“Be a plumber!” Career decision-making during technological transformation: a conceptual paper

The purpose of this paper is to explore how existing career decision-making and sustainable career literature can help individuals and organisations to understand and prepare for the ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) may reshape future career paths. We apply current academic insights about career trends to understand how these trends will play out in workplaces that are increasingly integrating AI technologies. We have applied recent academic theories of Career Decision-Making and Sustainable careers to representations of the future AI-enhanced workplace.

to understand how these might elucidate choices for new entrants and mid-career job-seekers to sustain their employment. To explore successful transitions between roles and exit from paid employment, we examine the literature on contemporary discontinuous career patterns including career shocks, and the retirement literature.

We synthesise the findings of the current career literature to explore how future careers might evolve, and how to prepare for the transition. We find that contemporary patterns of discontinuous employment, career renewal and rebalancing, and unpaid contribution to society have already been identified, that can provide a template for future paid and unpaid employment patterns. Career advice should prepare new and existing workers for future careers that incorporate continual re-engagement, reinvention and rebalancing, whilst meaning and purpose may be found through intensive learning and achievement, interspersed with family focus and cultural renewal. The conceptual contribution of this paper is our call for careers to be viewed as part of a larger ecosystem that encompasses an individual's entire lifespan, whereby individuals will need to re-engage with the changing workplace, and retrain and reinvent themselves for new future roles, whilst periodically reprioritising their values and engaging in unpaid prosocial citizenship. This perspective encourages us to think about careers in a broader life perspective that includes continuous learning, charitable work, caregiving, cultural renewal and building relationships.