Think of your careers as many short loops

The career, as most people have understood it, is dead. Not the working life – that endures – but the old architecture of it: the single long arc, the carefully chosen specialism, the thirty-year ascent through a recognised hierarchy. Sanjay Menon, executive VP and MD of Publicis Sapient India, wants professionals – particularly young ones – to bury that model and stop mourning it.

“In the past, people have thought about careers as one long loop that lasts 25 or 30 years,” he says. “You go through a learning curve, a maturing curve, and then a monetisation curve. People have to think about careers right now as many short loops.” It sounds unsettling. Menon insists it is liberating – if you arrive at it with the right disposition.

That disposition, he argues, begins with curiosity and is sustained by what he calls a gamer’s mindset. The analogy arrived to him unexpectedly, watching his son navigate the worlds of competitive gaming. “Gamers thrive on the fact that they don’t know enough and they’re being challenged by something that is likely to beat them more often than they will win,” he says. “It’s the thrill of wanting to be challenged and the joy of overcoming it.” When that spirit is brought to professional life, the paralysis of uncertainty dissolves. You stop waiting to feel ready and start asking, instead, where the opportunity lies.

The contrast Menon draws is between dieting and wellness. Dieting is a finite journey – point A to point B – whereas wellness is a continuously evolving set of behaviours oriented towards health. A career, he believes, should follow the second model. How do you think about a career as a set of moves rather than one big move? The answer, according to Menon, lies in realising that expertise is no longer a destination but a series of temporary advantages to be leveraged and then superseded.

Understand Business ValueFor those already embedded in a domain – software development, say, or finance – the path forward is not sideways but upstream. Menon uses the example of a developer writing code for an automotive client. “The lowest common denominator is: I’m writing code,” he says. “The next thing is: what am I writing this code for? Why is it valuable for the business?” As AI absorbs the purely mechanical elements of coding, the professional who has relentlessly pushed their understanding towards business context finds themselves already positioned at the next level. “You are building perspective by constantly pushing upstream. Most people look at the work they do as a task; they don’t spend enough time linking that into where it generates business value.”

The warning signs of professional obsolescence, Menon suggests, are subtler than redundancy notices. They arrive when colleagues begin treating you as a point solution – the person summoned for one specific, repeatable task. “To me, that’s a red flag,” he says plainly. “No matter how good we are, we’re never going to be faster or more tireless than a machine. If you compete with AI, you will lose; if you use AI as a booster rocket, you will get where you want to go.” The shift he urges is from job security – which he regards as something of an illusion even historically – to what he terms relevance security. “People who stayed in their jobs were always people who were able to create value. Today, you have to create different kinds of value in very short time frames.”

He is unsparing about the suggestion that workers might find refuge by identifying tasks AI cannot yet perform. “A gap that exists today may not exist tomorrow,” he says. The proper response is not to occupy a gap defensively, but to become fluent at identifying gaps – and at scanning laterally for where a skill proved in one sector might become newly valuable in another.

The institutional implications are considerable. Menon is blunt about the environment in which curiosity can flourish, advising younger professionals to seek out flat organisations where proximity to business impact is immediate. “If you’re writing code for a shopping cart, you should understand how a single percentage of channel conversion means millions in revenue.” Managers who suppress curiosity – often, he notes, because their own relevance feels threatened – are not merely bad leaders; they are, in the current climate, genuinely dangerous to the people in their care. “Don’t compromise on what you can create,” he advises. “Question the environment you’re in.”