Are You Prepared For The Future Of Work?

By Laurel Donnellan

I’ve been helping people find and do meaningful work for nearly thirty years. I’ll admit something: for most of that time, my office conversations started with “What do I want?” Lately, it starts with “Will there even be a place for me?”

I understand why. Our economy is moving through a kind of change none of us has lived through, and AI is getting the loudest headlines. But when I hear that second question, I hear someone who has quietly handed over the car keys. To the job market. To the algorithm. To a boss, or a headline, or a layoff rumor in the group chat.

I want you back in the driver’s seat of your own career car.

Some context helps me here. Across generations, people now hold 13 to 25 jobs over a lifetime, spread across 2 to 9 distinct career chapters (CLC Integrated Research Brief, 2026). The one-job, one-ladder life was already gone before anyone was talking about AI. What AI changes is how fast the next chapter can arrive.

So the better question is: what do I need to build to drive well, whatever the road does? In my experience, it comes down to three things.

1. Relevancy

Most advice about staying relevant right now focuses on tools. Learn the new platform, take the course, add the certificate. Some of that is worth doing.

But relevancy has two audiences, and most people focus on only one.

The first is the market. Does someone still need what you can do, and will they pay you for it? That’s the one that gets all the attention.

The second is you. Does the work you’re good at still mean anything to you?

You can pass the first test and fail the second for years. Paul L., a UK founder who did this work with us, said it better than I can: “There is simply nothing worse than being trapped in a career that you are good at, but you simply don’t enjoy.”

I’ve watched that trap get more dangerous as work speeds up. When you’re relevant to the market and irrelevant to yourself, every disruption feels like a threat. The job is the only thing holding the whole structure up, so you defend it at all costs. When the work is also yours, there’s something underneath the job title that comes with you into the next chapter.

So build relevancy in both directions. Keep learning what the market needs. And get honest about which of your skills you’d still want to use if nobody were grading you.

2. Resiliency

Resiliency usually gets talked about like a personality trait. Some people bounce back, some people don’t.

I don’t buy it. The people I’ve seen move through a hard stretch well have usually done one specific thing. They’ve stopped reading a pause as something negative.

A layoff. A burnout break. A season of caregiving. A role that quietly disappears in a reorg. If each of those means something is wrong with you, you’ll spend all your energy defending yourself instead of reading the road. If each one is a season with its own logic, you get to ask a much better question: what is this chapter for?

That shift sounds small. It’s the difference between a detour and a crash.

3. Readiness

This is the one people put off, because it feels like it can wait until something happens.

It can’t. By the time something happens, you’re deciding from panic.

Readiness means you have a written plan for your next chapter before the current one ends. What you want. What it needs to pay. Your first three steps. A plan you wrote on a calm Tuesday will serve you better than anything you scramble together after a bad Friday.

Here’s what I’ve learned after nearly thirty years of sitting with people at exactly this crossroads. None of us gets to choose whether the road changes. We do get to choose whether we’re driving.

If you’d like company while you build that plan, our Plan for Purpose cohort is a good place to do it. It’s eight Wednesday evenings on Zoom, built around this exact work: getting clear on what you want, digging into what you’re good at and what you love, exploring real options, and writing a plan you can actually live.

We begin October 14, and enrollment stays open through October 21. Anyone who joins after the first session gets the recording and walks into Session 2 caught up. Here's everything you need to enroll.

Love,
Laurel Donnellan
Founder and CEO, Compassionate Leaders Circle