Every few months, some expert makes a grand prophecy that the job market is changing, usually over a stock photo of a chessboard or some random boardroom. Unfortunately, the irritating part is that they are right.
What the platitude skips is the sheer scale that is underway at this moment. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 reckons that by 2030, some 92 million roles will disappear while 170 million new ones appear, a net gain of 78 million. It also expects 39% of the skills people use at work today to be transformed or obsolete within five years. Mind-boggling, eh?
This means that two in five of your current strengths, then, are on the clock. That has been mostly true for most of modern working life, and the people who come out ahead are usually the ones who notice before their employer sends the memo.
Reed Hastings, it turns out, noticed. He started Netflix, the legend goes, after Blockbuster charged him a $40 late fee for hanging onto Apollo 13 for six weeks. He built a thriving DVD-by-mail business and then went to work dismantling it himself. Streaming launched in 2007 as a small add-on for Netflix, going on to become its future moat. At one point, Hastings reportedly threw his own DVD executives out of the main strategy meetings, on the grounds that they ran the profitable part of the company but had nothing useful to add about where it was heading. He had no patience for defending something he already considered finished. Netflix now has north of 260 million subscribers. Blockbuster has one store left in Oregon that mostly sells T-shirts.
All of which brings us to the force currently rearranging every office in the country: AI. This is obviously the big elephant in the room. Plenty of people treat it as a rival, sizing up their desk. For the wiser ones among us, it can behave more like a power tool that nobody handed you the manual for, but you can be a master of, with adequate practice.
On a Tuesday, with a job to keep and barely any spare time, this is bigger than it sounds. You can start with a handful of habits and build from there.
Start with the AI itself. Take one tool that overlaps with your actual work and use it for a fortnight, even if clumsily, but on real tasks. Draft with it, argue with it, and watch where it just makes things up. You will learn where it helps and where it falls flat faster that way than from listening to a podcast, and most of the intimidation wears off within a few days.
The skills worth the most effort are what you’ll carry between jobs. Analytical thinking still tops the list of what employers say they want, per the WEF report, with resilience and plain adaptability close behind, and none of that is tied to a single AI app or industry.
Plenty of technologies have promised to make careful thinking unnecessary, and so far, none have managed it. So before you reach for a tool next time, take five minutes to write down what a good answer would even look like. Framing the problem is still your job, not the machine’s.
Watch your own patch of the economy while you are at it. Read what the trade press is worried about. Pay attention to which tasks around you are quietly starting to run themselves, and work out what gets more valuable once they do.
People are already on this: in 2024, sign-ups for generative AI courses on Coursera ran at roughly six a minute. You do not need to drown in industry news to keep up. Pick one trend a quarter and learn enough about it to hold an opinion.
Some of what’s most useful to learn, you can’t get from a random youtube video. Talk to people who are a step ahead of you. Ask what they read, what they got wrong early on, how they decided what to bother learning and what to ignore. That kind of thing is hard to find written down because most people only say it out loud, usually over a coffee when you ask them directly. Mentoring someone more junior is worth doing for the same reason, since you find out fast how shaky your own grasp of something is the moment you have to explain it to another person in simple terms.
Upskilling works best as something you schedule, not something you scramble for after the layoffs land. Sometimes it is scrappy, a weekend course or a project you angle your way into. Sometimes it is formal, particularly in fields built on credentials. Healthcare is the obvious one, where a recognized qualification stacked on top of clinical experience can unlock a different level of work. Some practitioners weigh up structured options like a post-graduate/APRN certificate to build on what they already do while staying close to where the demand is. Whichever way you go, put it in the calendar like a dentist appointment, so that you stick to your guns.
You do not have to like uncertainty. You just have to stop waiting for it. Hastings was not clairvoyant. He paid attention to where things were headed and let go of the part that was already on its way to being finished, and the scaled-down version of that is available to anyone right now. The only real cost is getting started.