As a young business development manager at General Electric, working on a project in Japan in the early 1990s, I found myself on the other side of a debate with GE’s iconic CEO Jack Welch. The topic was the merits of the Japanese corporate model of lifetime employment.
“Neutron Jack” was what the media called him — a macabre reference to the neutron bomb that apparently kills people while keeping buildings intact. Jack had come to loathe that nickname, even though it did fit the reality of an American industrial landscape that was littered with abandoned GE facilities.
In our brief debate, I emphasized the dedication to continuous improvement and quality that Japanese firms enjoyed from their lifetime employees. Jack was not moved. In his view, lifetime employment bred complacency. To him, the best deal a company could offer its employees was lifetime employability through rigorous professional development.
Whether you love him or hate him, I think history has proven that, in this case, Jack was correct.
The corporate world is even more challenging today than it was in that earlier era. Professional development budgets are fickle and fluctuate with the strength of the economy, by one estimate declining by eight per cent from 2022 to 2023.
There is also a sense of unease that many learning programs can miss the mark by a wide margin, feeling a little like an afternoon with Michael Scott at The Office.
So what is an ambitious employee to do?
I have three suggestions for you to stay relevant and employable.
The first suggestion is to take the initiative and experiment with emerging technologies in your own professional role, long before there is a playbook for how to use these tools. As an example, some of my clients have become quite creative in their use of generic AI chatbots such as Chat GPT, BingAI or Gemini, asking them to summarize complex topics into short, easy-to-understand audio tracks that save them many hours of research and reading. A quick search will yield dozens of other ideas for you to incorporate these chatbots into your workflow.
If you work in an organization that is rolling out a proprietary technology, AI or otherwise, try to ensure that you get added to an early test group of users. It is always a bit of an art to learn how to adapt to and use a new technology. By being on the leading edge of this adaptation you will become an influencer in your organization, helping later waves get up to speed. This is a great way to build your profile.
My second suggestion for you to stay relevant and employable is to curate a broad network of cross-functional and intergenerational contacts. Complex problems most often do not fit neatly into one stack of subject-matter expertise. A network of diverse colleagues can give you advice and perspectives from various functions which can lead to great insights and practical solutions.
A cliché from my time in the advanced materials sector was the two solitudes of product development and marketing. Engineers in product development often seemed hellbent on pursuing interesting projects without commercial potential. And the newly minted MBAs in marketing were notorious for asking for “unobtanium,” that magical material with vastly superior properties at half the cost. The people that broke through in that business were the rare few who could speak both engineering and marketing, allowing them to develop projects that were actually practical and profitable.
It is possibly even more powerful to have a network of intergenerational contacts. As a society we are becoming less intergenerationally connected, with one study concluding that 80 per cent of Americans in their 20s don’t have a single friend that is more than five years apart from them in age. What a missed opportunity.
Combining the technical and cultural aptitude of youth with the perspectives of people who have been around for a few cycles can be very powerful. In my own coaching practice, I have seen such intergenerational teams anticipate the first round of global inflation in 30 years, and also avoid sounding tone deaf in the face of an emerging social trend. The key to such relationships is to retain a sense of humility and a willingness to learn.
My final suggestion for staying relevant and employable is to be courageous and honest with yourself. Even if you follow my other suggestions, the pace and magnitude of change might lead you to conclude that your job, company or industry is doomed. If this is the case, don’t let yourself become the frog in the pot of soon-to-be-boiling water. Be proactive and make a jump to a more promising lily pad of new opportunity, even if it requires some short-term hardship.
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