Career readiness in the post-career world

 

Careers are no more. Like the one my father used to have. Or the one I aspired for. The rituals of entering, the legitimate peripheral participation followed by genteel progression into the inner circle, marked by ever greater material possessions and social prestige - they are no longer real.

But the idea of a career is the cornerstone of middle class life. In fact, it is middle class life. From the start - choice of school, grades, university ranking, traineeships - to the end, the dreams of retirement, putting one's children on the same path, the middle class life arc is a projection of mid-twentieth century career.

How many young men I met who have been inspired to study law after watching The Suits? They are all inspired by Mike, they say. Yet, Mike is post-career, a hustling entrepreneur more than a lawyer. If they want a career path of the sort law schools offer, they should want to be Louis Litt. Nah, they would say, that's not the type they are: Welcome to the post-career world!

A sense of crisis

The suits released in June 2011. Between 2011 and 2019, Mike Ross achieves everything he wanted - marrying Rachel, getting a real law degree, running his own legal clinic and finally, returning to New York to work alongside Harvey. Horatio Alger Jr.'s rags-to-riches hero gets a twenty-first century update: All was well in the end.

On September 30, 2012, Alexnet offered the first glimpse of what machine learning could do. In 2016, AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol, despite the brilliance of Move 78. In November 2022, ChatGPT's release brings chatbots to public conversations. By 2024, Mike's magical memory would have been bested by ChatGPT, and Rachel Zane would perhaps be made redundant in 2026. If we believe the Talking Heads, Harvey today would be a solopreneur, his gifts augmented by Claude: if he is in China, he might have a robot trying to do Donna's work too.

But I believe that the talking heads are overdoing it and there is no clear evidence that AI has destroyed jobs yet. The recent redundancies have as much to do with Covid-era overexpansion of the Tech sector relative to the other parts of the economy. If anything, AI has created new jobs, and many of these jobs have been created in infrastructure. If the average software engineer struggled to get a job, it has become cool to become an Electrical or Mechanical Engineer again.

Yet this feels like a crisis, because the narratives of 2011 do not fit the world of 2026. This is what AI has done: It has broken our narratives with a powerful counter-narrative in the making. Today, Mike Ross may not want the law degree anymore - he builds a new model to ace bar exams and then deals with the consequences of the dissolution of the legal profession as we know it. Or, whatever. One thing he doesn't do is to go back into the career he aspired for.

Career as a narrative

This brings me to the issue of definition. A career is not a job, but rather a form of identity. This is a story which one tells about oneself, powerful stories that shape - and are in turn shaped - by the lives we live. They are bundles of expectations, rituals and rewards, but first and foremost, they are formed by a social contract.

Once we recognise careers as such, we should see that as AI starts having an impact on the economy, both in terms of what we do and how we do these, these narratives are bound to change. The good news is that there would still be careers even after careers-as-we-know-them might disappear: This is because the reconfigured productive structures would come with new rules and expectations, which would need making sense. The world of money, its symbols and associated conventions needed an Accountant once; today, it may require a data storyteller.

Young people today wants to believe. We should let them. But we should not offer them a false narrative - that all will be well in the end - but invite them to imagine afresh. It is good that AI has broken the structures and created the openings. For example, it has taken away the raison d'être of the large firm, as it removed the 'transaction costs' that exist when individuals try to work together, and this may build new possibilities of 'a man and his AI' firms doing beautiful things. And many of those. And new things every day! Handling the thousands of problems that cry out for solution - the care we can't afford to give, the education we don't have time for, all the little things and big issues - may become careers again.