Forget the career ladder – think squiggly and make sure you know how to learn

The career ladder was an appealing concept: linear, predictable and with a blueprint to follow. The certainty of a ladder-like career was reassuring, and the promise of consistent promotions with more “success” (titles, salary, status, prestige) the further you climbed offered a continual focus and destination to aspire to.

But this model is out of sync with our current context and disconnected from our day jobs. I’ve asked thousands of people around the world, from those starting out to senior leaders, to describe their career in one word, and by far the most common response is “variety”.

No-one’s job stays the same for long these days. We expect to develop in different directions – both in the work we’re doing now and in our careers in the future. On average we’ll have at least four or five different types of careers in our increasingly long working lives. Variety has become an embedded feature in our experience of work.

The Squiggly Career is now universal. This is a career as individual as you are, driven by your personal definition of success. You create your own opportunities and are open and curious about a range of options for your future. It means prioritising possibilities over plans, talents over titles, progression over promotion, and direction over destination.

If, like me, you’ve been working for a while, unlearning and letting go of ladder-like success factors can feel hard. Your identity can be wrapped up in where you sit on an organisational chart, the hard work you put into the position and title you hold. But staying committed to an out-of-date idea is a bigger risk to your career relevance and resilience.

This isn’t intended to discourage ambition. I want everyone to be ambitious for where their career can take them. But to realise those ambitions now relies on developing the skills to succeed in an inevitably squiggly career, whether you want to be the next CEO or start your own business.

The one no-regret skill

Skills matter, but which ones? As AI is changing both what we work on and how we work, figuring out where to focus can feel overwhelming. Skills England introduced me to the idea of “no regret” skills: skills that will stay useful regardless of changes in your job or where you career might take you. From our work over the past ten years with hundreds of organisations we believe there is one no-regret skill that is critical: learning how to learn.

Learn like your job depends on it (because it does)

In ladder-like careers we went to work to learn to do a job. In a Squiggly Career, learning is the job. If we don’t learn how to learn we risk getting left behind. Convincing people that learning is important isn’t the problem, the challenge is how to practically make it happen, and to make it unmissable and enjoyable. Learning isn’t just something you do on a course, something separate to the day job and designed by the organisation. This is what we’ve been working on for the past three years, using our framework: learn as you go, learn in hard moments and lead your own learning.

Learn as you go

The biggest barrier to learning is time. Rather than asking the question “How do I find more time to learn?”we find a more useful starting point is “How do I learn more from the work I already do?”This means learning as you go, from the meetings and moments that already make up your week. It’s an intentional and deliberate practice of making learning an inevitable part of how you work and who you are.

Designing easy, everyday experiments (or as Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff would call them Tiny Experiments) are useful for fast learning as you go. Start by picking something frustrating that you’d like to improve. Meetings are often a good candidate, as they take up lots of time but are rarely high learning or enjoyment moments.

A simple experiment we’ve tried out ourselves and with our learning partners is to use Decision/Discussion agendas. Not only has this made meetings more focused, it’s been so helpful that the language has spilled over into chat messages and conversations. Making experiments part of how you work will accelerate how much you’re learning both in your job and career.

Learn in hard moments

No one has a straight line to success in a Squiggly Career. There will be knotty moments, mistakes, failures and wrong turns. In tough times our focus is on coping and surviving and learning gets relegated, as it feels like an unrealistic task. Yet it is possible to learn in hard moments and see challenges as a chance to learn.

When things go wrong, we need a way of reflecting and learning that helps us to make sense of a situation. One of our most adopted ideas is called WWW/EBI, which stands for what worked well and what would be even better if? To overcome our natural negativity bias, write down three “what worked well” for every one “even better if”.

This technique also gives us a boost of optimism, and when we’re optimistic, we’re better at spotting opportunities, solving problems and asking for help, all useful skills in a tough moment. You might not choose hard moments, we’d all rather not make a mistake or be part of a restructure, but you can choose how much you learn during these times and benefit from the learning lots of people leave behind.

Lead your own learning

Just like no one should care about your career more than you do, we all need to lead our own learning. If our development is dependent on our manager or organisation, we’re outsourcing our growth to other people. When you start designing your own development you can make sure it supports the opportunities and possibilities you’re curious about and what you want to explore in your career.

One way to lead your own learning is to get good at being a beginner. There will be more beginner moments, so it makes sense to build your beginner muscles. Learning something from scratch is often daunting but one of my favourite ways to get started is to use a don’t know notebook. This is simply a list of everything you don’t know about a topic. This process will give you some quick clarity on the questions you have and make it easier to spot where to get started.

Another practical idea is to find more small firsts as part of your week, and this is a great way to learn together as a team. For example, could you all have a go at building your first AI agent this week, or having a curious conversation with someone you’ve not met before in your company?

Your Squiggly Career will be full of opportunities and obstacles, uncertainty and change. If you want to make the most of what work has to offer, now is the time to take seriously the critical skill of learning. Your career will thank you.