I’ve been on a fair few podcasts over the years – as well as hosting my own HR Means Business – but it’s often the conversations that end up somewhere unexpected that are the ones that stay with me. My recent appearance on The DEX Show with Thomas McGrath was one of those.
We started – as these things often do – with career history. Mine is not a straight line. Trainee accountant. Tax specialist. Recruiter. Early social media adopter at a time when most people in my world thought blogging was a hobby for people with too much time. Writer, speaker, analyst, researcher, podcaster.
The thread connecting it, if there is one, is restlessness – not the restless looking for what’s next, but the restless curiosity about whether there’s a better way of doing what’s in front of us. Every new technology, every new platform, every new way of sharing thinking raises the same question: how can we actually make the best of this? Not how the people who built it say we should use it, but what it might genuinely enable if we approach it with curiosity rather than compliance.
That instinct, it turns out, is exactly what I think the current moment demands – from everyone, at every career stage.
Nobody Planned for This
One of the threads I keep returning to in my writing and speaking is that nobody really designed for longer lives. The UK state pension age was set when average life expectancy was 68. You’d get roughly three years of it on average, if you were lucky. Now average life expectancy is 81 or 82 for men, 84 or 85 for women, and people remain active, mentally sharp, and genuinely motivated to keep contributing well beyond what previous generations would have considered working age.
The result is five generations in the workforce simultaneously – not by plan, but by accumulation. Organisations are still finding their way through what that means structurally. The culture, the career paths, the management models – none of them were designed for this configuration. We’re effectively building the plane while flying it.
And layered on top of that, for the youngest cohort entering work, is a housing market that has effectively broken the traditional social contract. In the UK (and much of the West) Property prices have risen roughly 40 times over the past four decades – whilst salaries have risen around nine or ten times. The model that worked for previous generations – work hard, save, buy a home, build stability, progress – doesn’t function the same way anymore. Academic Dr. Eliza Filby has written a best selling book about the result, called the Inheritocracy – a generation more likely to move forward through inheritance than through career progression – which I think is a must read for HR and managers in general, as it shapes how young people show up at work, what they expect from it, and how much faith they’re willing to place in conventional career structures.
The AI Assumption that Doesn’t Hold
There’s a lazy assumption running through a lot of AI and workplace conversations that digital natives will simply absorb AI fluency. They’ll be the ones who figure it out. ‘Find a young person who understands this’ as the joke often goes.
It doesn’t hold. Being comfortable with technology generally doesn’t mean being equipped for the specific disruption that AI represents. If anything, entering the workforce at exactly the moment when entry-level roles are being most directly affected by AI – when the learning pathway that used to exist is being compressed or potentially removed – may be more destabilising at the start of a career than at any other point. Gen Z are digital natives. They are not AI natives. And that distinction matters.
Where HR and Technology Converge
Thomas asked me where the traditional silo between HR and IT is heading. My answer: it has to dissolve, because it no longer reflects how work actually functions.
HR started in my personal work experience as timesheets, contracts, learning and professional development, a focus on progression, and personal issues that might be impacting work. Personnel, not people. How it’s evolved – employee experience, engagement, development, retention, skills progression, creating the conditions that allow people to bring their best selves to work – is inseparable from technology.
Screening and hiring. Skills matching. Predictive analytics that can begin to forecast turnover or identify where skill gaps are emerging. Personalised learning pathways. Tools that can help managers lead across generational lines they don’t always understand.
The data and analytics layer is where I think it gets really interesting. Not automating what exists, but enabling organisations to ask questions they couldn’t previously ask – and act on the answers before the cost of not acting becomes visible.
The Thing That Holds it all Together
Thomas ended the conversation with a question about employee experience as a metric in the age of AI transformation. It was the right question to end on, because it’s the one I keep coming back to regardless of what else changes.
How organisations treat their people determines how those people perform, whether they stay, and whether they help the business grow. That’s been true since I started work as a 19-year-old trainee accountant in a firm where the two oldest people were 52 and 55. It will be true when whatever comes after AI has reshaped work again.
Technology changes what’s possible. Experience determines what people do with it.
In an era of AI transformation, measuring how people experience work isn’t a soft metric sitting at the edge of the business case. It’s the signal that tells you whether everything else is actually working.
Always be learning. Always be connecting. Be genuinely curious about people – what drives them, what they’re trying to build, what they need to do their best work.
That’s the advice I gave technology professionals navigating AI transformation on The DEX Show. It’s also, I think, the most durable career philosophy I’ve found across a career that has taken more turns than I ever planned!
You can listen to the whole podcast conversation here : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/the-dex-show_what-does-a-great-employee-experience-look-activity-7493368503358550016-4beq?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABRMBEBEmfX44AFqq97vuDd1uRv9jtNDKY
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