How to Future Proof Your Career

If you decide to stay on your career path or move it will still be hard work, no matter what, I think people don’t realize how important it is to have that continuous learning mentality, whichever way you decide to go

A couple of weeks ago, I. Was on a panel. For a professional association here in Australia called CPA Australia. If you’re in the U S it’s similar to CPA. In the U S so it’s the accounting certification and membership association and the topic of that. Panel discussion was, are you ready to future proof your career? It was really interesting in terms of the panelists. It was myself. And then we had Jennifer both who is the CFO of Quanta and it, which is a startup here in Australia. And we had. Peter grist, who is a principal economist at an industry body called the Australian chamber of commerce and industry. And the moderator was Hacia Atherton and hasty as a well-known. Life coach, and she’s also a CPA and deputy chair of one of the CPA committees. So it was really lovely. It was about an hour and a half, and we had a great discussion. And I like to share with you. Some of the answers of the questions that I was asked during that panel discussion, because I thought that they were really insightful and I hope that my answers, which are pretty much about my career and my thoughts and ideas where useful. I could tell by the, you know, the little chat box and people commenting there. And I also, the next day received some lovely comments and feedback on my LinkedIn and. Requests for connections on LinkedIn with feedback. About the webinars. So I thought. I think I should share my answers with you. So here we go. The first question I was asked was what do you think the future will look like for professionals in terms of job roles and the skills and competencies that they will require?

As I work with more experienced professionals. These are professionals that have already had Lisa decade of work under their belt. If not more. I’m always interested in what next. Right? So I’m assuming people were. Would have finished their university degrees. Maybe even a master’s or additional professional development. They have gained experience in their field. What do they need to do next to guarantee? the career progression and a future-proof their careers. I truly believe people don’t really pay attention to the importance of understanding your leadership style. And what’s necessary. For you to know about your style and how you can plug in and play at different stages of an organizational growth and development and where you fit best. We had a great discussion, a few episodes ago with a leadership expert, and I’ll put that link below. So you might want to go and check out that episode. And this is so important, you know, to understand that it’s not about talking about what a great leader you are and how you you’re results driven, or you drive performance and you connect with people, or you are a servant leader. It’s really about. Understanding how your leadership style aligns with the stage of the organization. This, the organization needs a leadership that needs to come in and fix things or grow things or build things, or be a visionary and start sort of. Recreating an organization that. You know, is out of touch with it’s with the trends in the market and what’s going on for their industry. So this is super important, right? So understanding leadership, reading about leadership is really important for those more experienced professionals. I mean, you can start at any time. But if you’re in your mid thirties and older and you don’t understand leadership and you can’t confidently talk about it. It’s time for you to buy a book. Or listen to some interesting podcasts here on the job hunting podcast, you can go to my podcast is leadership development as a category there on my blog, and you can click there and just. Listen to the whole playlist, right? aNd then when you think about areas that I think corporate professionals are drawn to. I can see this in my practice. I hear about it all the time when I’m on LinkedIn, when I’m reading trends in the industry is ESG. Right. So ESG is a big area, cybersecurity, big area, AI big area. Do you see your profession being impacted by those up and coming trends? They’re not just trends. They’re probably here to stay right. it may be that you will need to update your, your learning and professional development in this space, but not only that you might need to unlearn things from the past. If you’ve been working for a long time and you’re in a, for example, an accountant or a finance professional, or a, you know, in the sort of legal area of an organization. You may have gone to university way before ESG was a thing. So you may need to educate yourself on what an organization needs to do in terms of compliance in comms of policy, in terms of business strategy to comply and start heading in that direction. You can be the advocate or the champion, or you can lag behind. And I think that that’s, you know, about problematic in terms of future-proofing your career. If you’re lagging behind. it’s also something that I see often that people come to me for career coaching and they start working with me and they’re like, I re I’m really interested in cybersecurity. I’m really interested in ESG and I want to apply for these jobs that have, you know, the, request of Nice ESG experience of cybersecurity experience. So they are competing with people that may have extensive knowledge on these areas, right? So these things. We often overestimate what we can achieve. In 12 months, let’s say, and we underestimate what we can achieve in five years in 10 years. So you can start now, start from scratch and build your knowledge over time. And I think that would be really beneficial to future proof. Your career. And finally developing networks in these new areas. I wrote a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago about ESG in particular. It was a post that LinkedIn news asked me to ride because they wanted to quote me on an article, which I think they did. I can’t remember now. If they did I’ll post both of them below in the links in the episode, show notes. I’ll definitely post the blog posts because the the LinkedIn posts cause the LinkedIn post was really my thoughts on what I think professionals should do. And basically in summary, that’s what I, spoke about. I it’s about professional development. It’s about own learning and learning new ways of doing business and advocating internally for the areas of expertise. That you believe are important, not just for you, but for the organization you work for. And developing your network so that you can grow in this new area of interest for you.

I hope that you like this answer. I, you know, Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting. I know it resonated with people during the panel discussion. Cause I could see questions coming in After we panelists answered this question, they had different answers. Of course we all kind of complimented each other. But I’m going to focus on what I said for you. Then the moderator asked me, I know we’ve touched on technology. But what other skills and competencies do you envisage will be highly sought after in the future? So, yeah, so we, bought the entire panel, discuss things about technology to future proof, your career, and the importance of that. hazier, the moderator wanted us to go a bit deeper on other skills and competencies. So I talked about remote leadership and high performing teams that are remote. And developing organizational cultures that are remote or hybrid. And I think that this is right now. It’s not the future. It’s today. This is right now very desirable for employers and much needed in corporate work space. As you probably know. So we are still adapting to a remote or hybrid workplace environment and understanding how to drive high performance projects, high performance teams. And a positive corporate culture that is hybrid is really important and crucial for us employers to achieve what we want, which is that flexibility and how we work. We know that that’s what employees want. Because they’ve been asking for it and there’s pushback from employers and we’re still sort of re negotiating how to move forward. Right. But if we can prove to employees that. We can be high performing, working hybrid or working remotely. That’s really going to help us. Crystallize benefits that we’ve seen since the pandemics of working from home, if this is what most of us and the corporate world seems to be inclined to do. So I think that understanding how to do that is really important. This is not new research in management research. We’ve been researching remote leadership styles and leading from afar. You know, from my understanding, see, since the seventies. I’ve read that type of research when I was studying and doing my honors degree, which in Australia is the equivalent of a master’s. In the U S. and fell in love with that research and I thought it was so interesting and it’s now probably going to be picked up again. And I’m hoping to see more research coming up on that sort of remote leadership and how to promote it and how to develop a high performance. Organization with remote and hybrid work for us. So I would really encourage you to Google it, start reading about it And get to know how you can become a great leader and a great member of a team that works in that sort of hybrid space.

Then we moved on to talk about the rhetoric about the fear of technology, replacing professionals and corporate professionals in particular. So. The moderator asked, you know, what we thought about it. And you know, how big a fan I am of AI. I think AI is a great resource for job seekers. It makes your life much easier. I’m not afraid of it as a career coach. I don’t think it will replace my services. In fact, I’ve seen my services only. Grow in the past year. And I’ve been talking about ChatGPT and nonstop. You’re probably tired about it. ’cause I talk about it so much and I have not seen any decline in, in the work that I do. I think it’s important for professionals to understand the importance of technology in the recruitment and selection process. So I advocate for knowledge and education of employees and job seekers in understanding how technology can impact recruitment and selection and therefore their careers. So the more you understand technology, the more you can future proof, your career outcomes and professional development. Right? So there’s that space where I operate in. In terms of you operating as a professional and understanding technology that is so important. We talk a lot about ages and men. I of course a great advocate for anyone who wants to work for as long as they want and wants to be involved in their careers and have drive and energy and so forth, or just need, they need to work and they need to pay the bills. Most of my clients are in the second half of their career, so I love and I’m passionate about giving them that sense of control of outcomes and so forth. And one of the most important things that can give you that sense of control is educating yourself on the technology involved in. Doing the work that you do and in your professional. When I talked to career changers or people that are considering career change. If they have that fear of changing careers, I often see this. No matter what you decide to do. If you decide to stay on your career path or move. it will still be hard work, no matter what, I think people don’t realize how important it is to have that continuous learning mentality, whichever way you decide to go. If you are a marketing manager and you want to continue being a great marketing manager and having in future-proofing your career. For the next 5, 10, 15 years. The most important thing that you need to do is to understand what marketing managers do right now. And what marketing managers will be doing five years from now. And that will most certainly. Evolve understanding technology as well as what I’ve said before, about remote leadership and so forth. So, if you want to change careers, then yup You would still have to learn that new and educate yourself in that new career. So regardless of what you want to do, there is work to be done in terms of professional development. So, this is why I think sometimes people over estimate. What they will need to do in terms of enabling career change and they underestimate what they need to do in order to future-proof their current careers. I hope that makes sense. So I’m very pragmatic about technology. I think we need to engage with it and understand it and be resourceful, be receptive to it. And also manage the risk of whatever profession we have been negatively impacted by technology, which means we could lose our jobs in the future. So always manage that risk. Well, by. Maybe sprinkling your expertise in more than one area or developing a side hustle or changing careers, you know, like you have to really investigate this. This could be a little project that you can do for a few months. And understand this now I’ll tell you a story. Back in the late nineties, I thought travel agents were gone, were done and I should sell my travel agency. So that’s what I did. I sold my travel agency, which I started and built for seven years. And look, I was going to sell it anyway because we wanted to move to Australia. But it started off as that sort of a scary feeling that technology would take up the jobs of travel agents and we wouldn’t exist anymore. And now I see you know, travel agents everywhere. I sold the travel agency and it’s still up and running. And doing quite well. I have a son who does not travel without a travel agent. He loves having a travel agent supporting his business trips. And there you go. So, you know, I over manage that risk to be honest. So. I’m telling the story because I don’t want anybody, anybody to freak out. And think that their jobs will disappear. Because, you know, if I had stayed in Brazil, I would probably be a travel agent and doing quite well because every time I go to Brazil, I visited my old travel agency. And I get a little bit. You know, sad that I’m not there. Cause I really love doing that work. Anyway, here I am now. I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives sometimes.

And then we moved on to talk about what I did. What’s one thing that I’ve done to help progress my career. Now, if you’ve been listening to the job hunting podcast, this won’t be news to you, but I’ve always put courage in front of confidence. So when I was asked about what I did personally, that I think looking back in hindsight made me different from other people. Was that I wasn’t afraid to, give it a go. Even if I you know, it wasn’t successful. I always, always very brave bravery and valor is one of my character strengths. And I know that. And. My father and my mother would agree that I am. Brave. My dad would say stubborn. But yeah, so courage in front of confidence a lot of times, and this is the feedback that I received via LinkedIn messages. After the webinar was that the people resonated with what I said about courage. Sometimes people think, oh, I’m not confident enough. Or can, can you coach me so I can become more confident? And frankly, it’s all about courage. Whenever you’re looking for a new job. There will always be a gap of knowledge. There will always be a gap of knowledge between the job seeker and the new job, right. There’s no way around it so much so that the. second more stressful thing after, you know, looking for a job and not having one is having a new job. I’ll tell you that. People underestimate how stressful it can be. The first year in a job and it’s a steep learning curve. You’re still finding your feet. It’s very hard. You don’t know things, you don’t know, people. And They’re there. You won’t be confident. You know, for the first year, you will need courage. You need courage to go through the recruitment process and to put yourself out there and you would need courage to start a new job. So that’s what I said. I also said planning ahead of action. Now, this was really interesting because we, I had a bit of pushback from one of the panelists about that. Where this other panelists was like, oh, you know, I, I didn’t plan my career. I was more like, you know paying attention to opportunities. And look. I as a woman, I had no choice, but to plan my career because I wanted kids and I wanted a family. And if you want it all, you have to plan. There is no way around it. Okay. And I remember way before I even thought about being a career coach. I would always have friends asking me because I had kids very young. They would say, oh, you know, should I have kids before I do my PhD? Or after I do my PhD? Should I have kids before, you know, I take on a new promotion or after. So I remember I was sort of ahead of the game a little bit because I had kids early and I had my, business. I mentioned before I had a travel agency. And people used to come from me for advice. Women used to come for me for advice, and it’s important to plan these things ask for advice and, hear from other women and learn. And they may not be exactly what you decide to do, but at least you have some idea of what can happen. Once you start having kids and want your career to progress at the same time, it’s not easy. So planning ahead of action. I think is imperative for anybody that wants to have a family these days where, you know, I had kids in the early nineties. Now we’re in a much more. Fair society. And, and when men and women need to think about their careers, if, you know where thinking about couples here, And even if that’s not in your plan or not in your near future. It will not hurt you. I do have plans. I had of action. It makes you a better job candidate. If you’re talking about confidence, it really boosts your confidence and your ability to speak about yourself. If you have thought about what you want for your career. So having said that I did mention to the audience that I agreed that understanding the value of opportunities and taking that mop as they come along is also really important. And I feel like from my experience and also research that I’ve read men, tend to take up more opportunities than women when they come, women tend to overthink it. And let opportunities go by and not take them up. I’ve mentioned this to a few women that I work with. Look. I want you to reconsider this. I want you to know that in. You know, in my practice, I see more men taking up opportunities than women. I think women wait too long. Overthink it. And that is. To their detriment. And you know, I want you to know that that’s what I’ve been observing. Frankly, I need more time to back it up with, with research that I’m probably read years ago and I, I kind of lost track of it. So. I want you to. For now, just think about, of this anecdotally. Just in terms of, you know people that take up Korea coaching with me, most men, I think I mentioned that. Before. And now I have decided that whenever a woman decides to book a discovery call with me, which you can do on my website, if you’re interested in private coaching, I tell them, I say, look, men just sign up straight away. And women take forever and then overthink it. And you know, and I want you to know that that’s my observation.

And I want to help you. As much as I want to help men. So think about it. So those were the things I spoke about in terms of what I’ve done in terms of future proof. In my career, I am a planner. It comes naturally to you. But I think it can be learned and what it, that’s what I teach when I run a group coaching program, it’s all about planning and having that framework for job hunting. And when I work with my clients again, it’s all about. Understanding that there is a recipe for recruitment and selection and you can learn it and you can plan a hand. And have better results Quicker. I want things to be quicker. I don’t, I’m not saying you’re never going to fail. I just want you to fail less. And reduce the time you spend looking for work.

Another question was this one of our key learnings today is to hear about economic global trends that may affect. Our profession in years to come. Can you provide us with some insights of what these might be? Again, I spoke about remote leadership, high performance teams, and most importantly, I spoke about culture. Culture is now a big problem. Everybody wants to work at a better place. Everybody’s seeking culture.

when you think about it, it makes sense. And I understand it, but I also want people to. Do a bit of self-reflection and understand that we are all contributing to culture. And wherever we go, may not just fix the problem. We may need to learn about culture. To be better participants. And contributors to culture. So when you look for a workplace that has great culture. If they are that good as good as it’s advertised, as good as you can tell and feel from your intuition going through the recruitment. They will be seeking people that will be great contributors to their culture. So I want you to be prepared for that to future proof, your career and understand what are your career drivers? What are your personal values? What are your strengths? How can you contribute to their culture? If you’re interested in working for that organization. Talent predicts, which is the strengths assessment test that I use. It’s. Great. Easy fast way to help you understand how to present yourself. And also how to choose the best culture for yourself and not just apply at random. So it may be that you are the sort of. Professional that will thrive in a startup culture and not in a government department or vice versa. There is no right or wrong answer for anybody. We need all of these organizations out there, but which type of culture suits you. So instead of just looking for a better workplace and a better culture, understand the cultures that suit you. So I hope this helps. I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while, listeners. Because whenever I do the free job hunting masterclass, Planning on doing one. Oh, can I do one before the end of the year? I don’t think so. I would definitely do one late January. So stick around, sign up for my newsletter. ‘ cause I’ll definitely be doing one then. Well, whenever I do it and I ask, what are you seeking? Why are you here? Why are you looking for work? It’s all only, always about a job culture and a better culture. So yeah. You need to know what culture is. Great, great resources out there. And I mean, even in this podcast, we’ve spoken to professionals and employers, and I hope that you have found some great interviews. And opportunities to learn from, from previous episodes, can’t believe we’ve been going on for four years. Oh, my God. It’s amazing. The next question was about crisis management and adaptability as being important for this uncertain times we’re possibly going into. An economic downturn in 2024. We’re recording this in 2023 and we had an economist on the panel. So of course he, he spoke about that. And the moderator asked what experiences or skills. Can we use to navigate this economic downturn and unexpected challenges? So I spoke about personal agility and the ability to pivot there is a specific episode on the job hunting podcasts with Marianne Ru, who is an expert on personal agility. And she’s also an expert and the future of work. So. I highly recommend that episode. And I’ll put a link in the show notes. I also mentioned it’s important for us. As human beings to understand the difference between. Tapping on our intuition, Reddit and tapping on our instinct. So instinct is fight and flight. Is sort of part of our DNA for survival and we needed that. And it’s still very useful for many different situations out there, but it’s overused. When you’re looking for work when you were have been made redundant or you hate the job that you currently have. We need to know, we need to tell ourselves. We’re not going to die. Right. That fight and flight is not necessary for Korea transition. For job seeking. In fact, it can be detrimental to your performance at interviews. If you walk into interviews. Anxious stressed, worried. Fearful. That is all fight and flight and it will Affect your cognitive ability. It will narrow it down. You won’t be able to think as creatively or retrieve things from your long-term memory. When you’re asked questions that are behavioral questions and want you to refer to examples from the past. If you use your intuition, however, you are much better off because intuition is all about experience. We build intuition over time based on our lives, the way that we live or the things we’ve learned. So if you’re a professional with experience, you become better and better. Intuitively know if that is a good workplace for you as the recruitment process goes by. If the people are in front of you being interviewed are experts in their fields or not. If they understand what you do or not. And if you were. tapping into that. You can navigate the interview process way better. You can make decisions to go forward with the selection process or step out if you think that’s not a good place for you to work. And also having foresight and not just forecasting abilities. We were speaking with accountants, it was an event organized by CPA. Accountants are great at forecasting, which is looking back and gathering numbers and, and predicting things based on previous. Results. We are in a. time of our lives. We are growing and changing rapidly and exponentially. Right? So foresight now is so important because things are not performing the way that they used to. Climate. Markets You know, everything that we measure now is kind of different. And we need to understand forecast is very important, but foresight is about creative thinking. It’s about brainstorming with others. And understanding that the world is changing at a rapid pace. Alright.

Then he I asked you have all made various career moves to get to where you are today. What has been one of the biggest surprises or learnings in your career to date now?

If I knew How stress at work. Affects.= My personal health, I would have made. I believe I would have been smart and made different. thE decisions in my life. If I had known that bad working environments really affect my mental health and my physical health. I would have probably moved out of jobs earlier. Sometimes I overstayed because I was afraid that by moving too soon, it would send the job market the wrong message about me. I don’t think we need to worry about that anymore. It is true that the return on your investment when you change jobs, Comes, if you stay in a job for three years, that’s how I feel about it personally, because the first year. It’s quite messy. It’s a steep learning curve. You are a fish out of water. You’re still learning. You have to go through that. whole cycle first. And then the second ear becomes easier and the third year is even easier, even if the workplaces challenging and, difficult. You know what you need to do, you understand the personalities and the politics and so forth, and you might be able to better influence outcomes as well. So. The return on your investment on making career moves, I think is to stay for at least three years. However, if a bad working environment is affecting you. Move out. You know You don’t need to stay as long as you think you need to stay. And that is something that I sometimes wish I could tell more people. And sometimes people book discovery calls with me and they come with a set mindset and I can’t change them. Even in console patients, right. When they are working with me for a few months, then, then we can slow the kind of. Reset their minds and unlearned some things. About how recruiters think and how employees think. But you know, I had this conversation with a friend who employs speed when she said, oh, you know, I don’t like people that lose that often I wouldn’t hire them. And, you know what I tell you, my listeners. don’t work for my friend. The work for somebody else. Right. So I think that we need to, again, it’s about coaches seek out employers that have an understanding of, you know, your reasons and why you had to leave an organization And that you can feel authentic vulnerable and yet confident and courageous to move forward. And I wish I knew that earlier, but I definitely love helping my clients with this and having, and seeing them succeed and be doing so well with their career. So. Yeah. I am all for it.

Okay. Second, last question that I was asked. If you could go back and give advice to your younger self starting out in today’s world, what would it be? I would say that you need to think about yourself and how you show up. To the job to. A job interview and so forth, because the way that you show up influence outcomes in your career. And it’s all about that fight and flight. And all about The intentionality and being there. Mindfully there. Right. I remember sometimes going to chat with a recruiter and being so worried about. What was happening at home where the kids out of school, when going, walking home by themselves or. Do you think work will realize that I’m talking to a recruiter and I wasn’t actually there, you know, mindfully they’re paying attention to the recruiter. And of course I didn’t get the job. Because it showed and it shows your body language the way you answer it, the fact that you were a bit distracted. A bit anxious. You’re probably not the best candidate that she will see for that opportunity. I am lucky that I have a healthy relationship with myself, but I could do better if I had understood the importance of my mindset and how it can influence. Outcomes for me. And again, it’s something that I love to teach and coach. And help people overcome as well.

And finally I was asked about complex business landscapes today and demands on being ethical and transparent and how important that is for professionals. And how can we ensure that we are upholding? Principles. That are important to us values that are important to us while we navigate sort of business landscapes. And this was a very interesting question. I think that we sometimes get stuck between whistleblowing and thinking about what that would mean for our careers, if it goes wrong. I recently interviewed an attorney and her expertise, it’s employment law. I would urge you to listen to that episode. I don’t know what number it will be as soon as it comes out. The link will be in the episode show notes for you. And it is so important to evaluate the benefits to you, the benefits to the organization, to society, to. other employees of you coming out and raising the alarm bells for bad behavior. For things that are happening in the organization that are unethical or. Not great best practices in terms of culture or customer experience, whatever it may be. And I think that this is something that we need to grasp with as corporate professionals, professionals, also working in a nonprofit and government as well. And, you know, I believe that if we aware that. fiGht and flight are not necessarily needed any more because you know, being kicked out of an organization. Or. Deciding to leave an organization is not equivalent to. Being abandoned by a tribe in the Savannah, which is how our brains are still thinking about situations like that. Activating our fight and flight. I think that’s a really important, I think we have better ways now. Of managing our careers without activating survival mode. I want you to thrive. I want you to think creatively about problems. And I want you to access. Positive cognitive abilities to move your career forward with that great mindset being present in the workplace, sticking up to your principles, seeking out employers that. Share your values and have the cultures that not only you want to be involved with them, but you want to engage, participate in contribute for as well.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode. The links to the episodes that I have discussed will be down in the episode, show notes. So. Let me see if I remember them all, there will be one with the Attorney and the American attorney on employment law that I want you to listen to. There will be Mary and Ruth about personal agility and a future of work. There will be the one about leadership styles that I mentioned as well. So yeah, the links will be in the episode show notes. There are 200 and. 10 additional episodes for you to listen to. And we just turned four. Last week with episode 210. And I’m so excited to be in this sort of fifth ear of the podcast. And can’t wait to share with you many episodes that I have already planned for you, including some very interesting interviews that are coming up. If you want to know more about me or subscribe to my newsletter, it’s a weekly newsletter. You can go to my website and do that.