For much of the twentieth century, career planning followed a predictable, linear model. Education led to a profession, which led to progressive promotions up a single organisational ladder. However, that paradigm has shifted and, due to a mix of economic volatility, technological disruption, and changing workforce expectations, truly linear careers are something that most professionals no longer experience.
Instead, individuals build portfolio careers; moving laterally across roles, industries, and even sectors which is not likely to change any time soon. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2023), half of all employees will need reskilling by 2027, and the average worker is expected to change roles more frequently than ever before as emerging roles and technologies continue to reshape work at an unprecedented pace. In this environment, the ability to adapt and apply transferable skills has become a cornerstone of career success.
From Career Paths to Career Portfolios
At the Agile Business Consortium, we often describe agility as ‘the ability to adapt rapidly within a changing environment’ and the same principle applies to our careers. Work success is no longer about climbing a fixed ladder but about building a portfolio of experiences that develop transferable skills and reflect personal purpose and values.
McKinsey & Company (2021) highlights that modern professionals are shifting from “career paths to career portfolios,” focusing on breadth of experience and interdisciplinary learning. Each move into a new project, new role or sideways step becomes an iteration, contributing to a resilient and meaningful professional journey.
What Is Incremental Career Planning?
Incremental career planning is an adaptive approach that mirrors agile iteration. It replaces long-term, rigid planning with short, intentional cycles of learning and reflection, allowing people to make informed, purposeful decisions as they go. Rather than mapping a rigid, decades-long career path, individuals identify their next viable step (the next stepping stone) based on current skills, opportunities, and evolving personal values.
In this model, each move is both an action and an experiment and, just as agile teams work in sprints, individuals can adopt the same principles to shape their careers:
- Reflect: Understand your current skills, motivations, and values - your personal “backlog.”
- Experiment: Take small, low-risk steps such as short projects, volunteering, shadowing, or microlearning.
- Review: After each experience, hold your own “retrospective.” What worked? What didn’t?
- Refine: Adjust your direction. Set your next goal based on evidence and self-insight.
This approach to taking ‘the next step’ reframes career planning from the traditional ‘one-time’ decision into a continuous cycle of reflection, experimentation, review, and refinement an ongoing process of course correction and discovery.
The Value of Transferable Skills
Transferable skills (such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and adaptability) are increasingly valuable at work and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD, 2023) found that organisations now prioritise these “human” skills as key enablers of resilience and innovation, relying on people to grow and adapt as their work does.
In practice, this might look like job searching when you’re feeling happy and fulfilled, so that you can keep your skills up to date against the job market or trying to find gaps in your skills or experience which might stop you from moving in the direction that you’d like to.
Career agility is not about predicting the future. We don’t have to know what’s coming to make plans. Instead, career agility is about stopping to check-in when you get new data. We can make a plan and start working towards it and, when we meet a hurdle or notice that the plan isn’t working in the ‘real world’, we can stop and choose a new path.
To this end, spending time job searching when you feel happy and fulfilled can help you to keep your skills up to date, but it can also help you to see changes in the work landscape and find gaps that you might like to fill, or things that you might need to overcome. Does the job that you want look like it will still exist in the future? Maybe it doesn’t exist yet? How can you get ready for it?
Embracing a Non-Linear Path
A stepping stone career isn’t always comfortable. In a world that celebrates speed and certainty, it can be unsettling to realise that a career may not follow a predictable path, but maybe less-so for those already operating in an agile environment or with a strong agile mindset. The most successful professionals are often those who have navigated uncertainty with curiosity and intention and there’s still plenty of room for ambition and goal setting, for those who thrive when they have a target in sight.
Agile ways of working remind us that progress isn’t always linear. Iteration, feedback, and continuous improvement lead to sustainable growth; not just in teams, but in people. The same curiosity and adaptability that fuel agile organisations can transform how individuals approach their careers.
A Framework for Agile Career Planning
Professionals can apply agile thinking to their personal development in simple, practical ways:
- Set a Vision: Define what purpose and fulfilment look like for you.
- Build a Backlog: Identify skills and experiences that align with your vision.
- Plan Sprints: Choose small, achievable actions to move closer to that vision.
- Gather Feedback: Seek input from mentors, peers, or communities of practice.
- Inspect and Adapt: Reflect on outcomes and adjust your next step.
This approach ensures that career development stays dynamic, evidence-based, and aligned with evolving aspirations and assures that it’s not fixed to outdated definitions of success.
Leading with Agility and Purpose
Purpose-led agility is not only about how organisations adapt; it’s about how people do within them. Incremental career planning empowers individuals to align their growth with their values, explore new directions, and build resilience in uncertain times, but it’s also good for their employer and, though linear careers are no longer in fashion, it’s more than possible to grow and change course whilst working in one organisation.
At its heart, incremental career planning is an approach which invites us to see our careers as living systems, capable of evolving, responding, and growing through change.
The question is no longer “What do you want to be when you grow up?” but rather, “What will your next iteration teach you?” and though we won’t be setting ‘lifelong’ goals for our career, incremental career planning is not about abandoning ambition.
It’s absolutely still ok to have long term plans and goals. It’s about designing your career as a living system and evolving your plans alongside your skills, circumstances, and the world around you to make sure that you can always find your next foothold.