Position, don’t predict: the framework I wish someone had taught me in 2019
Build capabilities and options that work across multiple scenarios instead of betting on one future.
Nobody can tell you which jobs will exist in 2035. But you can position yourself to be useful regardless of which scenario arrives.
The honest audit tells you where you stand. This tells you what to do next. Not because I can predict the future with any precision, but because there are moves that work across multiple scenarios, and moves that only work if one specific future arrives. The first kind are worth making now. The second kind are a gamble.
The scenarios are useful here. Managed Transition: governments implement support, new social contracts emerge. Neo-Feudalism: capital captures gains, most people subsist on fragments. Fragmentation: no coherent response, regions diverge. Black Swan: something nobody modelled. The current probabilities sit at roughly 28% Managed Transition, 48% Neo-Feudalism, 19% Fragmentation, and 5% Black Swan. The direction matters more than the precision.
If you optimise for Managed Transition, which is the assumption baked into most career advice, and Neo-Feudalism arrives instead, you’re caught with no safety net, no independent income, and a new qualification in a field that’s already overcrowded because everyone took the same retraining programme. If you position for resilience across scenarios, you might not be optimally placed for any single outcome, but you won’t be catastrophically exposed to any of them either. That’s the trade-off. It’s the right one.
The no-regrets moves, the ones that help regardless of which scenario materialises, are clear: build financial reserves, diversify income, strengthen trust networks, develop capabilities that survive automation. Everything else is scenario-dependent. Think of it like packing for a trip where nobody will tell you the weather. You can’t build a wardrobe for one pattern. But you can make sure you’ve got a waterproof, some layers, and decent boots. The specific outfit matters less than having options.
That’s positioning. Options, not answers.
Here’s what that looks like in practice if you have runway: time, resources, employability, options.
Build owned assets. Something that generates value without requiring you to sell hours. Intellectual property. A product. A course. A system. A business with recurring revenue. A property that produces income. The distinction matters because the fundamental vulnerability of professional services work is that it sells time. You have a finite number of hours. You sell them at a rate the market determines. When AI compresses the time required to produce the same output, the rate collapses. Owned assets don’t have this vulnerability. A product sells while you sleep. IP compounds. A recurring revenue business scales without proportional time input. The investment is front-loaded: months or years of work to create something that then generates value independently.
MIT Sloan’s research on founder age says the opposite of what most people assume. The highest entrepreneurial success rates come from middle-aged founders, not young ones. The person with twenty years of domain expertise, an established network, and hard-won judgment about what works and what doesn’t is better positioned to build something than the twenty-five-year-old with energy and no context. If you’re forty-five and thinking it’s too late to build something of your own, the data says you’re wrong. You’re in the optimal window.
Acquire skills in AI augmentation. The people who survive in knowledge work are the ones who use AI tools to multiply their output, not the ones who pretend the tools don’t exist. This is different from “learn to code,” which was never an escape route for most people. AI augmentation means understanding how to use the tools reshaping your industry: how to prompt effectively, how to validate AI output, how to integrate automated workflows into your existing practice. The person who uses AI tools to produce in two hours what previously took two days hasn’t automated themselves out of a job. They’ve made themselves five times more productive. Right now, AI augmentation skills are relatively rare in most workplaces. Within two or three years, they’ll be table stakes. The advantage goes to early adopters.
Develop trust networks. When credentials commoditise, when anyone can generate a polished CV, a strategy deck, or a thought leadership article in minutes, the scarce resource becomes trust. Granovetter’s research from 1973 still holds, verified by MIT in 2022 across LinkedIn data: weak ties, casual acquaintances and distant connections, are more valuable than close friends for employment opportunities, access to information, and career advancement. Your close friends know the same things you know. Your weak ties connect you to networks outside your own. Novel information. Novel opportunities.
Spend less time deepening relationships with people like you and more time building light connections with people who aren’t. The plumber who knows what’s happening in the trades market. The teacher who understands what young people are actually learning. The NHS administrator who knows which healthcare roles are expanding. Twenty minutes of coffee with someone outside your industry is worth more than an hour at a networking event full of people from your industry.
Build and maintain at least twenty professional relationships across different industries. Actual relationships where either party would take a phone call. That takes time, and the payoff is asymmetric: an introduction, a tip, an opportunity you wouldn’t have known about otherwise, arriving months or years after the coffee. Start now. The network you’ll need in a crisis is one you should have been building before the crisis.
Position as navigator. During periods of transition, the people who understand the change become more valuable, not less. If you work in professional services or consulting, the old value proposition was helping someone do marketing better, or strategy, or operations, or finance. That proposition is losing value because AI does it faster and cheaper. The new one: helping them understand what’s changing and position for it. The shift is from optimisation to navigation. From incremental improvement to fundamental repositioning. This isn’t rebranding. It requires actually understanding the displacement dynamics, the scenarios, the timeline, the risks. Most people in advisory roles don’t have this understanding. If you do the work, you become the person people call when they’re scared and uncertain.
Reduce financial vulnerability while you can. Least interesting advice. Most important. Reduce fixed costs. Pay down debt. Build reserves. Every pound of fixed cost you remove from your monthly expenses is a pound of runway added to your transition. The target is six months of expenses in liquid, accessible savings. Not stocks. Not property equity. Not a pension. In a savings account you can draw on within three business days. If six months feels impossible, aim for three. If three feels impossible, aim for one. Any buffer beats no buffer. The difference between making a decision from safety and making one from desperation is not a matter of degree. It’s completely different quality of decision.
For those without runway, living month to month in a role that’s already contracting: assess clearly and quickly. If your audit says your role doesn’t survive five years, waiting is expensive. Begin the transition while still employed. Not after redundancy. Not after the restructuring. While you still have income, a title, a professional identity, and the bargaining power that employment provides. Your single greatest advantage right now is that you’re not yet desperate. Desperation is expensive.
Across all positions, five principles apply. First: diversify income. Single source of income is a single point of failure. Even a small secondary stream, a few hundred pounds a month from freelancing, tutoring, consulting, or a side project, transforms your risk profile from binary to graduated. Second: build trust relationships across sectors, not just within your industry. Third: reduce fixed costs. Every pound of fixed cost removed is a pound of flexibility gained. Fourth: develop capabilities that survive automation. The eight capabilities from Enterprise Skills, commercial awareness, decision-making, problem solving, financial literacy, adaptability, data analysis, team collaboration, leadership, are what employers value and AI cannot replicate. Fifth: act now. The window for positioning is open but closing.
There is no version of this where waiting is the optimal strategy.
The positioning work sounds abstract until someone actually does it out loud, with the numbers written down. Then it becomes tactical. Not romantic. Not optional. Just necessary.
You don’t need to know which scenario lands to make these moves. You just need to be in the position where you’re useful when it does.