Forget climbing career ladders. Learn to swim career currents.

For most of my business education and early working life, the deal was a career ladder.

You picked a profession, you got on the bottom rung, and you climbed. Every rung was a promotion, a pay rise, a slightly bigger desk. The whole thing rested on a quiet assumption that nobody ever really thought about at the time. The ground the ladder stood on had to be made of concrete, not custard!

That assumption is dead.

Vicki Saunders wrote a brilliant piece recently about the shift from job security to future employability, and one line in particular stood out to me. She said the ladder matters less than the floor feeling firm. I've been thinking about it a lot since. Partly because I clearly have no life, but mostly because it's true, and it changes how companies think about what they can/should be offering their people.

What's the point of a ladder if the ground it's standing on is crumblier than a Cadbury's Flake?

I don't think the answer is to climb it faster. I think the problem is that from early on in peoples' childhoods and education, we were mainly taught to climb ladders (or maybe this was more-so with my generation and ones before it? 🤔). Nobody realised they needed to learn to swim career currents. But then again, why would they? No one envisaged what was going to happen... Or did they?

I got lucky early

Fifteen years ago I was in the middle of a culture transformation at Tesco. It was a big, serious, proper piece of work, and it's where I first met the acronym VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. It came out of the US military, and even back then, based on what Tesco was going through at the time, it felt incredibly apt.

We were also plugged into a think tank called the Institute for the Future. They make predictions ten years out, built on deep research into technology, society, agriculture, politics, the lot. And they're incredibly accurate. Most of what they called has come to pass. The one thing nobody got right was the speed. They knew velocity was going to increase but I don't think anyone was prepared for how fast the ground was going to move.

What that experience gave me was luck as much as insight. It taught me, early and in calm water, that change is normal. Not a crisis. Not an event you survive and then get back to normal. I learned to be comfortable with it before I ever needed to be. Look out of any window, at work or at home, and everything you can see is in the middle of changing. That's not a threat. That's just Tuesday.

I know not everyone got that lesson. Most people get their first swimming lesson in the sea of change while they're already drowning. Hold that thought, because it's a benefit I wish I'd had all the way through my career.

Now, brace yourself. I'm about to go deep with this swimming analogy (pun partly intended). Bear with me though as its a perfect way to land the key points that are coming. 🏊🏼‍♂️ 🏊🏼‍♂️ 🏊🏼‍♂️

The current doesn't care about your channel

You can be a strong swimmer. You can have a channel you've chosen, a career you love, a direction you're committed to. Good. Swim it.

But several times across a working life, the currents are going to pull you out of your channel whether you like it or not. A restructure. A merger. A new CEO with a new idea. A technology that eats the thing you were good at. You didn't choose it, you didn't cause it, and no amount of being good at your job stops it arriving.

Some people get pulled under and don't come back. Some tread water for a while and then go under slowly. And some learn to bob along like a cork, find the pull, and swim with it rather than against it.

I want to be careful here, because this is where posts like this usually get nauseatingly preachy 🤢. I'm describing a pattern I've observed mainly within myself. I'm not describing a rule that fits everybody, and I'm certainly not saying the people who went under were weak. That would be utter crap, and it would let the wrong people off the hook.

Why people go under

The people who drown aren't the bad swimmers. That's the lie in the self-help version of this story, the one that says adapt or die and quietly blames anyone who struggled.

Two things pull people under, and neither of them is a character flaw.

The first is that nobody taught them the water. Now, I appreciate this may apply more to people of my generation than the new ones coming into the workforce. But for years, especially for our parents, the deal was one channel, one ladder, one employer if you were lucky. That's what people trained for. That's what schools educated you around. You can't be surprised that someone who was taught to climb doesn't instinctively know how to swim. They didn't think they'd ever have to.

The second is money, and this is the one I know from the inside.

When the current takes you and you've got a mortgage, kids, and a month of runway, you don't get to float. You grab the nearest thing that looks like the old job, quickly. Partly because you're probably a bit panicked, partly because the bills don't pause while you work out where the current's going.

I've done exactly that. I've taken the first offer on the table more than once, not because it was "the perfect role", the career "gurus" (*cough!) of LinkedIn tell you to hold out for, but because the financial pressure made it a decent option I could afford whilst being happy enough in the role.

And sometimes I was back on the market inside 18 months. Not because I chose badly, but because in the last six years of my career I've had my fair share of layoffs. Another round of cuts, the current taking me again before I'd properly dried off. I've been let go in a big corporate, when AI came into HR of a global tech company and a huge chunk of the department around the world went in one go, me included. I've been in scale-ups and startups where the money suddenly had to go somewhere else and people went with it. Nobody's immune to this. I'm certainly not, and I do this for a fucking living!

So when someone tells you to just learn to float, understand what they're really saying. Floating is a luxury. It costs money you may not have. The people who get to do it calmly are, more often than not, the people who already had a buffer.

That's not a reason to give up on floating. It's a reason to build the buffer before you need it, and it's the single biggest thing an employer can actually help with.

How you actually learn to float

Floating is the most counter-intuitive thing in the water, and it's worth understanding why, because the career version is identical.

When you're out of your depth, every instinct tells you to fight. Get your head up, thrash, climb the water like it's a ladder. And that's exactly what sinks you. You burn everything you've got fighting the thing that would have held you up if you'd let it. Floating is the opposite of the panic instinct. You stop fighting, you get horizontal, you breathe out, and the water holds you.

The career version is the same move. When the ground goes, the instinct is to grab the nearest job-shaped thing, fast. Sometimes, as I've said, you have to, and no one should feel bad about that. But when you can create even a little room, the winning move is the boring one. Work out where the current is actually going before you start swimming. That takes time. Time takes money. Which is why a financial buffer isn't a nice-to-have on the side of your career. It's the thing that buys you the option to float instead of grab. Nobody writes about money as a career skill because it isn't romantic. Write it down anyway.

The five things that keep you swimming

When I think about what actually keeps a person swimming, there are five distinct things.

I was going to describe them as armbands. But armbands are for people who can't swim, and they're the thing you eventually take off. These aren't training wheels for your career. These ingredients are the parts of swimming itself. The technical, the physical, the psychological, the behavioural, and the commercial.

The technical skills. Think of these as your stroke - what you actually do, the craft, the qualifications, the hard capability that got you hired. It's the most obvious one, and the one everybody focuses on, which is exactly why it's the least distinctive. A good stroke keeps you moving on its own. In a strong current, it isn't enough.

The physical skills. I see these as your breathing - the thing that goes first when you panic, and the thing that quietly ends more careers than any skills gap. Your energy, your health, your capacity to keep going. This matters more every year, not less. We're being asked to work longer. In the UK the state pension age is climbing, and the research Vicki cites is blunt about it. Once you lose a job after 50, you're twice as likely to end up in long-term unemployment. Staying in the water for 30+ years takes physical maintenance nobody plans for.

The psychological skills. To me, this is your buoyancy - what keeps you up when you stop actively working at it. Your confidence, your ability to sit with not knowing, your capacity to take a knock and get back in. The research that sits under all of this found something that stood out to me - the stress of insecurity peaks not when the bad thing is certain, but when it's 50/50, when you simply can't know. The not knowing is the thing that drives you mad. Buoyancy is what lets you live in the not knowing without drowning in it.

The behavioural skills. Think of this as swimming with others. Nobody swims a channel alone. There's a boat, a crew, someone watching. How you work with people, how you adapt, how you handle ambiguity and other humans at the same time. When I told Vicki how much her piece resonated, she made exactly this point back at me - the skills her clients keep naming right now are adaptability and dealing with ambiguity. Those aren't technical. They're behavioural, and they're learned in company, not alone.

The commercial skills. Stretching my swimming analogy to within an inch of its life, this is where you're reading the water. This is the one I missed until the second half of my career. It's understanding how money actually moves through a business:

• Why your role exists in economic terms.
• What you're genuinely worth to someone else.
• How to spot a business that's quietly about to start cutting.

Reading the water is the difference between seeing the current coming and getting surprisingly smacked in the mush by it.

I haven't listed 'your network,' and that's deliberate. Get the stroke, the breathing, the buoyancy, the crew and the water-reading right, and your network is the wake you leave behind you. Chase a network on its own and you get business cards. Build it intentionally, by helping others and letting them help you, and it becomes a lifeline, not just a vanity number showing you how many connections you've accumulated on LinkedIn

This is not a self-help post

I've realised that if I stop here, I've written something that lets every employer off the hook. Learn to swim, sort yourself out, good luck. That's definitely not the argument I'm making, because what I've just described, people can't build alone. Some of it, they can't build at all without their employer.

The buffer that lets you float instead of grab, that's pay, notice and honest warning. The chance to strengthen your stroke, that's development that actually happens, not a line on a careers page. The crew, that's a manager with the time and the headspace to have a real conversation with you, which, going by the Gallup data, is getting rarer, not more common. Manager engagement has fallen hard over the last few years, and you can't have the career conversation with someone who's underwater themselves.

This is the challenge to employers, and this is where the bold ones will separate from the rest. Very few can promise security anymore. Everybody knows it, and pretending otherwise just insults people. But can you promise something harder and more honest? Can you say that whatever happens, wherever the current takes them, they'll leave you a stronger swimmer than they arrived? Better stroke, better read on the water, more buoyant, more employable wherever they end up, whether that's a competitor, a career change, or doing their own thing.

If that's a promise you can actually keep and prove, and you're an employer brave enough to say it out loud whilst showing it's true, then you'll be trusted in a way so many other employers will struggle to compete with.

A word about my wife

My wife and I bicker about this, gently, fairly often. She says she hates change. I find that genuinely puzzling, because everything is changing all the time. Saying you hate change is like saying you hate time. It just is, constant, always ticking on whether you like it or not. You can't stop it so why hate it?

But I've come to think she's not actually wrong, and I was being a bit (read: "very") smug. She doesn't hate change itself. She hates change being done to her, with no say in it and no say over when. And that, it turns out, is exactly what the research says the stress actually is. It isn't the change. It's the not knowing, and the not choosing. The powerlessness.

Which means the goal was never to become someone who loves the whiplash you get from being flung about by the current. That's not realistic, and it's not even healthy. The goal is to get enough of a say, through your own five things and through an employer worth their salt, that the current stops being something that happens to you and starts being something you can read and move with.

Where this leaves us

We can't take the currents away. The market will keep turning things over. Roles will keep disappearing, and no honest employer can promise the water will be calm. But we can stop teaching people from an early age to only want to climb ladders, especially ones that aren't bolted to anything any more, and start teaching them to swim.

We can help build the buffer that turns floating from a luxury back into an option. And if you employ people, you can decide to send them out stronger than they came in, and be proud enough of that to say it out loud. Most of us learned to swim while we were already drowning.

The whole job now, for ourselves and for the people we're responsible for, is to teach it in the calm water, before the current comes. Because it's coming. It's always bloody coming!