How to Future-Proof Your Career and Stay Ahead of AI

Forget coasting – the world of work is shifting faster than you can update your CV. AI is automating skills, shrinking industries and rewriting the rules of success. The men who’ll thrive aren’t clinging to old roles, but reshaping themselves to stay competitive. This extract from Survive the AI Apocalypse shows you how.

READ MORE: How to Start Saving for Retirement No Matter Your Age or Income

Extract From Survive The AI Apocalypse: A Guide For Solutionists by Bronwyn Williams & Sharon Pearce

Are You Making Friends And Influencing People?

If you are in a corporate job, the question you should be asking yourself to find out if you are in a nonsense job is: Are you in any way directly influencing a customer outcome? Much of our advisory work involves designing operating-model changes for big businesses. In this line of work, we talk about value chains and capabilities and use all sorts of horrible jargon to define what work should look like. But ultimately, if someone is just monitoring a process or delivering a process or checking somebody else’s work (or at a more senior level, someone is super busy checking what other people have checked), you have to ask yourself what value they are bringing to the table. What is the value you actually generated today?

If your business were paying, would you pay someone to do something that does not directly influence your customer positively and give you a competitive advantage? You wouldn’t. Sharon needed someone to sweep their chimney recently because they couldn’t light a fire to keep warm when the electricity was off. They were happy to pay someone with the technical know-how and physical ability to perform this task, which they couldn’t do themselves. That person added value.

Value is the difference between spending your money on things that you want, and that you’ve been saving up for, and spending your money on bullshit (e.g. banking fees, surcharges on your electricity bill, duplicate funeral-policy premiums and insurance with exclusions). Bullshit spending happens not only at a personal level but also at a corporate level. Companies and customers are very happy to pay for things they want, which generate more sales and ensure more growth for you and meet their needs. But they will be very reluctant to pay for things that feel like a tax. They also don’t want to pay for compliance or for something they believe they shouldn’t have to pay for.

READ MORE: Get a First Look at ‘Taking the Anxiety Out of AI’ by Sameer Rawjee

Real Value Is Consistent

What’s valuable today will not necessarily be valuable tomorrow. But this applies mainly to the bullshit segments of the economy. When you look at the real side of the economy, things like food, security and safety, where value is determined by scarcity and demand rather than price signals, peer pressure and vanity metrics, what was valued yesterday will be pretty much consistent in the future.

So, consistent value is probably the first thing we should consider if we are concerned about securing our place as valuable in the future. We need to look at longer-term trends that fulfil the deeper needs of all human beings, such as the desire for love, safety, housing, food, comfort and status. Because human beings are the only source of value in the future. So, if you want to be more resilient, you want to avoid having to reskill often. Therefore, you need to focus on things that won’t change continually and avoid chasing new skillsets all the time. It’s a grand irony that the most cutting-edge skills are also the skills that have the shortest half-life.

You might be tempted to ‘quickly do a computer-science degree’ to keep up with the world, but remember that ChatGPT can today do for free what just last year you had to pay a team of developers to code for you!

Swiss-Army-Knife Skills

The reality is that the skills you need for the future are shifting towards solutionist-orientated skills. We like to call them Swiss-army-knife skills. Companies cannot sustain huge numbers of people over time. Jobs are evolving. The world is shifting – and so should you. While it is predicted that the number of new jobs created in future will outnumber today’s redundant jobs, the reality is that the number of people we need to do the work with the advent of AI and automation will likely be lower or at minimum more flexible than the permanent structures we see in organisations today.

If you’re unable to take bits of information – whether you gleaned that information by providing ChatGPT with great prompts or from reading or from a customer need that has evolved – if you’re unable to stay ahead of those trends, if you’re unable to understand the context and real needs of your customers and unable to bring the right people into a room or ask the right questions and know what to do with the answers and translate all this information into a solution, you won’t find the answer in technology, no matter how smart it is.

READ MORE: How to Balance Wedding Expenses with Long-Term Financial Stability

The real skill, therefore, isn’t in whether you can code in Python or SQL or how great a ‘prompt engineer’ you are, but in whether you can apply the information you have in a context that is relevant to solving a real need in a way no one else can or has done before. To ensure that you’re able to do that, ask yourself: Can I use AI and technology to help me do things and solve problems that the AI can’t or that another process or person cannot do alone? In other words, you need to bring some level of differentiation to the party. If you cannot do this right now, start thinking about how to do so now, because companies don’t survive without differentiation – and neither will you.

If this sounds overwhelming, do not fear. This is why we invented the ‘Can You’ test, which we discuss later in this book (see Chapter 8) to help you determine the answers to these questions and what to do about them.

You Are More Than Your Job

To differentiate yourself, you will have to start thinking about yourself as an entity. If all jobs will be bullshit jobs in the future, you need to separate the idea of your job (your salary) and your work – the things you do and the value you add. This is an empowering conversation. Having a job basically means being dependent on someone else. It means being half an adult, although that’s what we seem to be training our children to do. In school we train kids to sit down and take instructions to make them employable by someone.

We then perpetuate this extended adolescence until they retire and become dependent on their pension. This might be normal right now, but it is far from the only story about what success could and should look like. We have to grow up and become independent individuals. There are no stable jobs or secure companies or fully funded social safety nets to protect us from change and disruption. Rather, we need to see ourselves as ‘individuals, incorporated’, dependent on no one but ourselves for our employability and independence. This may entail having multiple side incomes, or what we could call a ‘career portfolio’. This may sound exhausting, but it is the best way to diversify your risk of redundancy.

READ MORE: Self-Employed vs. Running a Business: Knowing the Difference Matters

Becoming an ‘individual, incorporated’ rather than an employee gives you options and gives you scale. You are no longer limited by the hours and earning potential of your employment contract. The mindset you need to figure out where the value is that you’re adding and can add anywhere and for anyone differs widely from an employee mindset, which creates the expectation of getting looked after once you land a job. It allows you to be on the lookout for opportunity. Achieving it is a huge challenge, because we spent 12 to 18 years acquiring an employee mindset. From teachers and schools to employers and parents, society is still churning out people who expect the safety of jobs that simply won’t be there much longer.

The Employability Conundrum In ‘Work For Value’

There is an employability conundrum in all of this, especially for individuals who are new to the workforce. This conundrum cannot be tackled by individuals alone. Rather, it must be a collective effort for organisations, governments and individuals. Entry-level jobs will become fewer and fewer as companies start leveraging AI and augmenting ‘work for value’. Graduates will require more and more experience to become employable in roles that add value immediately as opposed to ‘learning to fulfil value-adding roles’ in future. The absorption rate of graduates will likely become lower and lower. (Already fewer than half of South African graduates are finding work that is relevant to their field of study.) 

Then there is the advent of an augmented (people- and machine-based) reality that will change the nature of work at pace once you are employed. Scarce skills that today are remunerated at a premium will not be as scarce in future. Moreover, earning potential in scarcely populated roles will eventually decrease, not increase. How we pay, educate, upskill and reskill will need to be the focus of society to sustain our economies in future.

Here are some questions we need to think about: How do we teach graduates and provide real work experience for them simultaneously? How do we actually translate solutioning as a core skill? How do we reward for value instead of for jobs to ensure sustainability in our organisations?

The answer to these questions may very well lead to poor performance on the part of suppliers, employers and other parties being stamped out without us having to invent a process to do it. The opportunities to revolutionise the system – the whole system – are endless.

READ MORE: Take Control of Your Finances in 3 Easy Steps

Men’s Health participates in various affiliate marketing programmes, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites