WHAT’S NEXT JOURNAL: VOL. 7
September 2026
THE MANY LIVES OF WORK ENTERS THE WORLD
September was the month The Many Lives of Work stopped being something that existed mainly between us, our editors, our interviewees and the many drafts on our screens.
First came the teaser. Then the cover. Then, after two years of research, conversations, writing and rewriting, we opened pre-orders.
There were also the less polished realities of bringing a book into the world: retailer pages appearing at different times, links that did not always behave as expected, and more refreshing of browsers than we would care to admit. But slowly, the book began appearing on shelves across the internet.
The Many Lives of Work can now be found through Foyles, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Ex Libris, Hugendubel and Amazon, with wider international availability continuing to roll out.
For so long, our attention has been on making the book. Now we find ourselves tfocusing on what happens when it begins to belong to its readers.
We wrote it for people reconsidering the shape of their working lives, but also for organisations asking how careers, learning and talent need to change in an age of longevity. We hope readers recognise parts of themselves in it. We also hope they question it, disagree with it, test its ideas against their own experience and take the conversation somewhere we could not have taken it alone.
After spending so long asking what might come next for careers, we are looking forward to what comes next for our book. May it have many lives!
FROM PUBLICATION TO CONVERSATION
A book is one way of putting ideas into the world. The conversations that follow are another.
Over the coming weeks, we will be bringing The Many Lives of Work into a series of discussions and events, both in person and online. Plans are taking shape for a virtual gathering, as well as conversations in London, with more details to follow shortly.
For us, these events are not simply an extension of a book launch. The questions behind the book were always larger than the book itself.
What does a 50 or 60-year career require from an individual? How should learning change when professional knowledge cannot be expected to last a lifetime? What happens to identity when one career chapter ends? How should organisations think differently about progression, experience, flexibility and renewal?
We have spent the past two years exploring those questions through research and interviews. We are now looking forward to opening them up to a much wider room and our readers joining the conversation.
More on the first events very soon.
FROM THE BOOK
Experiment Before You Decide
When talking with recent graduates as well as experienced professionals,we see that one assumption around career change is particularly difficult to shake: that clarity should come before action.
We often imagine that a successful transition begins by identifying the right answer and then pursuing it. We are suggesting the reverse: design small experiences to generateinformation that reflection alone cannot provide.
In The Many Lives of Work, we describe experimentation as an important stage of a Perennial Career. An experiment is not a commitment to a completely new professional identity. It is a deliberate way of testing an emerging possibility and learning from what happens.
That might mean taking on a small project, studying something new, advising an organisation, volunteering, spending time inside an unfamiliar field or testing an idea alongside existing work. The purpose is not to prove that a new direction will succeed. It is to produce evidence about whether it deserves to be pursued further.
Experimentation offers another route. Instead of asking Is this definitely my next career?, we can ask What could I do to learn more about whether this belongs in my next chapter?
In a long working life, the capacity to test, learn and adjust may be more useful than the ability to predict exactly where we are going.
We explore experimentation and the role it plays in career renewal in Chapter 4 of The Many Lives of Work.
OUR WRITING
The Second Apprenticeship: Why Long Careers Require Us to Become Beginners Again
Careers traditionally reward the accumulation of expertise. We spend years becoming the person who knows.
But a working life that lasts five or six decades is unlikely to allow us to remain expert in the same things throughout.
In The Second Apprenticeship, we looked at what happens when experienced professionals need to return to the position of learner. New technologies, industries and forms of work require people who may have spent decades being valued for their certainty to tolerate not knowing again.
The challenge is not simply one of reskilling. It is also psychological and organisational. Most workplaces invest heavily in learning at the beginning of a career and increasingly reward delivery as seniority grows. Longer careers require us to rethink that distribution.
A resilient working life may contain several cycles of mastery and relearning. The ability to become a beginner more than once could therefore become one of the defining capabilities of professional longevity.
Read the full piece here.
Progression Is Not the Same as Promotion
If careers are getting longer, one of our oldest measures of professional success begins to look increasingly narrow.
For much of modern working life, progress has been imagined vertically: a larger title, a bigger team, increased responsibility and higher compensation. But a 50-year career cannot keep climbing indefinitely, nor should it need to.
In Progression Is Not the Same as Promotion, we examine what happens when movement sideways, deeper into expertise, towards greater autonomy or into a different pace of work is treated as lesser than upward movement.
Research suggests successful careers have always been less linear than their retrospective stories imply. Yet organisational status and reward systems still tend to privilege management and vertical advancement.
Longer working lives require a wider vocabulary of progress, one capable of recognising mastery, range, flexibility, influence and renewed relevance alongside promotion.
Read the full piece here.
OUR READING: WHAT THE EVIDENCE TELLS US
A theme running through our reading recently is that the longevity debate is beginning to move beyond a simple question of duration.
It is increasingly about what makes longer working lives viable.
In the Financial Times, Isabel Berwick looked at new approaches to career planning beyond the early stages of working life. The underlying problem is striking: we invest heavily in helping people choose a direction at the beginning of a career, then provide remarkably little structure when experienced professionals need to make consequential choices decades later. Pasted text
The Atlantic approached the issue from another direction, questioning whether “middle age” can still be attached neatly to a chronological range. If people are living longer and working for longer, age becomes a less reliable shorthand for where someone should be professionally. A 55-year-old may be entering an entirely new field rather than preparing to leave one. Pasted text
Research by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Keelan Beirne and Andrew Scott added an economic dimension. Their work challenges the assumption that ageing populations inevitably produce economic decline. Adaptation matters. Technology and productivity can help economies respond to demographic change, but so can the way institutions develop, retrain and make use of people across longer working lives.
Taken together, these arguments point towards a more demanding phase of the longevity conversation.
It is no longer enough to establish that people will live and work for longer. The more useful questions concern quality, adaptability and agency. Can people change direction without discarding accumulated experience? Can organisations create meaningful development beyond early career? Can working lives change pace without being interpreted as decline? Can longer careers remain economically productive without becoming simply longer periods of endurance?
The extra years are only the starting point. What we build around them will determine what those years become.
BEFORE WE GO
For a long time, The Many Lives of Work belonged mostly to a relatively small circle.
It lived in our conversations, our notes, the stories people generously shared with us, the research we kept returning to and the drafts we changed more times than we can remember.
That circle is widening now.
The book is beginning to find readers in different countries and different stages of working life. Soon, it will be read in contexts we could never have anticipated while writing it.
That is perhaps the most exciting part.
We do hope the book creates space for a richer conversation about how careers can evolve across longer lives and about the structures individuals and organisations will need in order to make that possible.
Most of all, we are looking forward to hearing what stays with you.
What’s Next explores how longer lives are reshaping careers, work and the choices we make across a working lifetime.
