards the goals that are challenging but not impossible. Secondly, celebrate and be grateful whether the goal is achieved or not because either will teach you something new.
