The idea that a career is considered a constant is not a truth anymore. There is automation, robotics, company shifts, market fluctuations, economic and governmental changes. The career is not exactly the same as it was 30 years ago; heck, 5 years ago. But what seems constant is that the career trajectory is moving towards the singularity — The Career Singularity.
What is the Career Singularity? It’s something I have been thinking about for several years. You can almost feel it like the forces you feel when turning a corner on a roller coaster. The gut feeling of what’s next and how do I prepare? The Career Singularity is just that; it’s how people change their career in shorter periods. It’s like Moore’s law but for careers. Every two years, the compute doubles until we reach the singularity. Well, our careers are changing faster and faster until we are changing jobs in real-time.
One might ask, how do we change jobs in real-time? We don’t. It’s not physically possible for people to change jobs that fast. Computers can’t either. That’s the paradox. People are not able to shift their jobs that fast but we are pushing ourselves to the brink of what’s possible. However, we are still early on this curve. We did 30 years on average. Then it was 10 years at a company. We moved to 5 years and around the 2010s, the average tenure was 3 years. In the last five years we have seen jobs average around 18 months. If we keep this up the next time frame will be 6–9 months on average.
Companies also have what we call the “Company Singularity”. Companies are just a much larger version of individual people. Companies also have to dynamically change just as fast if not faster than individual people. The issue is companies can’t change too fast or they could end up falling apart.
The career singularity is what we are all approaching because it’s not just competition or the demand that companies expect, there is also automation and robotics that are coming online this decade. We have had this massive wave of people upskilling and changing their jobs into tech in fear of being left behind. And millions of people are making that dive, especially in tech. They are seeing the benefits of working remote while also making more money. The downfall is many people are unaware that this remote work has a cost. As we have seen recently, tech companies are had big tech layoffs.
Companies know as more people are remote, the more fluid they can build their teams. It’s also like how cloud functions were introduced. Spin up a cloud function when you need them and then turn it off when it’s not longer needed. I’m not saying it’s cut and dry with jobs. What I mean is in the next decade, people might see their career transition into more consultant roles without even realizing it. Thus, that’s why it’s important to us from this stand point that we aid people with tools that are helping them every single day. It’s too hard and far too complex to try to navigate the entire career space alone. Yet we have done this for years. Sometimes we use recruiters, friends, college coordinators, bootcamps and even coaches. All of these are assets. But they are not going to help you day to day working on ways to navigate the complex career. They have a point of transaction and we believe those transactions are necessary to switch from job to job or to take courses or to meet people who can help you for a few sessions.
We believe that people should know what opportunities they want to take. People should know the risk associated with the opportunities and how any action they take towards their career would pan out. We believe people shouldn’t have to operate alone, especially as more technology is built to replace people. By 2025–2028, the career space will be so volatile that this industry will need analyst to see the shifts like the stock market.
Why do I care? Because I noticed that the people around me, including myself, my friends, my family will be outpaced and possibly replaced by both technology and automation. I know there will be a point that I may not do a job fast enough or that my time at a company may not be as long as it used to be due to changes. I know my capacity of compute and I know I can’t read and see everything. But I would like to see and read what is imperative to my livelihood to support my family and my future. Thus, it’s important for me to build cofounder because I need help to keep moving forward and continue to augment what I do so that I can traverse through the career frontier the best I can.
The Career Singularity was a term I thought about because it appears that the world is pushing it limits, thus, pushing its people. We have two choices. We can ring the bell and tap out or we continue to push towards the work that matters. Though, we may think we have work-life balance now, the future seems to reflect us working a lot more to continue to get head but really its the definition of what I call the Career Singularity.
If you made it this far and looking for more. You are in luck. We made a video that talks about this.
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