Over the past few years I’ve mentored hundreds of smart, ambitious professionals who are deep in a career-related existential crisis. The conversations typically go something like this: “I’m freaked out because people all around me are getting laid off”, “I’m burnt out and fed up”, and “I can’t rely on my job for security any more, help!”
And honestly, I get it.
The traditional model of career progression that’s underpinned working lives – get a degree, get a job, climb the ladder, earn more money, have more responsibility, climb some more, earn some more – is growing wildly more precarious by the day.
We’re living through the biggest shift in how people work since the industrial era. Technology has leapt decades in a few keystrokes, redundancies are sweeping the job market and roles are being rewritten faster than educational institutions can keep up.
The promises of a traditional career – stability, security, safety – can no longer be kept by businesses sprinting just to stay in the same place.
The corporate ladder is collapsing economically, and it’s not hyperbolic to say that it’s losing cultural relevance too. Trends like the Great Millennial Career Crisis and quiet quitting have splashed their way across the internet and oozed into water cooler conversations everywhere. In a post-COVID world, people are exhausted.
Many high performers who were once driven by money and status are now prioritising autonomy, creativity and alignment between how they work and how they want to live.
A new model of work is emerging at the intersection of these shifts; one that’s more flexible, fragmented and individually driven. We see this in the growth of the creator economy, the rise of freelance and fractional work, and the movement of portfolio careers into the mainstream.
Whether by choice or necessity, more skilled professionals are jumping off the ladder, and we therefore need a new way to think about career and success.
Enter: the Career Web.
The Career Web is a new way of thinking about how we earn and add value to the world. Instead of committing to one field, one employer, one income stream or one trajectory, you build an interconnected ecosystem of skills, relationships, audiences and income sources around you. In this model you’re in control. The builder. The creator. The maker.
It allows you to strategically design multiple income streams and points of leverage in a way that mitigates risk, builds long-term security and allows you to express various skills, passions and interests. It has a few defining characteristics:
- The radial strands: These represent your core skills, capabilities, knowledge and income streams and act as the base structure for everything else.
- The connective tissue: This represents how value moves, signals travel and opportunities come to be. Your conversations, relationships, connections, networks, referrals, collaboration, visibility, personal brand and reputation all exist here.
- A surface area: The more you spin, the more you weave, the more expansive your web becomes, and the more opportunities fly by and stick.
- It’s always changing: The web is in a constant state of flux. Not static, not tangled, but elastic.
- It’s always growing: As you shift, change and expand, so does your web. You build a new radial strand. You make new connections. New opportunities emerge.
In practice this might look like a marketer who consults three days a week, mentors a few founders and writes on Substack. It could look like a finance exec doing fractional chief financial officer work while running a cash flow workshop for small business owners on the side.
The web can take many shapes, but it’s all about building personal resilience; a way to keep earning and expanding even when the ground shifts (or bottoms out) beneath you.
We’re still early when it comes to the rise of independent work and multiple income streams, but what if, as the current system fragments, there’s a fundamental reimagining of how we work, earn and live?
What if the way we’ve historically structured our careers becomes the exception, not the rule?
What if our income, identity and sense of progress weren’t tied to an employer or the market, but to the strength and resilience of our own web? What if the death of the corporate ladder represents the birth of something else?
Anna Mackenzie is a start-up adviser, mentor and creator of The Portfolio Career Build Method. She writes a weekly newsletter at annamackstack.substack.com.
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Anna Mackenzie is a startup advisor, portfolio career mentor and writer of the popular newsletter Anna Mack’s Stack.