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Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow

Hillary Clinton

How should we think about the arc of our individual working lives, given the twin challenges that are disrupting the way they used to be understood? One is the reality of our longer life spans, the other the changing impact of technology on jobs – one 2013 study suggested that 47 per cent of total US employment was at risk from computerisation.1 We can’t at this stage know precisely how a field we are interested in or have already chosen will be affected, but somehow we need to get as close as possible to having both a short- and a longer-term horizon for what we want to do. It’s about having a purpose with what you are doing now and thinking about how to lay the groundwork and gain the right CV points either for your next role or further down the line.

For me, the most useful approach has been to think in terms of five-year plans – five years being a period of time that is reasonably foreseeable and easy to keep in mind. Not long after I started on Today, I mentioned my five-year approach in an interview, only to realise that, with echoes of the Soviet Union’s economic plans, it probably had a slightly sinister ring to it. What it meant to me was thinking about the possibilities of the future in manageable chunks of time.

When I first joined the BBC and found myself working in a very large organisation, it was a way to start mapping some sort of route through what felt then like quite an overwhelming place. I knew people around me were doing compelling work that I could see and hear on air, but I also knew I might never be a part of it if I didn’t figure out how to find my way around in a bigger sense than not getting lost in Television Centre.

For Professor Heather McGregor – who ran a firm of executive headhunters, became the Financial Times’s ‘Mrs Moneypenny’ columnist and is now dean of a business school – longer parameters are more valuable, especially at the starting point of a career. She advocates putting a ten-year plan down on paper, including the position you’d like to be in at the end of that time but also planning for an alternative result: ‘Write down the reasons it might not happen. Then work out how to deal with them. As a pilot, when you plan a flight to somewhere, you always have to name an alternative airport, in case, for whatever reason, you can’t land at your intended destination. Think about your career like that.’2

What you write down might be job-specific – a particular role, level of pay, or title – or broader, such as running your own business or working in a smaller company. After that, she says, you need to work out the barriers to getting there. ‘Quite often the barriers are financial. People get stuck in jobs and careers they don’t enjoy because they need to pay the rent or the mortgage. Sometimes you need to take risks to really change the direction of your career – rent your house out and go on a training course? Move to somewhere totally new? Take a step back in seniority to get into a different kind of work? Take that promotion even though you are unsure that you can really do the job being offered?’

What this process should make clear is what you need to do or think about now to try to make your ambition a reality. But whether your horizon is five or ten years away, there should be no doubt about the likely impact of global population trends on the working lives of those growing up today. The 2016 book The 100-Year Life was based on the premise that the majority of children currently being born in rich countries could expect to survive beyond their hundredth birthday. And yet our societies and the policies of most governments remain rooted in the way previous generations have lived.3 The gerontologist Professor Sarah Harper points out the profound change represented by the ageing of an entire population: ‘To grow old in a society where most people are young is fundamentally different from doing so in a society where most people are old.’4

That’s because of another shift taking hold at the same time – the decline in fertility rates that began in the richest countries of the world is spreading fast through Asia, Latin America and Africa. Women nearly everywhere are having fewer children and by 2100 those under fifteen are projected to make up less than 15 per cent of the global population. By 2050, when the UK is projected to have half a million citizens aged one hundred or more, Professor Harper says ‘old age’ will probably be a term associated with people in their late eighties or nineties and we will likely think less in terms of chronological age and more in terms of frailty or disability.5

The 100-Year Life co-author, Professor Lynda Gratton, agrees on the immense impact of these changes. ‘We need to move away from this idea that life is three stages: full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement,’ she says. ‘Instead, we should think of it much more as multi-stage, where we come in and out of work.’6 That could well mean a greater convergence between the working lives of men and women: as professional life is stretched out by a decade or more, periods of maternity leave or working part-time should start to appear more marginal. The intense period that many women experience in their thirties, as they feel the pressure to establish themselves professionally and start families, may ease. Perhaps we won’t think so much in terms of ‘a career’ at all, for women or men, but of multiple careers or simply applying experience and skills to different tasks and circumstances.

We may also have to think differently about the key moments at which to encourage aspiration and foster ambition, seeing this as an ongoing, almost lifelong mission. Nevertheless, it will always be one that begins with the young and we know from the science on stereotyping as well as from surveys how horizons can be limited early on. In 2018 the Drawing the Future survey, involving 20,000 children aged seven to eleven from 20 countries, highlighted how gender, background and ethnicity can play a powerful role in children’s ideas of their own potential. It found that jobs were often stereotyped by gender, career choices were made on the basis of these stereotypes and that children’s aspirations are most influenced by who they know – their parents and their parents’ friends – as well as by television and the media.7

From seeing the work of the charity Mosaic, I know how important it can be to provide first-hand accounts of the world of work that are wider than what children commonly see. Asking young professionals to volunteer their time, Mosaic sends them in to schools in disadvantaged communities where they mentor small groups over the course of an academic year. The task is to inspire the children about what their futures could be. ‘They are growing up in communities where the very idea of work is quite often limited to something others do,’ says Nizam Uddin, who leads Mosaic. ‘Even where there are adults in close proximity to these young people who are in work, these are not the jobs that inspire them or the ones they marvel at from afar.’ One British Asian mentor told me that the girls she worked with were amazed that someone from a background similar to theirs could grow up to be an independent woman, earning her own living.

The lawyer Miriam González Durántez founded an organisation called Inspiring Girls with a similar mission, taking female role models into schools. She thinks that the early teens are a key time to focus on girls. ‘No matter whether they come from a city or a rural area, from a well-off background or not, self-confidence is an issue. Something happens when they are twelve to fifteen that knocks their confidence down. In my view it is the result of sexism that they begin to notice from the age of six.’ She has also noticed how often she is asked about whether it is possible to combine a career and a family (she has three sons). ‘This surprises me because I honestly don’t think I was worried about that when I was thirteen. But they are already thinking about it and it is limiting them.’8 A Girlguiding UK survey from 2016 also suggested that as girls get older, they increasingly perceive boys to have a better chance of success in their future jobs. While 86 per cent of seven- to ten-year-old girls thought their chance was equal to boys’, that dropped to 54 per cent for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds and just 35 per cent among those aged seventeen to twenty-one.9