How to Future Proof Your Career 

Your career may be thriving now, but is it guaranteed to keep growing in the future? No matter how confident you are in your abilities, your employer, or your industry, that’s a question that should give you pause. Fortunately, with the right strategies and an adaptive mindset, you can put yourself in a position to keep your career growing – even if you’re forced to change things up along the way.

What Is Future Proofing?

There are no guarantees when it comes to your livelihood, and threats come in many forms. By 2030, it’s estimated that between 400 million and 800 million people could lose their jobs or be displaced by automation. Some industries will die entirely as cultural attitudes and technologies evolve. And of course, economic hardship could leave you the victim of downsizing.

Future proofing is a set of strategies designed to keep your career safe for the future. The goal is to ensure you have a stable, prosperous career even if you face significant threats and challenges. So how can you accomplish this?

Top Strategies to Future Proof Your Career

These strategies can help you future proof your career, no matter where you’re working now:

• Earn more certifications. First, consider earning more certifications in your chosen career. For example, if you’re working in accounting, you could become a CPA. Earning certifications requires you to study, prepare, pay a bit of money, and jump through a few hoops – but these efforts will immediately distinguish you from your peers. You’ll open up more opportunities for career development in the future and minimize the chances that you’ll be the first on the chopping block when your employer goes through economic trouble.
• Learn new skills. Similarly, you can learn new skills. Within your career, there are probably tons of skills you can learn to make yourself more valuable and more versatile; for example, you can go through leadership training or become familiar with a new programming language. However, the best skills to learn are ones that could conceivably help you in a variety of careers, such as learning a new language.
• Cross train. Consider cross training with other people in your department. You’ll get to learn skills and gain some experience in totally new fields – and get more perspective on how your organization works. It’s highly accessible and may not cost any money (just a bit of your time and a favor from someone else), so there’s no reason not to get involved here.
• Professionally network. Professional networking is valuable to just about anyone in any career. It’s an opportunity to meet new people from a wide range of different disciplines – and get exposure to many prospective employers and career paths. No matter how your career develops in the future, you’ll have contacts who can help support you in a variety of different ways, from teaching you new skills to introducing you to hiring managers at other organizations. It also functions as a built-in support system.
• Advance to management and leadership positions. Do what you can to seek out management and leadership positions, assuming they play an important role in the organization. It’s typically much harder to get rid of people higher in the hierarchy than low-level workers doing basic, easily trainable tasks.
• Stick to tasks that are hard to automate. Automation is one of the biggest threats to human workers, but not everything is easy to automate. Try to focus on non-automatable tasks, skills, and responsibilities; for example, it’s hard to automate human-to-human conversation or high-level critical thinking tasks.
• Pay attention to trends. Pay close attention to trends, both in your industry and in the economy overall. How is your industry evolving with the times? Is demand increasing or decreasing? Is demand for your position growing or falling? What new opportunities or economic niches are emerging elsewhere? The more you know and the more you pay attention, the more opportunities you’ll have in the future.
• Remain adaptable. The most important tip in this guide is to remain adaptable. Your career is going to go through changes, whether you want it to or not. You’ll face industry changes, the onset of new technologies, economic disruptions, and other forms of turmoil. That’s practically a guarantee. What matters is how you respond to those changes; do you sit back and suffer the fallout, or work proactively to get yourself to a better position? Never take your position or future career for granted.

Even with these tactics on your side, there’s a chance your career could face a major threat. Future proofing can’t protect you from everything; instead, it’s meant to protect you from most things and increase your chances of a speedy recovery if you face displacement or loss.