Is It Time You Tried The Career Blend?

No job titles, yearly career changes and knocking off at 3pm because you’ve hit the wall… Tracy Ramsden talks to women disrupting the nine-to-five and influencing the way we’ll work for years to come

- Tracy Ramsden

A CAREER FOR LIFE, A FAT PAY cheque and getting the keys to the corner office are no longer the end-goal. With job security and promotions well out of reach (millennials are the first generation to earn less in their twenties than their parents did), a generation of resilient young women are flipping these challenges into opportunities, bouncing back from failure and saying, ‘screw the work life balance’ (it looks pretty exhausting, anyway). Instead they are embracing what experts have branded the ‘career blend’.

The slippery corporate ladder has been replaced by the career lattice – working a four-day week in advertising but running a film company on the side, or doing flexi hours from home for a digital agency while building a tech startup at the same time. This new way of working encourages personal development and collaboration along horizontal paths instead of through traditional hierarchy. The appeal is freedom. Research shows that 66 per cent of millennials want to change career within a year or less, so they are constantly sizing up new opportunities. They are a generation of professional nomads looking for the next challenge, making an asset out of the market’s uncertainty and learning new skills that accelerate their prospects.