Boundaryless careers: how to self-manage your career in the digital age

There’s never been a better time to enter the world of work and start a career like now. Compared to traditional careers, which were built around the idea of ‘you work today, I’ll reward you tomorrow with pension plans, holiday allowances, job security, and promotion’, the new career or Boundaryless Career encourages employees to move in and out of various product areas, technologies, functions and organizations, at will. Rather than rewarding loyalty and tenure, market value and skills has precedent.

Because a job for life and one employer has become much rarer, there also exists greater uncertainty about work opportunities and job longevity as well as non-linearity of careers. While structured and linear career paths exist, particularly in the government, armed forces and education settings, the new age career is becoming characteristically fluid and impossible to plan and structure, particularly in the service sector.

The greater demand on individual skills, especially problem solving and creativity as well as more intense involvement in team building and collaborative work, has led to greater emphasis on career self-management. Thus to succeed employees, must seek out opportunities to update and market their skills appropriately. In order to retain such a fluid talent pipeline, organizations have also placed greater emphasis ‘Boundaryless Benefits’ constituting of helping employees build transferable skills and help increase their market value.

This has been the essence of the Global 100 program at Wipro. Rather than preparing readiness for a particular role, candidates are exposed to a range of diverse roles across line and functions with a heavy emphasis on skill building and expanding candidate’s range of competencies through short cycles of learning explorations: trial-mastery-exit as they move through rotations.

Candidates are given time and resources to devote to their personal and professional development, as well as opportunities to market their skills internally. This helps ensure a smooth transition into great roles at the end of the program and continued horizontal growth over traditional vertical growth of success.

I see this trend continuing in the future and across worker generations. Everyone will be expected to be able to take on new work behaviours and work personas, engage in multitasking and move from narrow specialties to performing an array of processes, more frequently than in the past. To succeed, it will be those employees who keep their skills up-to-date and relevant through an ongoing commitment to learning, flexibility and mobility, finding personal meaningfulness and creating connections with the larger community.