Five Steps To Designing A Meaningful Career In The Age Of AI

By Laurel Donnellan (Originally published at Forbes.com)

For nearly thirty years, I have been asking people a deceptively simple question: what is the best use of your passions and purpose for your next career chapter? When I started this work, most of my clients expected to answer it once or twice in a lifetime. Today, the question has become a companion for life, and our rapidly changing economy, including AI, is the reason why.  This can seem overwhelming if you do not have an updated career planning strategy. 

The linear, one-employer career is long gone. Baby Boomers held an average of 12.9 jobs across their working lives, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our research at Compassionate Leaders Circle projects that people entering the workforce today will hold about 18-25 jobs across six to nine distinct career chapters (a series of related jobs). Four forces are driving this shift: AI-driven displacement, longer working lives, the rise of the gig and portfolio economy, and shrinking tenure among younger workers.

By 2036, our synthesis of data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Upwork, and MBO Partners projections suggests nearly half of American workers will do some form of freelance or independent work while traditional full-time employment shrinks. Most career plans, however, are still built for 1985.

The Purpose Gap Is Widening

Here is what has not changed: the human longing for meaning. McKinsey research finds that 70% of employed people say their sense of purpose comes from work — but only 15% are actually getting it. A 2025 Gallup study tells the same story: workers with a strong sense of purpose are 5.6 times as likely to be engaged in their jobs, yet fewer than one in five describe their current job as having a purpose they personally believe in.

According to 2026 Careershifters research, values and purpose misalignment now outranks pay among the top reasons people leave their jobs. In an age when AI is rewriting job descriptions faster than universities can update curricula, purpose is the one career asset that cannot be automated.

AI Is A Tool, Not A Compass

A consistent warning has emerged from the leaders and future-of-work researchers I interview for my podcast: we are at risk of using AI backward. In Glean's 2026 Work AI Index, 51% of workers said AI has already automated meaningful work they would have preferred to keep — the inverse of the intended benefit.

Dr. Kelly Monahan, a future-of-work researcher we interviewed for a previous article on the Future of Work, offers a simple test for healthy AI adoption: it should help you work faster, produce higher-quality work, and free you to connect with people in the real world. AI should absorb the manual and the tedious — not the work that generates meaning, creativity, and connection. If you love writing, do not outsource the writing; if clients energize you, let AI handle scheduling, not the relationship.

There is also the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we treat AI job loss as inevitable, the more likely organizations are to make it so. Compassionate leaders — and compassionate career designers — choose curiosity over fear, and intentionality over reactivity.

Anchor Yourself In Soul Work

At Compassionate Leaders Circle, we map every working life across four overlapping circles: full-time jobs, part-time and freelance gigs, entrepreneurial pursuits, and what we call pauses and pivots. At the center, where all four circles meet, sits your Soul Work — the best use of your passions and purpose for your current career chapter.

If you do not know what that is, your Soul Work right now is to figure that out.

Most career frameworks ask, "Which category are you in?" The better question is, "Which circles are you living in right now?" The overlaps are the majority experience, not the exception: MBO Partners reports that more than a third of full-time employees also run an independent side gig. In my coaching practice, the most fulfilled clients are rarely the ones with the most impressive titles; they are the ones whose weekly calendars overlap with their purpose.

Soul Work rests on four passion types: Interests, the topics that energize you; Talents, the skills you would never delegate; Style, how you show up when you are most authentically yourself; and Environment, what you need in a workplace to thrive. From these, craft a purpose statement — an action verb, something you care deeply about, and the impact you hope to have. Purpose is not static; it changes throughout your life, which is exactly why it works as an anchor in volatile times.

Plan For Pauses And Pivots

Here is the circle almost every career framework ignores: the pause. AARP counts 63 million family caregivers in America — nearly one in four adults. And pauses end: in the third quarter of 2025 alone, six million Americans moved from the sidelines back into the job market, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Caregiving, health challenges, layoffs, retraining, burnout recovery, retirement transitions — these are not career failures. They are the planned and unplanned pauses and pivots that allow you to prepare for your next round of employment. The compassionate move is to plan for them before you need to: build savings, build skills, and build the support system that will carry you through.

Design Your Next Chapter

Whether you are twenty-five or sixty-five, here is how to begin:

Step One: Dream first. Before you optimize your resume for an algorithm, name your Soul Work. Write a purpose statement that reflects your current and future why. If you need guidance with this step, look here. 

Step Two: Use AI as a brainstorming partner. Feed your favorite AI platform the jobs you have loved, your interests, and your ideas, and ask for twenty possibilities across full-time roles, freelance gigs, and entrepreneurial pursuits. Let it expand your options; let your purpose narrow them.

Step Three: Build AI fluency. AI literacy is becoming the new baseline, just as computer literacy was in the 1980s. Freelancers with specialized AI skills already command a significant wage premium.

Step Four: Overlap your circles. For example, test a side gig or an entrepreneurial experiment while employed. Overlapping income streams mitigate risk and expand freedom.

Step Five: Prepare for your pauses. Choose three specific actions in the next 30 days that ready you for the pivots ahead — planned and unplanned.

The age of AI will keep changing what we do for work. It cannot change why we work. The people who thrive in the coming decade will not be the ones who out-compete the machines. They will be the ones who anchor themselves in purpose, lead with love, and design careers — chapter by chapter — around the work their souls are here to do.

If this topic intrigues you, join us at the free, online Work on Purpose Summit on July 30, 2026.