Career Fluidity

Most of you will remember I’ve written a lot about life-long learning and continuous education. I believe there is a huge need for this. Two reasons: first, individuals need to keep honing and reshaping their careers so they can adapt to changes happening all around them personally and within their chosen career-based industries. Second, the global community needs continuous education so everyone gets the personal development and support they need to function well within society. In any society wherever it exists.

The more we deal with day to day reality – aren’t we all? – the more we learn that change is not only a constant, it is everywhere. All the time. This is no exaggeration.

Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, and author of several block buster books, schools us repeatedly in the globalization of our education, economics, industries and competition for virtually everything. In his latest book, “Thanks for being Late”, Friedman equates change to flow and the use of this term helps us view life, work, play, education, and all experiences as a continuous river of change. The flow of change. The flow of transactions. In fact, transactions are the stuff of life these days. We exchange feelings, conversations, knowledge, goods, products and services. Commerce is the organization of transactions of all sorts. It doesn’t have to include the flow of money, although most of the time it does.

Therefore, we need to change the way we ‘see’ our lives and activities and careers. They are all of a piece – sharing the DNA of the times all of the time.

Because of the flow rate of change, our careers – the way we earn our livings – require us to continually change or morph into what is becoming. The becoming is not even real yet but we are doing bits and pieces of it and soon it will become more apparent and more concrete.

This is the new reality. Most of us have witnessed it and even felt it. Yet we continued being an accountant, a clerk, teacher, engineer, whatever, even as we began changing to the still unknown.

Career education in the future will focus on some specific education topics, but more important will be the processes by which we pick up information, relate it to transactions, and then into the flow that comprises whatever is being bought and sold or exchanged. There is no way of knowing what all of that is or will be. And the ‘will be’ may be 15 minutes from now or 15 months. The change will happen regardless of the when or where or who.

Are we ready for this rapid exchange of content that becomes a transaction of value and thus marketable? Are you ready? Do you see the world differently today than you did yesterday or a week or month ago? That is the perspective I’m writing about in this moment.

Are we seeing these things as three-dimensional-reality like our old jobs once were? Are we envisioning how this will play out and what then is expected of me? If yes, then you are prepared for what is coming. If no, you are not prepared.

If the latter, please know you are not alone. But you will need to get busy morphing into the new life processes soon. Not later. There is no later to what no longer exists.

This is the challenge: to become whatever is required of you while remaining happy and productive. And kind. Kindness never goes out of style or need.

I’ll be here tomorrow. Until then, be change and be kind.

October 23, 2017