Do not be fixated on a long-term career plan. In this age, it may not be the right call. As technology reshapes markets and industrial sectors, committing yourself to an 8-year, 10-year, etc plan could be a mistake.

My suggestion is to have a long-term view with a plan in bursts of say 2, 3 years. That long-term is the aspirations of what you want to become (the vision) while the short plans are the missions to it. Before the pandemic, there were no jobs like Chief Remote Officer and  Remote Staff Manager; today, those positions are available. If you are fixated on unalloyed fixed plans, you may miss emerging opportunities.

Remember that Lagos taxi sticker: “My car stops wherever there is a good party”. Indeed, as the parties open up with opportunities in new energy, cryptocurrency/blockchain, climate change, fintech, etc, the flexibility to adapt would be critical for your career. You must get into that party!

Recall… in the past, resumes and CVs were like classified documents. We did those because companies kept their words: they provided jobs, long-term, and rarely laid people off. But when they started firing with reckless abandon, the people revolted and LinkedIn provided a platform to say “I am posting my resume on LinkedIn since I cannot trust company A to provide me a job for life; company B I am here”. Magically, that classified resume is available to the whole world. So, in summary, the world has changed and those 10-year career plans may not be optimal.

Sure, I understand the challenge – society sees humans on what they do and where they work. Thank goodness, that is changing. The YouTube millionaires in Nigeria have become influential, and daily, society is accepting the construct of entrepreneurial capitalism. What that means is clear: that career plan must not be company-specific or industry-specific because new vistas are emerging.

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Comment 1: Thanks for sharing this Ndubuisi Ekekwe. I recently did a post titled “what am I?” Where I reflected on how the different roles people handle in the course of their careers could lead to a loss of professional identity if not properly managed. It’s easy for someone who has only handled sales roles over a 10 year period to describe him/herself as a salesperson. But if that same person has handled multiple roles in product commercialisation, project management, delivery advisory even digital transformation then it’s possible for that individual to have some difficulty putting a descriptor on his or her self. However the reality of our times is that sticking to and developing expertise in just one function can be risky for one’s career, especially in an age of robotics, machines and remote work. How does one craft a unique identity as one build multiple skillset and expertise through new (and sometimes different) job roles?

Comment 2: What is needed is not any long-term career plan, but rather a knowledge acquisition plan, and with that – you can always make a stop wherever a good party is taking place.

It is absence of new knowledge that makes people to cling to and ferociously defend knowledge/skill that is going obsolete. If the plan is to continously acquire relevant knowledge and deepen capabilities, you won’t get stuck or feel threatened whenever the labour landscape changes, because you are equally sailing along.

Don’t just grow, but also develop, the latter is very dynamic.

Comment 3: When someone thought in this line and spoke to our peers about it they termed us “ndi nzuzu” . Thank you Prof for this masterspiece.

It’s a confirmation that someone is on the right track..

Work, get experience, mobilise the resources needed for your dream, make the right network that share same value with you. Start small while in your job and keep building your brainchild.

I just love the reality check you are giving us here sir.

Comment 4: Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe this is a very insightful revelation. I am just thinking about the implication of this reality for employers. In my view, I think that companies should come to the reality that the average length of stay for a staff will be 2- 4 years. Then, adopt structures that will approach the execution of the firm’s long-term goal in the form of interim milestones of say 2 – 5 years. That way, the company can match its staff requirement to the exact skills and knowledge base required to get them from point A to point B in their long-term plan.

Additionally, HR must innovate to find creative ways to help their companies to be more efficient and effective in terms of average recruitment cost, time to fill, and candidate to job suitability.

Response to 4 from member: Regrettably, most businesses cannot function this way. They have to budget and plan to access funding from lending institutions and shareholders. As soon as investors loose confidence, such businesses immediately become obsolete, leading to more job seekers in the market

Response to 4 from member: Employers can:
– promote a culture of internal employee growth, or
– accept the market with individuals changing regularly.

Both methods can work, but there are costs/benefits with each. The company’s strategic intake plan needs to have a grip on whether or not a desired skill can be done by any honest person, by someone who has specialized training, or by an individual between those two extremes.

Comment 4 writer: [] you have raised very solid points. Indeed, each of the pathways present cost/benefit. It also, places more responsibility on HR to be me more attentive to testing methods, learning quickly and making necessary adjustments so as to maximize benefits and minimize cost.

In secondary school, Mazi Orji, the man who taught us Geography in Secondary Technical School Ovim, forced us to know the world’s countries and their capitals. He demanded the maps of Chicago, Boston, London and those special places in the world. And the textbook we used – Human and Physical Geography – which WAEC recommended, was written by Goh Cheng Leong, possibly a professor in America. Indeed, it was like a class in Baltimore!

In the map reading section of Geography, they presented the contours of the Everest, Mississippi River, etc and largely nothing about Africa. Magically, we knew so much about America and Europe, including the weather system, that we came up with codes: Summer JJA, Autumn SON, Winter DJF and Spring MAM (those codes represent the first alphabets of the months; you needed those codes to know the months. For harmattan and rainfall seasons – our weather cycle in Nigeria – no one had that in the syllabus).

So, I was very happy that Cristiano Ronaldo had a similar experience: they possibly taught him more about Africa than Europe and  Saudi Arabia, offering equal opportunity flip: “Cristiano Ronaldo has just completed a move to Saudi Arabian club Al Nassr, but made a slip up during his official presentation in Riyadh on Tuesday when mistakenly saying he had “come to South Africa.” Lol. Yes, it is news!

We wish CR more goals as he begins his journey in Saudi Arabia. This is beyond football, Saudi has one of the world’s leading image makers money can buy. But he needs to attend more Geography classes. Mazi Orji is available!

Perhaps the Portugal great was disorientated by the whirlwind nature of his arrival at his new club, which saw him fly out to Saudi on Monday night, before undergoing a medical the next morning and then being greeted by thousands of cheering fans at Al Nassr’s Mrsool Park stadium.

“For me it is not the end of my career to come to South Africa,” Ronaldo said at a news conference before stepping out on the field at the 25,000 capacity stadium. “I really don’t worry about what people say. I took my decision and I have responsibility to change that, but for me I’m really, really happy to be here.”

Category-king companies create a new basis of competition, by providing orthogonal competitive paths, different from what any other firm does. In the world of search, Google unleashed one many years ago, taking Yahoo down in the process. For years, no other company has come to challenge the brilliance and absolute dominance of Google search.

But there is a redesign on the way – and Microsoft is part of it. When it provided truckloads of money to the guys in the OpenAI, I noted that Microsoft would possibly have the rights to first commercialize inventions out of the organization. Yes, it is called OpenAI but when it comes to money, not everything is “open”.

That seems to be the playbook now as we’re reading that Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT into Bing, its forgettable search engine: “Microsoft is reportedly planning to incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search service, a move geared toward wrestling more shares of web queries from rival Google. The Information reports that Microsoft plans to introduce the new feature by the end of first quarter 2023. The move will create a new path for web search results, changing the link-based answers that both Bing and Google have been serving.”

Google, shine your eyes: you have a real threat right now. Why? ChatGPT serves me the meal while you send me links to buy groceries to cook the meal. In that model and organization of results, ChatGPT is miles apart, as it accumulates more data and becomes smarter. Yes, who wants to be clicking links when you can get the answer before you?

Very soon, if you search Bing with “who had an edge on text search”, Bing may response: Bing over Google!

An AI Answers “What are the secrets to wealth in Nigeria?”

Microsoft is reportedly planning to incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search service, a move geared toward wrestling more shares of web queries from rival Google.

The Information reports that Microsoft plans to introduce the new feature by the end of first quarter 2023. The move will create a new path for web search results, changing the link-based answers that both Bing and Google have been serving.

ChatGPT, which is designed by OpenAI, has become popular among internet users since it was launched last year, due to its ability to add context to queries. It uses GPT-3.5, a large language model released last year, to generate answers and authentic-looking responses to queries about all topics. With the GPT-3.5-powered ability, ChatGPT helps users to accomplish tasks such as creating poems, composing college essays and writing code.

Bing believes that using the technology behind it, its search results will provide more humanlike answers to users. Microsoft is now betting on it to win over search users.

The Verge noted that Microsoft’s use of ChatGPT-like functionality could help Bing rival Google’s Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base that Google uses to serve up instant answers that are regularly updated from crawling the web and user feedback.

The swift rise of ChatGPT to the spotlight has, however, rattled Google. Last week, CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly issued ‘code red’ to employees, tasking them to develop a response to the potential threat from ChatGPT to its search-based ad business.

But besides its marvelous ability to create contextual answers to queries, the authenticity of ChatGPT responses is under serious question. The AI has been noted to have major flaws such as racial biases and inability to distinguish between false and true information. It is said to have a tendency to present incorrect information as true fact.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the system cannot be trusted to provide accurate information for now. “It’s a mistake to be relying on [ChatGPT] for anything important right now,” he said in a tweet.

It is not clear how Microsoft plans to integrate the technology. A person familiar with the matter said the Washington-based company may roll out the additional feature in the next several months, but it is still weighing both the chatbot’s accuracy and how quickly it can be included in the search engine.

However, while the ChatGPT wave sweeps across the web, threatening Google’s dominance, the search giant has said it won’t immediately launch its own AI-powered search feature. Google reportedly cited “reputational risk”, bias and factuality issues with AI chatbots as reasons any change to its existing search technology will have to wait.

Microsoft has been betting big on chat-based interfaces. In 2019, the company invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and has an exclusive license to use its text generator AI GPT-3. ChatGPT appears to have opened up the opportunity for Microsoft to expand the idea. The person familiar with the matter said the initial release may be a limited test to a narrow group of users.