Your Job Is a Lagging Indicator

The market moves way faster than categories and the organisations inside them are able to update the jobs that they are comprised of

Your job right now is a description of the past.

Sure, maybe you spend all day talking to AI, coming up with marketing strategies for new software that didn’t exist two years ago and explaining to senior management some rising trend on TikTok.

The work you do lives in the present, but your job? Your job was laid out yesterday.

Practically every role is built on a fossilised foundation from the past.

Most companies lack the foresight to invent a job because they think they’ll probably need one in a few months time. Organisations just don’t work like that. Generally speaking they just aren’t that strategic. As a rule, companies create roles because a particular way of operating has become established enough to justify a headcount, a salary, and a skills framework. By the time all of that has happened, the world has usually started moving somewhere else.

Not only that, but the companies and clients and the whole model that every business in every category operates in are all to some extent subject to the same lack of foresight. And unfortunately that’s not going to change much because human beings are just very biased against thinking about the future when the present is right there distracting them.

The big compounding factor here is that it takes an awfully long time to institutionalise an idea. But it takes much, much longer to realise that an idea doesn’t make sense anymore.

So all that’s to say, your job is an unreliably lagging indicator.

I can offer you a personal anecdote about this. I left a perfectly good job at a big holding company agency to join a small independent agency. Nothing dramatic happened. The job was fine, the money was good. It was simply that holding companies had stopped making sense to me.

The logic that created HoldCos no longer seemed to reflect what was shaping the market. And if that was true, then it followed that my perfectly respectable job as head of strategy inside an agency inside a holding company was, whether anyone knew it yet or not, also something that didn’t really make sense anymore.

I still had clients, pitches, direct reports, reviews, briefs. I had all the work that makes a job in the present moment feel very much like a thing that is there and exists. But at the same time I just couldn’t really rationalise what I was doing with my time against the understanding I had about what made sense for marketing and advertising as a business services category.

The important thing there isn’t whether I was right in that one particular move. What I am getting after is that jobs are lagging indicators.

Markets change first.
Organisations change second.
Duties change next.
Roles change last.

Once the penny drops on that. It reframes your perception of a fair bit of stuff.

You finally ‘get’ why, back when you were a grad, you spent weeks producing reports that nobody reads simply because fifteen years ago somebody important probably did read them.

You’ll understand why you attend meetings whose original purpose has long since evaporated, but a recurring calendar invite possesses some sort of constitutional authority.

And you’ll figure out why vast swathes of human beings toil to generate artefacts that made perfect sense when the information within them was scarce, despite the fact that such information is now falling out of people’s pockets.

Basically, it’s because organisations prioritise stability. Sometimes to a degree that borders on stupidity. And in a world like ours’ stability is just the process of continuing to do once sensible things for longer than they remain sensible.

There’s an interesting provocation for you.

If your work describes the present, and your job describes the past, what should your career describe?

I suspect that a good career is built by developing skills and competency that doesn’t exactly fit whatever your current role is. Or even what your current workload looks like. Or even what the current set of jobs you might see on LinkedIn offers up.

You can have another anecdote here.

Right at the start of my career, when I first moved into advertising, it became quite clear to me that the industry was operating as if there were two different kinds of thinking that needed to be kept separate; when in fact there was not.

I can remember the exact moment that this happened because it was during an interview at a media agency where I was told that I was “thinking too creatively.”

My insight there in that interview was that there are a great many people who are separating out the analytical things like data, systems, and measurement from what I would call the aesthetic type of things like scripts, art direction, and copy.

Media Agency stuff and Creative Agency stuff basically.

What seemed very clear to me was that, within the world of advertising agencies, ‘creativity’ was so deeply aligned with the people who defined the aesthetic qualities of the marketing that it wasn’t being leveraged in the systems and analytics side of marketing. And on the flip side, the analytics and systems side of marketing wasn’t being leveraged by the agencies who define the aesthetic qualities of the marketing.

As somebody who had grown up with the internet, coding websites in HTML to promote electro-clash DJ sets at the university indie-society nights, this separation felt completely artificial. And the rapidly accelerating digital world didn’t care about the division that the advertising industry was holding onto.

So I tried to find a job that brought the opportunity to flex across both of those domains. Because even I could figure out that there would be an increasing demand for that hybrid competency as organisations and jobs caught up with the way that the market was changing.

It turned out that the job was called ‘comms strategy’. And that bet seemed to pay off relatively well. But the point is broader than just my own anecdotes.

Markets don’t advertise the things they’ll need in five years’ time, they don’t really advertise the things they need today. But it is useful to think about your career and your skills with that in mind.

With the job market being the way it is right now, e.g. crappy, lots of people are asking what skills they should be picking up next to help in their career.

I think that’s maybe the wrong question. Or at least a bit downstream of a more interesting and at the same time helpful question.Which is:

What keeps happening that everyone treats as normal, but makes no sense?

You’re experiencing the sensation of banging your head against the past whilst living in today.

Sometimes this is because you haven’t understood something yet. But every now and then it’s the opposite, nobody has understood something that you have understood, and then it’s the first sign that everyone else is still operating on a set of assumptions that have expired.

The market changes unevenly. Consumers and culture move first. Then technology tends to follow that. Then businesses notice. Then organisational structures eventually adapt. It takes a long long time for job descriptions to get rewritten.

So I wouldn’t spend too much time asking what skills employers are looking for today. They’re mostly looking for people to fill jobs they already know how to describe.

Instead, look for the things the market hasn’t quite found the right words to describe yet. The combinations of skills that seem obvious to you, but sit jankily across different departments. The important bits of work that still don’t belong to anybody. Then you can build towards those things. Because a job is a record of where the market has been, but your career should be a bet on where it is going.