The future of careers as we see it

In a stable world, careers were about individuals fitting into set structures and meeting the expectations and standards of the system. As a result, careers were predominantly credentials and position driven.

In the world we are entering, however, those very structures are transforming. Automation is displacing jobs, digitization is changing expectations from roles, organizations are transforming to become dynamic & agile ecosystems, and new educational & career opportunities are opening up. At the same time, people’s expectations from careers are changing as well. Individuals are looking for more autonomy and meaning & fulfillment through their careers.

In this new world, careers cease to be about fitting in and meeting expectations. Careers are now about taking charge and constructing or designing and carving out your own ‘space’ of contribution and realizing your potential, in this new environment.

To take charge and design their own career spaces, individuals will have to take up a proactive stance and build a new set of career capacities – to be able to contribute and engage positively with the changes in the environment.

Enabling individuals to navigate and flourish in this new environment

An earlier era demanded a simpler approach to careers: individuals needed to find the right opportunity based on their aptitudes and demand-supply gaps, acquire the required credentials to take up the opportunity and finally, to engage effectively with their job.

But the new career environment demands that individuals approach careers differently.

1. Career seekers must sense-make the complex environment in which they operate.
   
2. They need to be enabled to develop career strategies that take into consideration a dynamic environment where industries in which they operate might undergo shifts and changes.
   
3. They must develop the capacity to self-reflect and know themselves better so they can find a deeper fitment, between ‘who they are as a person, the job at hand and the drivers of their fulfillment.’
   
4. They must proactively create value through their role and expand & deepen their capacity over time.
   
5. They need deeper, inner capacities – for e.g. the resilience to deal with environments which are demanding and not safe & comforting, the agility to adopt new skills and capabilities, the self-esteem and sense of agency to design their own space of contribution.
   

Career seekers - whether they are students entering their careers, individuals looking for employment, mid-career professionals making a transition, people returning from a career break, people who are displaced or individuals who are about to retire – all face a more dynamic environment demanding new career thinking.

Therefore, various stakeholders of the career ecosystem such as the career seekers themselves, employers, educational institutions, governments, non-governmental organizations and career counselors need to step up and support career seekers differently so that career seekers can navigate and flourish in the new career environment.

iBecome Lab has a key role to play in this environment.

The lab has the necessary capabilities to build a range of career interventions – across geography, intervention agency, career seeker group and type of career enablement needed. We are open to working with multiple partners and across a range of revenue models.

We are committed to helping solve, what we believe, to be one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century – the reinvention of the way we spend our work lives.

We build solution models & tools for generic classes of challenges that are relevant to career seekers globally. Our models are uniquely designed with the intention of meeting individual career outcomes and yet being scalable across millions of career seekers.

Meeting career outcomes is a complex cognitive act involving a combination of learning, sense-making, decision making & thinking through. We develop different kinds of solutions models to equip the career seeker to navigate this complexity.

Our solution models and prototypes can be converted into products that cater to specific career seeker groups.

We seek to work with partners to co-build & scale-up career application products across multiple forms and media. These could include digital tools & apps, book and paper-based tools, classroom/ workshop experiences, digital models that enable a third party like a career counselor, etc. In short, we leverage the most optimal approach that helps the target career-seeker group achieve their outcomes.

iBecome actively seeks to build collaborative partnerships with different stakeholders in the career space in India and elsewhere.

We offer multiple models of partnering, such as:

Within each partnership model, we propose a ‘co-lab’ process of working together

In a co-lab, iBecome brings in it’s solution models, and our partners bring in their familiarity and access to a specific context, their market knowledge and technical expertise. Together we will build scalable “glocal” products of varying nature & form.

To explore partnership opportunities please write in:

iBecome is headquartered in Mumbai, India. It was founded by Srinivas Venkatram in 2007.

It has received angel funding from Mr. Luc Schaack and Mr. Roland Assa who have backed the deep discovery stage of the lab’s journey.

It is incubated at Illumine – a Knowledge Solutions Lab, in Mumbai, and receives continuous investments in terms of team time, space and resources from Illumine.

iBecome: a societal intervention in the making
The iBecome vision was born more than a decade back…

In this journey, iBecome can draw upon the competencies of its parent lab, Illumine, at any time.

These include,

1. The ability to build cognitive solutions that require inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking.
2. The ability to build tools that help people develop self-reflective capacities.
3. The ability to architect very large-scale cognitive change interventions that are robust at scales of 200,000 people at a time.
4. The ability to co-create & envision community solutions that address the concerns of all stakeholders and speak to the highest ideals of the community.
5. The ability to build new learning models, curricula & support ecologies that enable ‘discovery’ learning on scale.