The Kickass Career: How to Succeed in the Future of Work, Now

By Ben Hamer

Work is a massive part of our lives. If work changes, we change. And change we will. Change is happening at the fastest rate in human history. It’s also the slowest you’ll experience change for the rest of your life. And according to the experts, we’ll have at least 17 different jobs across 5 completely separate careers. Many of those jobs don’t even exist yet, with 25-40% of jobs set to be automated by 2030. This makes navigating the new world of work more complex than ever before. Society is evolving, technology is advancing, and jobs are changing. And that was before a global pandemic.

But we’re approaching new challenges with old ideas, which is why there’s a need for a fresh take on careers and how you can succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Kickass Career throws conventional career advice out the window and takes a new approach. It will help you to better understand what’s happening in the world of work, why it matters to you, and what you can do about it. It’s designed to help you have the mindset, skills, and know-how for building a successful career in a volatile, uncertain and ambiguous environment.

To do this, The Kickass Career focuses on reframing your mindset by tackling some big topics like values and purpose, because you can’t just talk about jobs, careers, and the workplace without giving a nod to the deep connection that they have with your identity. It helps you to think differently about failure, negativity, and how you manage your time. It covers off the skills, both human and digital, that you’ll need to develop so you can stay future-fit along with becoming the leader that you wish you worked for. And it helps you to navigate a change in job or career, as well as a whole heap of other workplace challenges that you’ll confront along the way.

So, grab a cup of tea (or an ethically sourced soy mocha, whatever is your vibe), put up your feet, and strap yourself in for a book about having a kickass career in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Together, we’ll explore how you can thrive, not just survive, in the new normal while maintaining relevance and taking control in the future of work, today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922703064

Ben Hamer

Dr Ben Hamer is one of the leading voices on the future of work and author of The Kickass Career: How to succeed in the future of work, now. Ben is a Doctor of Public Administration, specialising in leadership and management, which included time spent as a Visiting Scholar at Yale University. He also has a Bachelor of Business Administration with First Class Honours and is an Adjunct Fellow for Swinburne University’s Centre for the New Workforce.Ben was appointed as a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Australia at the age of 28. He still works there, which makes his parents happy because he has a track record of changing jobs and this stability gives them confidence that maybe he’s growing up. Ben drives PwC’s Future of Work practice and has spent time at the World Economic Forum on high profile projects to do with the future of skills, education and work. He’s also on the Board of the Australian HR Institute (AHRI), where he was appointed as the youngest non-executive director in the history of the organisation.Ben enjoys morning coffee in bed, colour blocking his outfits, and using politically incorrect humour as a defence mechanism.

Book preview

THE

HOW TO SUCCEED

KICKASS

IN THE FUTURE OF WORK,

CAREER

NOW

DR BEN HAMER

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

PO Box 4363

Penrith NSW 2750

https://www.indiemosh.com.au/

Copyright 2021 © Dr Ben Hamer

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.

Disclaimer

Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

Chapter 1: Introduction

A friend of mine quit a job as a lawyer to start an apprenticeship as a carpenter. Another, a doctor, handed in their resignation after only a few years. And a family member left teaching in their mid-forties to be one of those people who work in events management with a dramatic headset and an attitude to match. People changing jobs isn’t new. But these examples all have one thing in common. They all started out in what were traditionally considered to be ‘jobs for life’. We’d normally expect that when someone becomes a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher, then they’re in it for the long haul. But while they all set out on one track, they ended up going down a completely different path. And this is the new normal we find ourselves in. According to the Foundation for Young Australians, we’re going to have at least 17 different jobs across five completely separate careers.

The world of work is changing and the journey from school to work to retirement is no longer a straight line. It’s a giant squiggly one. A big part of this is due to technology, which is shaking things up in a big way. And while adapting to emerging technology isn’t anything new, the difference now is the speed.

Change is happening at the fastest rate in history.

In the single second it took you to read that sentence, an algorithm executed 1,000 stock trades, while Visa processed more than 1,700 transactions. Right now, 76,000 Google searches are returning tens of billions of results. Over 6,000 tweets have been tweeted and 2.9 million emails are being sent, not all of them by humans. All in a single second.

This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Somewhere between 25 and 40% of jobs will be automated by 2030 and according to former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, artificial intelligence (AI) will change 100% of jobs within the next five years. These changes are already having a sizeable impact on the jobs you’ll do, the careers you’ll have, and the skills you need. But it’s not all about the robots. For example, this thing called COVID-19 came along and within the space of a few weeks, there was the biggest spike in unemployment since the Great Depression as well as the world’s largest work-from-home experiment.

While we’re well prepared for the past, we’re ridiculously underprepared for the future. We might be living through the fastest rate of change in history, but it’s also the slowest rate of change you’ll experience for the rest of your life. Like Nevada counting a US Presidential Election slow. Stuff is only going to get more complex and move quicker. The issue is that our views on education, careers and even retirement are buried deep in the past. Career advice is outdated and overwhelmingly flawed.

The new world of work requires a different mindset and approach. One where you let go of what you think you knew about work. One where you reimagine your career so that you can keep up, stay relevant and kick ass. And to start with, you need to move on from traditional self-help.

The problem with traditional self-help

A lot of people turn to self-help when it comes to dealing with a terrible boss, an unfulfilling job, or a career change. The thing is, traditional self-help evangelists have created a billion-dollar industry that is more about making money than helping others. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely a place for self-help. But there are three main issues that limits how useful it can be, particularly when it comes to your career.

Self-help throws the shame you feel back in your face. Some people turn to self-help to ‘fix themselves’. But they tend to fall short because they hold this fundamental view that whatever they do, including self-help, supports their feelings of inferiority and not being good enough. Because all the positive self-help stuff fixates on what you don’t have. It focuses on what you think your shortcomings and failures are, and then throws them back at you. For example, you might go to a conference to see some guy in a cheap suit tell you how to get rich quick because you want to make more money, but it just makes you feel inadequate by reinforcing that you don’t make enough money in the first place. Or maybe you write positive affirmations on the wall (#livelaughlove) or recite a mantra in front of the mirror telling yourself how successful you are. But all it does is remind you that you aren’t successful. Ironically, fixating on all the positives just focuses on a life that is better than the one you have. It reminds you of what you aren’t, what you lack, and what you’ve failed to do. Because if you were successful, you wouldn’t need to stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself.

Self-help is just another form of avoidance. Everyone has problems. But traditional self-help tends to deal with the surface-level issue, which is why it can be another form of avoidance. For example, maybe you don’t like dealing with conflict in the office and so you watch a YouTube video about how to have a difficult conversation. All of a sudden, watching the video feels more important than actually having the conversation and so it doesn’t result in any real improvement. This is where traditional self-help can ignore values-based questions like why you avoid conflict in the first place. It can be a shallow way of trying to feel good in the short term without solving the important stuff for the long term.

Self-help is a drug. Self-help creates the perception of change, which results in a temporary high. It creates a feeling of accomplishment or improvement, which makes you feel good for a short period of time but without addressing the deeper cause of the problem, that feeling eventually disappears and makes you want to go back for more. The irony is, if you actually helped yourself, as the name self-help would suggest, then you wouldn’t need to rely on it. But people get hooked.

When you try and apply traditional self-help to your work and career, you can find yourself chasing temporary highs without setting yourself up for long term success. That’s where this book comes in, providing you with a fresh perspective on career advice for the new world of work.

An artist's impression of me in a therapy session

A new look at careers and career advice

I’ve spent most of my career advising everyday people like you and me through to CEOs and governments on the same topics that I write about in this book. I lead on the Future of Work for a major consulting firm and have worked with global thought shapers and change makers at the World Economic Forum. I’m an Adjunct Fellow at Swinburne University’s Centre for the New Workforce and am involved in the human resources community as a Board Member at the Australian HR Institute. As you can tell, this is the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning. I’m passionate about identifying and understanding the trends that are disrupting work and workplaces and making sense of what it means for organisations and their people. I’ve also learnt a lot from my friends, family, psychologists, colleagues and sporting coaches when it comes to my own career that I also use to help others.

It was over coffee with a friend one morning where they suggested that I write a book. I’d written blogs and articles that people seemed to like. I’d penned my doctoral thesis and written whimsical songs for friends’ birthdays. But a book was something else. After giving it some thought, I committed to putting pen to paper. Because there’s a hell of a lot going on in the world of work. We hear on the news about factories being shut down and jobs disappearing, while entirely new industries are emerging. People are changing careers frequently. Society is on the move, technology is advancing, and jobs are evolving.

Work is a massive part of our lives. It’s ingrained in the human psyche and so if work changes, we change. And change we will. Given most of us spend one-third of our waking lives at work, we owe it to ourselves to get it right. If you can be more satisfied at work, chances are you’ll be more satisfied in life. But work, careers and organisations are being disrupted. It’s a massive opportunity, though if you passively sit there and let it pass you by then you’ll get left behind. Which is where this book comes in: to help you better understand what is happening in the world of work, why it matters to you, and what you can do about it. It’s intended to make the complex a little less complicated. And it’s designed to help you have the mindset, skills and know-how for the short term so you can build career success over the long term. To get you there, this book is written in three parts:

Part I: Reframing your mindset to take on the new world of work.Before thinking about the future, it’s important to establish the right foundations that will influence your outlook. Because you can’t just talk about jobs, careers, and the workplace without giving a nod to the deep connection that they have with your identity. This means tackling some of the big issues like values, purpose, and vulnerability, while thinking differently about failure, negativity, and how you manage your time. And it helps to understand how your brain is wired to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty in a changing work environment.

Part II: Building your toolkit of skills for the future, now. Once you’ve established the right mindset, it’s time to have a look at the skills you’ll need to succeed in the future of work. And it’s all about balance. A balance of the uniquely human skills, or ‘soft skills’, while building your digital literacy. Plus, given you’re going to have a kickass career, you either are or will be a leader, so we’ll cover that one too.

Part III: Finding your place in the future of work. This is all about looking at how you can get more from your work, job and career. It covers topics like why career advice is outdated and identifies ways you can make your job work better for you. It explores the possibility of being your own boss and finishes by looking at how to go about a career change.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m not going to paint a picture about the world being all sunshine and rainbows. The truth is that there’ll always be another restructure in the workplace, another policy that fundamentally changes how you do your work, and another technological advancement to replace the jobs around you and maybe even your own. Change is only going to get faster. So, brace yourself and get moving.

Guiding your way through the book

This book is all about the new world of work. It explains some of the theory behind what is changing, why, and how it could impact you. It also offers practical advice and steps you can take for positive change, and some activities to help you on your way to having a kickass career. A career where you wake up and want to go to work. Not every day. That’s not realistic. But one where even on your worst day, you still feel like you’re on the right track. A career where you’re happy, engaged and challenged. And with a job that works for you rather than just working for your job.

This book is written to provide guidance to the worker, the supervisor, the executive, and the student. Each chapter represents a specific topic and concludes by summarising some of the key messages. It’s intended to be read from front to back, assuming you don’t get bored and give up halfway through. Once you’ve read it in full, then think of it more as a reference guide. A resource where you can pick up and refer to a specific chapter whenever you’re facing a particular situation. I’ve also added a list of recommended readings at the back of the book that I’ve found to be useful resources throughout my own career, as well as