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Linear career paths are going the way of the dinosaur, and not a moment too soon

Jon Foster-Pedley
By Jon Foster-Pedley
28 Jan 2025
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We are living through a time of unimaginable and continuing change. To survive we have to lean into the disruption, but to thrive we have to embrace a culture of continuous learning, unlearning and relearning.

The great annual excitement of the matric results reveal is starting to abate. As always it has been a time of great excitement for those who passed – and crushing despondency for those who didn’t make it.

For those who did, there’s the prospect of tertiary education if they were fortunate to have been offered a place. For those who don’t have a place, there’s a mad rush and a rollercoaster of emotions because they’ve just discovered their marks will let them in – if they can find somewhere that will let them squeeze in.

And then there are those who didn’t pass, who think it’s the end of the world.

As Winston Churchill said 83 years ago, it’s not the beginning of the end, but it could very well be the end of the beginning. It’s a maxim that applies to all of us, whether we were in matric last year and passed or failed, whether we have just graduated and are trying to enter the job market or whether we have been in our jobs for the last 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years.

Future of jobs


Yesterday, and whatever else happened in the past, is gone. Tomorrow starts today. The World Economic Forum released its 2025 Future of Jobs report ahead of the annual get-together in Davos and it’s quite bleak.

Almost 40% of today’s skills won’t be required in 2030. That’s daunting, but it’s down from the almost 45% that it was two years ago thanks to our increasing realisation that we need to keep learning, unlearning and relearning.

We are living through a time of unimaginable and continuing change. To survive we have to lean into the disruption, but to thrive we have to embrace a culture of continuous learning, unlearning and relearning. The best news of all is that no one person holds the monopoly on your education – or your development.

If you haven’t done so yet, check out Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis’s TEDTalk. They wrote a fantastic book five years ago called “The Squiggly Career”.

In short, their argument is that linear career paths are going the way of the dinosaur and not a moment too soon, because the corporate ladder some of us, and definitely our parents, would have had to have climbed is one of the most limiting things imaginable.

The corporate ladder doesn’t necessarily take you to new heights, but instead undoubtedly limits learning and opportunity. The question “where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” strikes a cold claw of terror on many an interviewee’s entrails – and well it should.

What we need to do instead is ask ourselves, “What career possibilities am I interested in?” in the full knowledge that the current generation in the space of their working lives will have at least five different – and possibly disparate – careers.

Education


Education is not only available to the fortunate few, but is all around us; we define our own curriculum all the time through the TED talks we listen to, the articles we read, the free online courses we take – and of course the formal education we pursue if we get that privilege.

Learning is one thing, applying the lessons that we learn – and the knowledge that we actually already have – is another. Here, Saras Sarasvathy’s theory of effectuation is extremely useful. She describes this as the difference between cooking from a recipe and cooking a meal from what is actually available at that precise time in your kitchen.

Her theory is broken into five principles: the bird in the hand; affordable loss; lemonade; crazy quilt; and pilot in the plane. In short: leveraging your existing means and resources; assessing the downsides to the actions you want to take; exploiting unexpected opportunities (making lemonade out of lemons); cooperating and collaborating with others; and taking charge of the direction and the consequences of what you are doing.

This is not a theory plucked out of thin air, but the fruit of a series of in-depth interviews Sarasvathy conducted with billionaire entrepreneurs to understand the secrets to their success, and in all of them, the one injunction that stood out was not to wait for the great opportunity to arrive, but to start with a simple idea and work with what you have.

Success isn’t a case of one size fits all and life is no longer about joining the dots on an upward trajectory. Instead, it is actually about adding more dots so that you develop polyvalent capabilities, over and above your actual core expertise so that you can identify opportunities that come your way and have the skills to be able to exploit those opportunities.

Agility, resilience


You don’t have to be an entrepreneur, not everyone can be, but you do have to be agile and, most of all resilient, because the reality is that your life journey is not going to be a straight line from A-Z.

You have to be able to bounce back from the vagaries of life, you have to be able to navigate the twists and turns and accept roadblocks as opportunities to take the road less travelled – and make the detour the main thing.

Some people will become doctors, engineers, lawyers, members of the professional class. Some will do it because they have a calling, others will do it because the perceived stability and the status that come with these jobs are vitally important, not just for themselves but for the families that spawned them, especially those that never had that opportunity in their lifetimes.

No one should allow their career choice to limit them: some of the world’s greatest leaders started as doctors, lawyers or engineers, but then went into politics or business and never stitched a cut, sued someone or checked a slide rule ever again.

The legacy of ladders – and the expectation of getting on to them and starting the slow, often tedious and self-harming climb up them – is all around us. It’s one of the reasons why we fear failure so much. Failure isn’t the end, it can be a fantastic new beginning – if we are prepared to learn from it.

Let’s stop being defined by what an old and obsolete system demands and instead start being curious about the untapped potential that lies within each of us.

Let’s commit to reinventing ourselves and admit that the obvious next step might not be the most appealing, but it certainly could be the most exciting and the most rewarding.

Let’s embrace the squiggly career of fulfilment and purpose, instead of ulcers, overdrafts and corner offices.

Let’s thrive in 2025. DM

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