Clients often come to me to seek guidance on how they should manage their career and what they must do today to protect their future, secure their career advancement, and have some control over the choices available to them as they grow in their profession. During the past decade, and particularly during the most recent five years the rate of change and its velocity have caused much consternation among mid-career and younger professionals—Millennials. They have now come to realize that merely going in “autopilot” in your job, leaving the “management” of it to the boss and the organization, does not provide for a good career growth strategy; one must look at the flux around them and develop a well-thought-out plan to protect their future. They must also retool themselves with some basics if they have failed in their early career to do so (see the last part of this blog).

I also see this now more as a trend with many professionals not jut the Millennials. When I started my career coaching practice some 15 years back, nearly 75% of my clientele then was out of work, looking for their next job, by using the tools that I provided them as a career coach. Some of this stemmed from the times we were facing: The Dot-com bubble burst of 2000, the state of the economy after the 911 attacks, the two wars the country was engaged in, and so on.

Today, with nearly 5% unemployment and the rapidly shifting economic, business, and technology landscape people’s priorities have shifted, where professionals have become more aware of the uncertainty stemming from the inexorable changes that are happening on most fronts; changes that are almost impossible to control because of their scope, size, and trend. Today, my client pool is nearly 95% working professionals looking to both protect and advance their careers. Some of them are facing headwinds in their current jobs due to political (organizational politics), competitive, and economic forces. Only about 5% of my clients today are out of work and looking for their next job!

So, what are some of the trends and what are some of the strategies that one can pursue to protect their future and keep control of their career? Here are my observations and suggestions:

Technology as Infrastructure: Technology had been a specialized field. Technology companies sold their ever-evolving products to companies in large, complicated IT packages and to consumers as appliances (computers and software apps). Now, technology has evolved into our society’s infrastructure with cheap access to powerful technology stacks. Our appliances have become connected with this infrastructure increasingly more tightly. The IoT trend is an example of this.

Not everyone needs to know how to program anymore; only the best few do, working at the companies that create these stacks. We also don’t need a big IT department. Now, technology is infrastructure, like our physical systems of highways and roads. This evolution allows smaller players to play the game only the big could play until very recently, forcing big companies to respond to a new breed of competitor, as well as a new consumer base.

What does this mean when it comes to managing your career? This means that you must decide early in your career if you want to pursue programming as your vocation. You can no longer be a mediocre programmer (who needs them?) and get by with landing a B job at a C company. Those companies will cease to exist. Also, as a result of rapidly trending IaaS, Paas, and SaaS (Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as Service, respectively) offerings and the ease with which they can be operationalized, an entire army of professionals from IT staffing companies (Infosys, Wipro, TCS, et al) are finding it difficult to make itself billable. This picture is only going to get worse with time in the near future.

So, what does one need to do to keep themselves employed during the next decade or more? See the trend and get into different areas of work where jobs are growing and leverage your core skills in a new direction to get ahead of the ebbing tide of jobs in these areas of IT. If you are in college and are wondering what to specialize in as you graduate, look at the investment trends of VCs and others that tell you what they are betting on for the next 5-10 years.

Systems as Components: When the transistor and the silicon revolution began in the early 1960s the starting point was a single transistor, which then costs hundreds of dollars. In the intervening times components have become subsystems and systems themselves have grown exponentially complex at price points then unimaginable. This trend of systems getting more and more complex and cheaper is inevitable.

Our ability to comprehend and model the impact of these rapid changes in how we see the future and plan for it is limited by the ferocity of these changes. As an example, let’s look at cell phones. In 1980, AT&T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those mobile phones (“bricks’) that appeared then. “How many can we sell by the year 2000?” they asked. McKinsey came back and said, “900,000.” And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000—in the first three days. And, for the remainder of the year, they sold 120 times more. And now—merely 15 years later—there are more cell connections than there are people in the world.

Concomitant with this change is the integration of the human element with the complex systems and their interaction for new avenues to create economic value. Household robots, driverless cars, and remote surgery and medicine are some of the examples of these evolutionary trends. So, what does it mean to those who are entering these careers or are planning to stay in it for the next several decades? Professionals are going to need new skills to complement machines even more in how they carry out their everyday and specialized tasks. Premium is going to be on people who can integrate well with complex machines, yet provide deeper insights into what is going on when dealing with everyday problems beyond just what the machines are telling them.

What this means in the context of how you manage your career is that the foundational knowledge of systems—including human and social systems—is going to be at a premium because those who merely respond to what the technology tools tell them is not nearly going to be enough in dealing with the root-cause of most problems. Their insights derived from deeper understanding of complex systems must override the false positives that are likely from such set ups.

So, if you are starting out in your career or are already in the middle of your professional life what are some of the things you must become aware of and do? Here is a short list:

1. Become an Expert: Learn how to master one skill in which you engage early in your career. Deep learning of any topic will teach you to master the basics of whatever you decide to engage in and this discipline will help you in any pursuit you decide to take on later in life. Nearly 90% of my clients are not able to write their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in a tweet (140 ch.) during our first session.
2. Know your Talent: If you identify what you are REALLY good at and engage yourself in it early in your career you will master that skill better than almost anyone else. Do not try to remedy something that you are not good at or are just mediocre at. Instead, focus on improving and mastering on your innate gift.
3. Understand the Basics: There is BIG difference between merely knowing and deeply understanding something. Despite the complexity of the world that surrounds us the number of things that are basic to understanding most of what surrounds us is relatively limited in comparison. Once you master these basics you can feel confident dealing with complexity without getting overwhelmed by it.
4. Pursue your Passion: It is often tempting to go after a glamorous job or the one that pays more, or pursue something merely because someone else is doing it. Know what stirs your passions and engage yourself in that pursuit and you will experience what joyful work is.
5. Learn how to Communicate: In my coaching practice most of my effort is spent in coaching clients how to understand a situation, re-frame it, and how to communicate well—both orally and in writing—to get them what they are after. Learning how to communicate well is a life skill and investing time to learn how to be a master communicator can be the most significant career enhancing skill there is. It is also the most underrated skill in advancing one’s career!
Despite the complexity of how changes are coming about and how the future is shaping, taking control of your career is not that difficult. Follow some of these tips and take charge of your career.

Good luck!