AI is changing the world of work. But instead of worrying only about which jobs might disappear, perhaps we should be asking a different question: what makes work meaningful to us in the first place?
Is AI Making You Question Your Career?
Let’s be honest. If you’ve found yourself wondering what artificial intelligence might mean for your career, you’re probably not alone. Everywhere we look, there’s another headline about AI transforming an industry, replacing tasks or developing capabilities that, not so long ago, seemed uniquely human.Â
AI can write reports, analyse data, create content, develop software and support decisions. And it’s getting better at many of these things remarkably quickly. For some people, that’s exciting. New possibilities, greater productivity and opportunities to do things differently. For others, it’s unsettling.
Perhaps you’ve spent twenty years building expertise in your profession and you’re beginning to wonder whether that experience will still be valued in ten years’ time.
Maybe you’re just starting your career and wondering which direction to take when nobody seems entirely sure what the future will look like. Or perhaps you’re somewhere in between, reasonably happy with what you do, but wondering whether you should be learning something new before the world moves on without you. They’re perfectly reasonable concerns. But here’s a thought.
What if we’re asking the wrong question?
Instead of focusing entirely on “What job should I be doing in the future?”, perhaps we should start with something more fundamental.
“What do I enjoy, what am I good at, what matters to me, and how can I continue making a valuable contribution?”
That’s where an interesting Japanese concept called Ikigai comes into the picture. And I think it has something important to offer us as we navigate the future of work.
What Exactly Is Ikigai?
Ikigai (pronounced roughly ee-key-guy) is a Japanese concept often translated as a reason for being or a reason to get up in the morning. It’s about finding meaning, purpose and fulfilment in life. And importantly, it isn’t necessarily about having an extraordinary career, achieving great things or discovering some grand purpose.
Your Ikigai might be found in your relationships, your hobbies, helping others, learning something new or simply enjoying the everyday things that make life worthwhile.
In Western career development, Ikigai has become associated with a popular diagram featuring four overlapping circles. The circles ask four deceptively simple questions:
- What do you love? What activities give you energy, enjoyment and a sense of fulfilment?
- What are you good at? What strengths, skills and abilities do you bring to the table?
- What does the world need? Where could you make a positive difference?
- What can you be paid for? How can you earn a living that supports your needs and aspirations?
The idea is that where these four areas overlap, we might find work that is both meaningful and sustainable. It’s worth pointing out that this four-circle diagram is a modern Western interpretation of Ikigai, rather than the original Japanese concept. Nevertheless, it’s a useful framework for thinking about our working lives. And when the nature of work itself is changing, I believe these questions become even more relevant.
The Problem with Building Your Identity Around a Job Title
Think about how you introduce yourself when someone asks what you do.
“I’m an accountant.”
“I’m a teacher.”
“I’m an engineer.”
“I’m an IT manager.”
We rarely say, “I’m someone who enjoys solving complicated problems, helping people and making things work better.” Yet that second description might tell us considerably more about what makes our work meaningful.
Over time, our job titles can become part of our identity. We invest years developing our skills, gaining qualifications and building our experience. We become proud of what we do, and rightly so. But there’s a potential problem.
What happens when the job, we’ve built our identity around begins to change?
If AI can suddenly perform tasks that once required years of training and experience, it’s understandable that we might feel threatened. It isn’t just about whether we’ll still have a job. It’s also about whether the knowledge, experience and expertise we’ve worked so hard to develop will continue to matter. But here’s something worth considering.
Your job title describes what you do. It doesn’t necessarily define the value you bring.
And that distinction could become increasingly important.
Your Skills Are Bigger Than Your Job Description
Let’s take someone who’s spent much of their career working in IT service management. They might have years of experience managing incidents, improving services, analysing performance, implementing processes and helping organisations operate more effectively.
AI could increasingly automate or support many of those activities. Understandably, they might start wondering what that means for their future. But let’s look a little deeper.
What if the thing they genuinely enjoy isn’t managing incidents or producing reports? What if it’s solving difficult problems? What if they’re particularly good at understanding people, spotting patterns, asking insightful questions or helping teams work more effectively? And what if their greatest sense of satisfaction comes from seeing others succeed?
Suddenly, we’re having a very different conversation. Those strengths could be valuable in leadership, coaching, mentoring, organisational development, service transformation or entirely new roles that haven’t yet emerged.
The person’s experience hasn’t suddenly become worthless simply because technology can perform some of their existing tasks. The challenge is recognising how that experience might be valuable in different ways.
Instead of asking:
“How do I protect the career I’ve built?”
Perhaps a more useful question is:
“How can I use everything I’ve learned to continue making a meaningful contribution?”
That shift in perspective can open up possibilities we might otherwise overlook.
Four Questions Worth Asking About Your Future
So how can we use the familiar Ikigai-inspired framework to think differently about careers in an AI-driven world? Let’s explore each of the four questions.
1. What Do You Love? Find What Gives You Energy
Forget your job title for a moment. Think about the parts of your working day that you genuinely enjoy.
When do you feel most engaged? What activities leave you feeling satisfied rather than drained? Perhaps you enjoy solving problems, being creative, helping others learn or bringing people together. Maybe you love working independently, exploring new ideas or making complicated things easier to understand. Now ask yourself why.
Someone who loves teaching, for example, might discover that what really matters to them is helping other people develop and succeed. That motivation could be expressed through teaching, coaching, mentoring, training or a role that doesn’t currently exist. AI might change how those activities are delivered, but it doesn’t automatically remove the underlying motivation.
The important thing is to understand what you love about the work, rather than becoming attached to one particular way of doing it.
2. What Are You Good At? Look Beyond Your Technical Skills
Most of us are reasonably good at describing the technical skills we’ve developed throughout our careers. But we’re often less comfortable recognising the broader strengths we’ve acquired along the way.
Perhaps you’re particularly good at bringing people together, understanding complicated situations, communicating difficult ideas or remaining calm when everything around you seems to be going wrong.
Maybe you have a natural curiosity, strong judgement or an ability to recognise opportunities that others miss. These capabilities can be valuable across different roles and industries. Of course, we shouldn’t assume that so-called human skills are somehow immune to AI. Technology is already supporting activities involving analysis, creativity, communication and decision-making.
But that doesn’t make our wider capabilities irrelevant. It makes understanding them even more important. Rather than asking only, “Which of my skills might AI replace?”, try asking:
“Which of my strengths could become even more valuable when combined with AI?”
Perhaps the opportunity isn’t to compete with technology, but to discover how it can help you make better use of what you already bring.
3. What Does the World Need? Think About the Difference You Want to Make
It’s easy to think about careers in terms of available jobs. We search job websites, look at salary expectations and compare the qualifications employers are asking for. All sensible things to do.
But what if we approached the question from another direction? What problems would you genuinely like to help solve? What challenges matter to you? Where could your experience, interests and abilities make a difference?
Organisations will still need to develop people, build trust, manage change, resolve conflict and make difficult decisions. Communities will continue to face challenges involving education, health, sustainability and social connection.
AI may help address some of these needs. It may complicate others. And it will almost certainly create new challenges. The important question isn’t simply where jobs might exist. It’s where your contribution could matter. Because work often becomes more fulfilling when we can connect what we do with something we believe is worthwhile.
4. What Can You Be Paid For? Keep Your Feet on the Ground
Now for the practical bit. It’s wonderful to talk about purpose, fulfilment and doing what you love. But unfortunately, the mortgage company is unlikely to accept personal fulfilment as a monthly payment. Most of us have financial responsibilities, commitments and a standard of living we need to maintain. And that’s why this fourth question matters. A meaningful career also needs to be economically sustainable.
In a changing world, that means keeping an eye on where opportunities are emerging, which skills organisations value and how technology might change the demand for different kinds of work.
It might mean developing new capabilities. It might mean finding different applications for your existing experience. Or it might mean staying in your current profession while learning to use AI to work more effectively. There isn’t one right answer.
And we should be cautious about anyone claiming to know with certainty which professions will survive, and which will disappear. The aim isn’t to find a supposedly future-proof career.
It’s to find meaningful, realistic opportunities while remaining prepared for those opportunities to evolve.
But I Think Ikigai Needs a Fifth Consideration
Here’s where I believe the familiar four-circle framework needs a little help when we apply it to the future of work. It can encourage us to search for the perfect point where everything aligns.
Something we love, something we’re good at, something the world needs and something we can earn a living from. Find that magical intersection and, in theory, we’ve found our answer. But what happens when things change?
What if the work we love is no longer valued in quite the same way? What if we discover new strengths? What if our priorities change as we get older, our circumstances evolve or technology opens up possibilities we couldn’t previously have imagined? That’s why I would introduce a fifth consideration.
Adaptability.
Not another circle squeezed into the middle of the diagram, but something that surrounds and supports all four.
Adaptability means remaining curious, being willing to learn, questioning our assumptions and recognising when it might be time to explore a different direction. It also means understanding that the skills we have today don’t represent the limits of what we could become.
But there’s an important distinction here. Adaptability doesn’t mean constantly reinventing yourself.
You don’t need to master every new AI tool, chase every emerging trend or spend your evenings collecting qualifications just in case your job disappears. That sounds exhausting.
Sometimes adapting means learning something new. Sometimes it means applying your existing strengths in a different environment. And sometimes it means consciously deciding not to follow a trend because it doesn’t align with what matters to you.
Adaptability isn’t about changing for the sake of change. It’s about knowing when, why and how to change direction.
And that brings us to something else.
Perhaps We Need to Stop Planning Careers and Start Navigating Them
Imagine you’re setting off on a long journey. You’ve planned your route, chosen your destination and worked out roughly how long it should take. Then, halfway through, you discover that the road ahead is closed.
You could stubbornly follow your original plan. But that probably wouldn’t get you very far. Instead, you’d look at your options. Perhaps there’s another route. Perhaps there’s a better destination. Or perhaps the unexpected diversion leads you somewhere you hadn’t previously considered.
Careers aren’t so different. For years, we’ve been encouraged to create career plans. Choose a destination. Work towards it. Measure your progress. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But when the landscape is changing, a fixed plan can become less useful. What we need is something that helps us make decisions even when the route ahead isn’t clear.
We need a compass, not just a map.
Your personal compass is built around understanding your values, motivations, strengths and aspirations. It helps you recognise what matters, evaluate opportunities and decide which direction feels right for you.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never take a wrong turn. It doesn’t mean you won’t encounter obstacles or need to rethink your plans. But it does mean you have something more reliable than a job title or a prediction about the future to guide your decisions.
The destination might change. The route almost certainly will. But understanding your personal compass can help you navigate both.
Where Coaching Can Help
When we’re uncertain about our careers, it’s natural to want someone to tell us what to do. Should I retrain? Should I change industries? Which skills should I develop? Is it too late to start again? And, of course, there’s a place for professional career advice, labour-market research and technical training.
But there’s a problem with looking for someone else to provide all the answers. Nobody knows exactly what the future of work will look like. And even if they could predict which jobs would be in demand, that wouldn’t necessarily tell you which direction would be right for you. This is where coaching can offer something different.
Rather than telling someone which career they should pursue, non-directive coaching creates the space to explore what they really want, what might be holding them back and what possibilities they haven’t yet considered.
For example, someone with twenty years of experience might find themselves thinking:
“I’m too old to change careers.”
“Everything I know is becoming obsolete.”
“I’ve invested too much in my current profession to do something different.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
These thoughts can feel very convincing. But are they necessarily true? What evidence supports them? What strengths might they be overlooking? What possibilities might become visible if they looked beyond their current job title? And what small, sensible steps could they take to explore those possibilities without putting their financial security at unnecessary risk?
These are the kinds of questions that coaching can help someone work through. The aim isn’t to persuade them to change careers. It isn’t to convince them that AI is wonderful or that they should embrace every new technology. It’s to help them develop the clarity and confidence to make decisions that reflect their own values, circumstances and aspirations.
Sometimes that might lead to a completely new direction. Sometimes it might help someone rediscover what they enjoy about their existing work. Both can be equally valuable outcomes.
You Don’t Need to Have Everything Figured Out
There’s another idea worth considering.
Perhaps we need to become more comfortable experimenting with our careers rather than trying to predict everything in advance. When the future is uncertain, it can be tempting to do nothing until we have all the answers. But waiting for certainty could mean waiting a very long time.
Equally, making a dramatic career change because of a frightening headline about AI probably isn’t the wisest approach either.
Fortunately, there’s a middle ground. If you’re curious about a different direction, why not explore it? Talk to someone already working in that field. Try a short course. Volunteer. Take on a small project.
Experiment with using AI to support an aspect of your existing work. You don’t necessarily need to resign from your job, start a business or completely reinvent your life. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is take one small step and see what you learn. And then reflect.
- Did you enjoy it?
- What did you find difficult?
- Did you discover something about yourself?
- Did it challenge any assumptions you were making?
- Could you see yourself doing more of it?
Perhaps you’ll discover an exciting new possibility. Or perhaps you’ll realise that something you thought would be wonderful isn’t actually right for you. Neither outcome is a failure. Both give you useful information.
You don’t always need to know exactly where you’re going to take a meaningful next step.
The Future of Work Isn’t Just About Technology
Much of the conversation about AI focuses on what technology can do.
- How productive can we become?
- Which tasks can be automated?
- Which jobs will disappear?
- What new skills will employers need?
These are important questions. But I wonder whether we’re spending enough time thinking about the people affected by those changes.
What happens when someone who’s dedicated their working life to a profession begins to question whether their expertise still matters? How does a young person choose a career when the future seems so unpredictable?
How do we support experienced professionals who feel that technology is moving faster than they can keep up? And how do we make sure that, in our enthusiasm for efficiency and productivity, we don’t lose sight of what makes work meaningful?
Because for many of us, work is about considerably more than earning money.
- It’s about identity.
- It’s about achievement.
- It’s about relationships, purpose and feeling that we’re making a contribution.
AI might change the tasks we perform. But it doesn’t automatically remove those deeper human needs. It may simply mean that we need to find new ways of fulfilling them. And perhaps that’s why Ikigai feels particularly relevant right now. It reminds us to look beyond what we do and reconnect with why it matters.
So, What Does Your Personal Compass Tell You?
I don’t think Ikigai can predict the future of work. And I certainly don’t think a four-circle diagram can magically reveal the perfect career. But that’s not really the point.
Its value lies in encouraging us to ask better questions. Instead of worrying exclusively about whether our current job will still exist in ten years, perhaps we should also be asking:
- What parts of my work genuinely give me energy?
- What strengths
- What contribution would I like to make?
- What kind of working life would feel meaningful and financially sustainable?
- How willing am I to explore new possibilities while staying true to what matters to me?
You don’t need to have perfect answers. And you don’t need to change everything about your working life.
But spending time exploring these questions could help you approach an uncertain future with greater clarity. Because the truth is, none of us knows exactly where AI will take the world of work.
Some professions will change dramatically. New opportunities will emerge. And some of the skills we rely on today may become less valuable in their current form.
We can’t control all of that. But we can become more aware of what matters to us, recognise the value of our experiences and remain curious about where they might take us next.
Perhaps the real value of Ikigai in the age of AI isn’t helping us discover the perfect career. It’s helping us understand ourselves well enough to navigate whatever comes next.
And when the road ahead is uncertain, that’s a pretty good place to start.
A Final Thought
If you’ve been questioning what the future of work might mean for you, perhaps you don’t need to begin by searching for a new job or another qualification.
Start with a conversation with yourself.
What matters to you? What gives you energy? What strengths might you be overlooking? And what possibilities could be worth exploring?
At Novista Coaching, we believe that meaningful progress begins with greater self-understanding. Through reflection, exploration and non-directive coaching, we help people discover their own answers and navigate their next horizon.
Because you don’t always need to know your destination. Sometimes you just need to reconnect with your compass.
Navigate Your Next Horizon.
