It’s perhaps easy to assume our challenges are unique to the worlds we are familiar with. Our lives, our communities, the sector we work in. I’m a sector-surfer, moving between different fields, figuring out how I can take learning from one and add value in another. The learning, I have to agree, is to be found in the transitions. I’ve actively avoided getting too quickly and tightly bound onto a career trajectory that disappears into a future of sameness. It’s no easy feat; we’re set on paths (usually far to early when we are asked to select subjects at school) that we are increasingly disincentivised to deviate from. 

Our growing knowledge and experience about the slice of world in which we work are often seen as sector-specific. Our seniority increases, as does our pay, our pension pot, our work-based social capital and influence, our knowledge of how to get things done, our control of resource and decisions. In short, we accumulate power. Once on our way, path dependency and loss aversion kick in and it becomes hard to switch. We are usually actively discouraged by others climbing the same ladder. 

Should we decide – and manage – to break out of the norm, our transitions become instances of wrenching ourselves free of the incentive structure that makes it all to easy to remain in the comfortable world of the familiar and the normal. What is less well appreciated is the energising space into which we emerge, one in which we are freed of all previous structure and expectation, where the constraints of possibility are released and our future paths become infinite. We make the shift from a finite game, to quote Simon Sinek, to an infinite game. The former sees our career as an upwards path to retirement, in which those who accumulate the most resource along the way have the best future to look forward to. It’s what Gen Xers like me were brought up in – the ‘career for life’ model. Times are changing now, though, and Millennials^⁠1 and Gen Zers appear to be adopting greater levels of flexibility and transience in their work, often with multiple clients or ‘gigs’ and quick to switch between employers. Pre-Covid data^⁠2 showed over 55’s spent just over 10 years per job compared to just under 3 years among under 34s. 

Seeing our working life as an infinite game is to probably question the relevance of retirement as a goal to be aimed for; sure, retirement at 65 made sense when our bodies degraded through the manual work we were doing; now most of us are in the knowledge economy the only impediment to work is our own sanity as we age. Is it not more appropriate instead to take mini-retirements at ages when we are still energised enough to make the most of them? It is also to question the relevance of working in the same field from age 21 for – what – 50, 55, 60 years? Is it not more exciting and energising instead to take on new challenges along the way? 

That’s been my experience, moving between sectors. I could have stayed in Local Government and of course that would have been the easy thing to do. But I am driven by the notion that life is to short to settle, and so to relax into comfort is for me to risk not being challenged. And from challenge comes learning and growth.   It doesn’t mean it’s easy to step off this treadmill, mind you; far from it. 

Yet when we break out of the norm we learn the most, about ourselves, about the human condition and about the world in which we live. I’ve learned so much moving first from the voluntary sector (charity) into the public sector (local government), to the charity sector (think tanks) and now to the humanitarian sector (INGO). Interestingly, the challenges remain the same, largely because we are still dealing with people and processes; it’s the context that changes. Common issues include how we collaborate effectively, involve those we are trying to help in design and decisions, allocate resources efficiently, hold people to account, mitigate appropriate risks, reduce our impact on the planet, build innovation, curate a culture appropriate to the work, make decisions effectively, align people behind a mission, avoid doing too many new things, stop doing things that are not mission-critical, ensure we are responding effectively to the world around us, work with partners, develop our staff, satisfy our stakeholders, shift systems, secure new business… the list goes on. 

It’s when you break out of your norm that you learn the most. 

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¹ https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231587/millennials-job-hopping-generation.aspx

² https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38828581