Disrupt Yourself: Why You Need to Reinvent Your Career Before Someone Else Does
This article was originally published in April 2019. It was substantially updated in May 2026 to reflect AI’s effect on careers and the case for disrupting yourself before disruption finds you.
When I first wrote this in 2019, the case for disrupting yourself was mostly about economic cycles. Don’t get complacent in the good times. That argument still holds. But it has been overtaken by a sharper one. AI is now reshaping the work itself, and waiting for the change to come to you is the surest way to be on the wrong side of it. The people most at risk aren’t the ones whose jobs are obviously automatable. They’re the ones who are quietly excellent at work that’s being quietly redefined underneath them.
A case in point
I met Ger, a busy executive in the insurance industry. We talked about the projects his company was working on. He cited robotisation, automation, and now AI as the big agenda items in his sector. He was busy working on these projects, and loving it.
I asked him about the project timelines and what was next for him beyond these projects. He admitted he hadn’t had time to consider the future — he’d immersed himself in the work. I sounded a warning: don’t take your eyes off your career future while you work on your current projects.
I’d been giving a “Future of Work” talk for Ger’s employer, and we had a brief coaching session afterwards. He said the talk had given him food for thought. He’d been blindly busy. He had risen through the organisation by being recommended for new roles by other people, and admitted he’d never stood back and thought about what he actually wanted to do.
I shared the S-curve idea with him. He needed to take control of his next move rather than depend on others to spot it for him.
What the S-curve actually is
The S-curve idea is simple. Every role, every skill, every business has a learning curve, a peak, and a decline.
When you’re climbing the curve, you’re learning fast and growing fast. When you reach the peak, growth flattens… and that’s the moment most people relax. They’ve earned it. The job has finally become comfortable.
The reason most people don’t is that the curve they’re on still feels good. By the time it stops feeling good, the next move has become a rescue, not a strategy.
Why this is hard to do
Disrupting yourself while in growth is hard precisely because you’re happy where you are. We haven’t been educated to find roles for ourselves… we’ve been trained to depend on managers and recruiters to find our next moves for us.
This runs against the grain of how most of us were taught to think about careers. Climb the ladder, earn tenure, wait your turn. That model wasn’t wrong. It just doesn’t describe the world we’re working in now.
Research has consistently shown that younger, mobile professionals start thinking about their next move within roughly eighteen months of starting a role. The instinct to keep moving is healthy. The risk is when it becomes reactive — you wait until you’re miserable, then panic-search for the next thing.
Career progression isn’t just promotion
Don’t get hooked on the bright lights of promotion as the only indicator of progress. As organisations have become flatter, there are simply fewer steps to climb on the career ladder.
The more useful frame is a skills ladder. What new skills do you want to learn in your next move? Money matters — but the people who get paid the most aren’t necessarily the ones with the highest titles. They’re the ones with skills the business is reorganising itself around. And that list is changing fast.
Three ways to start disrupting yourself
- Audit your skills annually. Once a year, list the five skills the business pays you for. Then check honestly which of them are getting easier (good) versus more commoditised by tools (warning sign). The skills being commoditised are the ones to plan around — not panic about, but plan around.
- Build something outside your day job. Side project, board role, mentoring, writing, teaching. The point isn’t the activity — it’s exposure to environments where the rules are different from yours. You learn faster, and you build a network that doesn’t depend on your employer being your only career patron.
- Take a benchmarked assessment. If you’re not sure where you actually stand, getting a structured read-out is a faster start than trying to self-diagnose. Our Future Career Readiness Index is a free 10-minute assessment that gives you a benchmarked starting point against people in similar roles globally.
Where to go from here
Disrupting yourself isn’t about quitting your job or chasing every shiny new technology. It’s about staying ahead of the moment when the work changes — by changing first.
John Fitzgerald
Founder, Harmonics Group
Harmonics specialises in helping organisations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change. To learn more about our programmes, please contact us on 061 336136 or email info@harmonics.ie
