The Turn: The Mid-Career Slump
It's hard to change course right when you're supposed to be earning fat stacks
I’ll be 45 this year. Going back to the second half of the last century, this would be considered the mid-point in my career. Twenty years (give or take) ahead and behind of me. A kid growing more independent. Parents retired. A spouse in the midst of the same journey.
Things are changing quick.
While there has been a lot of talk about the impact of AI on employees earlier in their careers and decades of discussions about how, when, and what impact the Baby Boomer retirement would have on the workplace, not much has been written about people in the middle of their careers.
Some new research from Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at London Business School, has shed some light on what’s going on. Gratton has specialized in studying our increasingly longer lives and its implications for work.
That was what I covered in my Reworked column last week.
What stuck out to me about the research was how much about the mid-career journey was about identity, not performance. Nobody talks to you about exploring new potential paths as much. They assume if you’re in a role, you’ve been there for awhile, and you’re performing well, you’re on your way.
It can feel a bit like a career on auto-pilot. I know how it feels to be on that track. And once you’re earning a certain amount of money, changing course will likely cost you. You might have to get new credentials like my wife did when she became a teacher. You might have to build different skills.
If AI is going to change roles so completely, we have to be thinking about what a shift looks like for everyone, not just entry-level employees. Give it a read and tell me what you think. Any novel programs for mid-career folks out there?
Learning more about the career pivot
What has helped me as I think about what I might want to do for the next 20-30 years is reading what some of my peers have done. Lexy Martin, a legendary researcher and advisor, has taken to telling stories about it on her blog (aptly named) Redirecting.work.
The stories section is less a collection of mini-biographies and more snapshots of a critical moment in people’s lives.
Lexy has covered some of my favorite people, including Sarah White, Jess Von Bank, Chris Havrilla, John Sumser, and Ed Frauenheim. But some of the best stories are from people who I didn’t know as well or who seem so dissimilar to me or my current reality.
The whole series really opens your eyes to those moments that things change and what it can look like for people in a wide variety of circumstances. There’s something really comforting about that.
What else is happening this week?
Labor Market Adds 172,000 Jobs in May, but Growth Remains Uneven. The number beat expectations, but most gains came from leisure, hospitality, and local government, and the majority of industries were flat or down. We’ll see if these numbers hold up through the revisions.
AI Has Broken Hiring. Here’s How to Fix It.. Based on 120 TA leader interviews and 6,000+ screening sessions, Shraddha Sunil and Mudit Saraf make the case that companies are selecting for people best at navigating hiring, not best at the job. The fix is redesigning early-stage screening around reasoning and judgment instead of polished credentials.
It’s Not Your Resume. The Stanford research everyone is quoting doesn’t screen resumes at all. It uses gamified assessments that sort by traits correlated with race, which is a very different problem, and Keirsten Greggs reads the actual study and explains what it found, including the part the “beat the ATS” crowd left out entirely.
Two Things Everyone in Hiring Should Know. Same Stanford research, slightly different take (but with video) from Katrina Kibben.
You Can Now Get a Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work. A software engineer filed a Title VII religious accommodation to opt out of AI at work and won. If ever there was a time to find religion.
AI Saves Time but Most Companies Waste the Gain, Study Shows. Workers are saving hours every week and those hours evaporate because nobody told the organization what to do with them. This is how all innovation goes.
Workers Turn to Social Media for AI Training as Employers Lag. If you don’t want employees learning AI from TikTok, you better figure this out.
AI Is Creating a ‘Joy Paradox’ at Work, BCG Finds. Sixty-seven percent of regular AI users say job satisfaction is up, but 47% say they’re spending more time managing AI than doing actual work. Turns out getting gaslit by and correcting AI outputs has a cost: our sanity.
Opinion, Not Evidence, Is Driving RTO Decisions. RTO mandates are following CEO sentiment and competitor headlines rather than any real analysis, and Peter Cappelli lays out the case plainly. Still so much management by feel.
What My Son’s Graduation Taught Me About Rewiring, and Why It Has to Happen Twice. The commencement speaker quoted Keats on “negative capability,” the capacity to sit in uncertainty without reaching for easy answers, and Jason Averbook spent the rest of the piece applying it to every executive he knows. The Keats is real and it’s still relevant.
Everything’s an Infomercial. The modern long-form LinkedIn post uses the same value-stacking structure as the 1949 Vitamix infomercial, and John Sumser nails what’s true about the content landscape right now.
EU Pay Transparency Directive. June 7th marked a key implementation date with only three of 27 EU member countries compliant so far. Anita Lettink covers where things stand and why the rest will probably wait until enforcement bites.
A Tiny Guide on Starting ChatGPT Ads. Want the TL;DR on ChatGPT’s ad platform? Viola Eva put together a quick-start guide covering formats, specs, and setup.
The 2-Hour Job Search: Why Steve Dalton’s Advice Still Holds. The resume is not the problem. The strategy is. Good job advice from Laurie Ruettimann, who has doled out a lot of it.
The HR Tech Landscape Moves Fast: New Podcast Worth Adding. In case your podcast list isn’t full, Stacia Sherman Garr and the RedThread Research team launched a new pod that promises to call out vendor BS alongside the signal.
The Enormous Potential for Microsoft Frontier Fine-Tuning. It always felt like the enterprise was Microsoft’s to lose, and they were trying their hardest. Josh Bersin covers Frontier Fine-Tuning from Build 2026, which lets companies train Copilot on their own IP with reinforcement learning that improves over time, and makes the case for why they may still win.
What Is Being Human? When intelligence stops being scarce, what’s left that’s distinctly human? Big questions in the age of AI from Kevin Wheeler.
We Don’t Make All the Talent Tools. We Make Them Better. The real problem in talent tech is a lack of shared context across them, and AI is only as good as what you feed it. Master Burnett talks about the criticality of context, something worth being a little obsessed with.
How AI Is Changing What It Means to Be a High-Potential Employee. Dan Schawbel asks what HiPo even means when expertise has a shrinking half-life and learning agility is the thing that predicts success.
AI Gets Political. Recruiting Will Feel It. Public opinion on AI has soured fast enough that regulation feels inevitable, and hiring is the obvious target. David Manaster lays out what that means for TA: defensibility, transparency, and governance are no longer nice-to-haves.
As-a-Solution: The Software and Services Convergence. The next era isoutcomes delivered smarter (not just cheaper), with agentic AI rewriting the unit economics so delivery stops scaling with headcount. Charles Bedard‘s new newsletter is already off to a strong start.
Have a great rest of your week!