Last week at the Agile Coaching Academy, we talked about future proofing your agile career. Were others doing this, and if so, what approach were people taking?
This was initially prompted by reading Jeff Gothelf’s book ‘Forever employable’ as well as a keen interest from myself in the idea of antifragility.
I also read somewhere that the top 10 most in-demand jobs didn’t exist five years ago.
So, if our future role doesn’t exist yet, what were people doing about? And how can we keep ourselves relevant? What’s more: if those ‘in-demand’ roles don’t exist yet, it’s equally likely that any existing roles we have now might not be in demand in five years time.
The conclusions were:
- To (obviously) take an agile approach to your career, constantly learning, adapting and not being attached to one particular role or title.
- Recognition that we probably won’t be agile coaches in twenty years.
- Working on how to differentiate yourself.
- Establishing ‘your brand’ and what you stand for / where your line in the sand is.
- What do you want to be known for, and …
- Once you’ve done that, what do you do next?
- Looking at your big rocks in your backlog and what you are doing to actively break them down.
- Wardley mapping and how the concepts of agile have gone from genesis to almost commodity now.
What jobs will there be in twenty year’s time?
So talking about Wardley mapping, there was an interesting talk between Chris Stone and Simon Wardley here. Simon reckons that the future of agile actually lies in going back to the core principles from twenty years ago.
Interestingly this tallies with the principles of ‘Lindy’, as pointed out by Taleb in this talk. Basically: If you want your book to survive over time, what do you do? Well, if you want a book to be read by someone in twenty years time, then make sure it could be read by someone twenty years ago as well.
Firstly: you cannot predict the future, and secondly, new ideas tend to get replaced by even newer ideas whereas older (Lindy) ideas have a much stronger advantage over new ideas since they’ve already stood the test of time. Likewise ‘new’ in-demand jobs will be replaced by even ‘newer’ in-demand jobs.
The Lindy affect also posits that because Agile has been around now for twenty years, there’s a strong chance that it will be around for another twenty years – but it’ll be the core ideas that survive, not necessarily the ideas from the past couple years. So future-proofing your career relies aligning yourself with the original ideas that have already survived – thus aligning with the original principles.
Hypothesis: if we want to be able to do something in twenty year’s time as a career, we needed to be able to do it twenty years ago, too.