There’s no shortage of content out there about following your passions, finding your dream job and being your own boss. So for me, the fact that I’ve never been able to point to a singular career ambition has made me feel like I’m missing something.
I don’t have a dream job, or an industry that particularly draws me in one direction. And for a long time, this has driven me mad. The constant worry of where I need to be in life, comparing myself to my peers and feeling like maybe I’m just not that good at what I do.
The Pressure to Have It All Figured Out
Log on to LinkedIn and you’ll find a myriad of promotions, passion projects, personal life updates that somehow teach you about B2B sales, and the obligatory ‘I don’t usually rant, but here’s my rant’ post. Everyone seems to have it together. They know what they want to say, what they want to do and where they want to be in their career.
But I’m beginning to think that not having a dream job might actually be a perfectly sensible response to how the working world is evolving right now.
Careers Aren’t Built the Same Way Anymore
Think about it, the role of ‘Social Media Manager’ is barely fifteen years old. ‘Influencer Marketing’ as a discipline, a job I have actually done, didn’t really exist when I chose my A-levels. And I hate to bring AI into it, but we’re collectively watching entire job functions be rapidly reshaped in real time. ‘Prompt Engineer’ wasn’t in anyone’s vocabulary five years ago, and now the ‘Head of Robot Feelings’ or ‘Director of Vibes (coding)’ doesn’t seem completely out of reach in the next five.
In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, 170 million new roles are set to be created and 92 million displaced by 2030.
Why Adaptability Might Matter More Than a Five-Year Plan
This isn’t meant to scaremonger; it’s just the pace of things. And it raises a fairly obvious question: if the landscape is shifting this fast, how sensible is it really to anchor yourself to one fixed destination?
It seems to me that dreaming too specifically about one fixed career path, now seems to look less like ambition, whereas staying curious and adaptable, might actually just be the smartest career strategy going.
It’s not that I’ve never had a career plan. I’ve had plenty. But as I’ve moved through life, my priorities have changed, I’ve stumbled into something new and interesting, and over time the original plan became a different plan. And then another one.
Learning by Being Thrown In
When I found myself moving to Sydney from London just over a year ago, leaving behind my comfort zone of consumer PR and influencer marketing, I had no idea where my work would take me next. But I’ll be honest, a role in B2B tech was genuinely not on my 2025 bingo card.
The first few months were, let’s say, a learning curve, and I still find myself leaning on my trusty AI SideKick for the questions I’m too embarrassed to ask out loud: ‘Explain the cloud to me one more time, in simple terms’, ‘What’s an integrator? An MSP?’, ‘What actually is the IT channel?’
But now looking back on the last year, I can honestly say I’ve grown more professionally than I did in the four years before it. Not despite being thrown in at the deep end, but because of it.
That’s because despite what may seem an impossible task at first, gradually becomes more familiar. You learn to swim, even when there are more sharks, crocodiles and jellyfish than you were expecting, in the form of tech stacks, hallucinations, LLMS, APIs and GPUs. And then you find a new piece of AI jargon to decipher, and it’s back to square one.
What Agency Life Taught Me About Growth
Here’s the thing about PR and marketing, no two roles look the same. The sector you’re in, the size of the business, the clients you work with and the channels you’re across, it all changes the job entirely.
From shooting influencer content with drag queens for Starbucks’ newest Frappuccino, to scoring goals with Rexona and Chelsea FC at Stamford Bridge, from dealing with Greenpeace scaling the Unilever building in protest against Dove, to visiting my first data centre with Wasabi Technologies (which, admittedly, wasn’t quite as high on the Sydney bucket list as the Opera House or Bondi Beach). On paper, it’s all PR and marketing. In practice, each one has taught me something completely different.
The Skills That Keep Carrying Forward
The variety is genuinely one of the best things about the field. You can keep learning, keep stretching yourself and keep finding new things to get stuck into, without having to start from scratch or retrain entirely. The core skills travel: storytelling, understanding audiences, building relationships, knowing how to land a message. What changes is the context and that’s where the interesting bit happens.
It’s also a field that has consistently generated new disciplines faster than most – social media, content marketing, influencer, creator economy, AI-driven personalisation. These weren’t things people were studying for when I was at school. They emerged, and the industry adapted. Which feels apt, given what AI is doing to the broader jobs market right now.
Maybe It’s OK Not to Know What’s Next
The people who’ve spent their careers learning new skills, picking up new tools and figuring things out as they go? They’re probably better placed for whatever comes next.
And that’s just it, I’m not sure what’s next. And I’m working on being ok with that. Because who knows what one of those 170 million new roles I might find myself in, in 5 years’ time.
The not-knowing is unsettling sometimes. But the alternative – having it all mapped out with every move pre-planned – sounds if I’m honest, boring and ironically short-sighted.
The marketing industry will keep moving and finding new versions of itself. Skills will adapt and mould into something new and the landscape is shifting fast enough that rigidly clinging on to one version of success starts to feel less like focus and more like stubbornness.
So no, I don’t have a dream career, I don’t have it all figured out. And to be honest it’s probably best we all stopped trying quite so hard to. Sometimes the smarter move is simply to wait and see.
