The workplace is changing fast. Speaking with dozens of executive leaders in transition every week, I see how crucial it is to move away from rigid multi-year career plans and instead hold a clear vision of what calls you while staying flexible.
I lived through an industry shifting under my feet early in my career, when I worked in radio and the music business.
Radio mattered a lot. Getting an artist added to the right stations could change a career. DJs were local celebrities who knew their cities, took requests, showed up at events, and had real influence over what people heard. Albums sold, record stores mattered, and labels knew how the machine worked. Artists made records, radio helped break them, consumers bought them, and an enormous industry lived off that cycle.
Then, quickly, pieces of that machine started to disappear. Radio consolidated, and voice-tracking meant one personality sitting in one city could sound local in several others. A job that once required a human in a studio in Denver, Detroit, or Tulsa could now be recorded elsewhere and dropped into the programming.
Then music itself stopped needing a physical product. Napster showed people they could get the song without buying the CD, and legal downloads followed close behind. Listeners who once paid $15 or $18 for a release because they loved two songs could now buy just the two songs.
Think about what that did to the economics. Record sales fell, and record stores closed. Labels started looking harder at touring, merchandise, and publishing to make up the difference. Contracts changed, distribution changed, promotion changed. Artists suddenly had ways to reach listeners without asking the traditional gatekeepers for permission. All of that happened in what felt like a handful of years.
I remember watching how people reacted. Some spent enormous energy trying to protect what had worked before. Others got curious and asked different questions: Where is the listener going? What are they doing now that they weren't doing three years ago? What does this technology make possible? What part of what I know still matters? The curious ones were usually the people who found their way through.
I think about them often right now, because we are living through another one of those moments, only this time, it isn't hitting just one industry; it is hitting almost all of them at once.
This is more than change
A lot of the leaders I work with lived through the dot-com years, the financial crisis, the rise of smartphones and social media, the shift to remote work, and more technological upheaval than any one career should reasonably have to absorb. So it's tempting to look at AI and say, I've seen this movie before.
I'm not sure we have. Change is what we've all been managing for thirty years: new tools, new channels, faster output. What's happening now is a deeper transformation. The internet changed how we worked; AI is changing the work itself. It's shifting which tasks require a person, how much one person can produce, how teams are built, and what skills companies prioritize.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 says employers expect 39 percent of workers' core skills to change by 2030. That isn't some distant future our kids will have to figure out. It's four years away.
Maybe that's why I'm hearing a different conversation from leaders lately. A few years ago, discussions usually started with title and compensation. What's the next logical role? What should I be earning? How big should the company be? Those questions matter, but they used to be the primary focus.
More and more, though, a different question comes first: what do I actually want the next part of my life to be about? Sometimes it sounds like, "I don't know if I want another job like the one I had." Sometimes it's, "I've been successful, but I'm not sure I want to keep doing this." And sometimes people get right to the heart of it and ask what they were actually made to do.
I love that question, especially right now. When everything around you is in flux, a title is a fragile thing to build your identity on. Clear purpose holds up much better.
This is where faith enters the plan
For me, faith means trusting that God is in control even when I cannot see the full picture. That doesn't mean sitting back. I still research, ask questions, make calls, test ideas, and pivot. But I no longer believe a good plan requires knowing every single variable in advance.
Some jobs that will be critical five years from now don't exist today. Some key companies haven't even been founded yet. Many skills you've spent decades sharpening will actually become more valuable, because technology can't replicate human judgment.
That's why absolute certainty shouldn't be the goal. Faith gives us permission to move without it.
Your experience didn't suddenly expire
Please hear this: AI did not render your thirty years of experience obsolete. It simply shifted where your real value lies.
Information is cheap; judgment isn't. A first draft is cheap, but knowing whether the draft is accurate or effective isn't. Finding twenty possible answers is easy. Knowing which one fits the customer, the culture, the timing, and the people in the room is what matters.
You've spent a career learning things that don't sit neatly inside a database. You know when a talented employee needs another chance and when it's time to let them go. You know when the numbers technically work, but the deal still smells wrong. You know when the executive team says it agrees and absolutely does not. You know what happens three decisions downstream because you've lived through decisions one and two before.
That is wisdom, and you shouldn't surrender it because a new tool showed up. Learn the tool, then bring your experience with you.
Five ways I would prepare for what's coming
1. Figure out what career fulfillment actually means to you right now.
Before you start searching on LinkedIn, talking to a recruiter, or letting the market tell you what to do next, take time to remember when work felt good. Not easy, but good. Think about two or three seasons when you felt fully engaged. What problem were you solving, and who were you helping? What were you trusted to own? Were you building, fixing, leading, selling, teaching, creating, or connecting?
At ReflectionPoint Advisors, we call this Recognition, because it's very hard to create a meaningful next chapter until you've recognized what mattered in the chapters behind you.
2. Use AI. Don't study it from the sidelines.
You don't need another article telling you AI is important. Open the tool and use it. Give yourself twenty minutes a day for the next month and put it against real work.
Then challenge it. Push its limits. Learn where it shines and where it hands you flawed advice with complete confidence. Hiring leaders can immediately spot the difference between someone who just talks about AI and someone who actually uses it.
3. Stop selling years. Start selling judgment.
Take out a sheet of paper and write down five of the hardest calls you've made in your career: the acquisition you fought for, the product you killed, the employee you bet on, the restructuring nobody wanted, the customer you walked away from, the moment you stood in front of a board without every answer.
Those stories say far more about your value than "25 years of leadership experience" ever will. Your years aren't the differentiator. What those years taught you is.
4. Get closer to people who are already building what's next.
The best information about the future of work probably isn't in another report. It's sitting inside conversations. Talk to a CEO who rebuilt a function using AI, or to the leader of a ten-person team who discovered they can now do what used to take twenty. Talk to a founder hiring for a role that didn't exist two years ago, and to someone twenty years younger than you who uses technology in ways you haven't considered.
Go into those conversations without trying to get something. Just be curious. Some of the best career opportunities I've ever seen started as information before they became opportunity.
5. Make a plan. Just don't worship it.
Set a 90-day intention. Know what you're moving toward, choose the three or four actions most likely to get you there, and measure what happens. Then leave some room.
This is where faith and strategy align, freeing you from the need to control every outcome. You can work hard, pick a direction, adjust as needed, and stay attentive to unexpected opportunities along the way.
The music business didn't ask anybody whether they were ready. Technology changed, listeners changed, and the economics changed. Some jobs disappeared, new ones emerged, power shifted, and eventually an entirely different industry took shape. Looking back, it was a transformation, even if most of us called it change while we were living through it.
The people who made it through were the ones willing to look honestly at what was changing without believing it erased everything they already knew.
You can't control the wave. But you can paddle, get yourself in position, and when it arrives, trust yourself enough to stand up.
If you're at your own Reflection Point and trying to figure out what fulfilling looks like in this next version of work, that is exactly the conversation we have in a Clarity Call. It's complimentary, it's personal, and there's no pitch.
What would you do differently this week if you believed the work you were made for was still ahead of you?
Recognition · Insight · Clarity · Action
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