Thought Leader: Chaos is becoming conventional for careers

We must equip people for the future of work – and that means embracing  chaos with creativity, writes Dr Naeema Pasha, director of careers and professional development at Henley Business School.

The world of career coaching delivery should have changed alongside the world of careers – but it hasn’t.

This is, in part, because when we request careers support, we like it to be direct and offer us clarity. For example, we might say to a careers coach: “I need to know what my next job is, what I need to do to be successful and what my earning potential will be.”

Such an approach is normal because the human brain seeks certainty; certainty means safety. Safety, as identified in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is one of the basic human needs after food and water.

In response, people working in careers and people management will often offer a transactional and direct response to meet that need; up until now, this has been a “good enough” way of functioning.

Taking uncertainty into account

However, the world of work is in the midst of uncertainty, disruption and chaos. In this environment, career coaches would not be far off the mark if they responded to professionals with: “I am not sure whether or not your job area will have disappeared in a few years or what skill set is needed for jobs that don’t exist yet.”

The impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robots is already causing disruption to many sectors and occupations. In fact, Deloitte predicts that, by 2035, 35% of UK jobs will be automated.

For senior leaders and careers professionals, skills development is something that needs addressing urgently. It appears that our traditional learning and development (L&D) programmes are not being sufficiently adapted to match the pace of change or meet the needs of the future of work.

Currently, L&D programmes only reach so far and do not cover a person’s entire career management strategy.  Career development strategies need to be broadened to take into account the uncertainty ahead for workers if we want them to maintain a useful skill set and not be thrown onto a robot scrap heap.

This should start from the bottom – in schools, colleges and universities – and be continued in workplaces.

The WOW careers framework

At Henley Business School, our research shows that to manage future careers effectively, the key is for business leaders and educational institutions to encourage the development of resilience, self-reliance and reinvention qualities in staff and students.

These are the essential tools for people to be able to achieve career management more successfully, especially when job roles, functions and careers are in a disrupted state.

The World of Work (WOW) careers framework we have developed for our students encompasses components identified by economists that are needed for the future of work:

• Technical: data and digital skills

• Cognitive: analytical skills

• Social: relationship building and networks

To this, we have added:

• Self: confidence, knowledge, self-reliance and career leadership

When things are serious, our solution is to have fun. This is not meant to sound insensitive; we need to develop a transformational approach for workers and students. However, for transformation to happen, people need to engage and we engage better when it feels good and fun.

Our WOW framework incorporates creative and exciting methods of learning; for example, virtual reality, gamification, comedy training for confidence building, cartooning for memory recall, and YouTube skills for personal branding.

We have developed a model that builds on the work of Chaos Career Theory and encompasses and embraces design thinking/user experience when creating learning programmes, considering the learner’s experience and perspective of what they want to achieve.  

Chaos career learning is fit for the future

Our WOW initiative supports students and workers to embrace chaos.

We offer in-depth career coaching to address mental blocks and self-sabotage that we, as humans, often subconsciously put in place to block our success as well as an experiential student development programme, and tools using gamification to build a sense of belonging (back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

We also run a WOW conference to engage businesses and universities and develop a community of thinking and sharing in careers and the future of work.

We have seen success in our careers framework, with 99% of attendees of a recent experiential programme saying that they were more likely to take action on their career as a result of the ‘fun’ programme; 69% also stated an increase in confidence.

In general, we have noted positive outcomes in ranking league tables in terms of graduate employment and the roles our students go into after finishing their study.

This demonstrates that taking action now to foster change and skills development will provide a stronger and more flexible workforce for the future. Businesses and educational institutions need to nurture employees and future generations of workers and support them in adapting and enhancing their skills if they are to succeed in the future.