The Shift to Adaptive Work and Life Models

Being adaptive means reimagining yourself before you need to. Your ultimate happiness at work and life may depend on your ability to do this. So “Shift to Adaptive Work and Life Models” is just a fancy way of saying “imagine and see your future by using models.”

Reimagine yourself before you need to, because your ultimate happiness at work and life may depend on it. We call this being Adaptive.

Making the shift to adaptive work and life models requires decisions and actions — it is a foundational applied career innovation skill set.

We challenge you to demonstrate for your students, by creating Earning Models, the decisions and actions you took to arrive at your current Earning Model.

You have a choice: adapt or die.

(Or worse, suffer death by the abyss of career planning — the place where good workers go to die.)

One of the most important skills you can teach your students about career innovation is how to accept and adapt to changes in their internal and/or external worldview.

Here’s the career innovation advice students need: A career change may be risky but not changing your career is even risker!

The world is constantly changing and so are living situations. Over time, your students’ careers (just like yours!) will likely change as well. 

Help your students by providing them with low-risk, psychologically safe, and real-world methods, tools, and experiences they can use to learn to adapt. They will become skilled at spotting opportunities, gathering and utilizing resources, and putting their ideas into action. 

Give them a method that they can use for the rest of their working lives.

The goal of the “Earning Model Into Action Method” is to give learners a framework for navigating the four stages of the adaptive process: 

  • Model—Students create earning models to help them visualize various work experiences.
  • Adjust—When building an Earning Model that has a clear fit or appeal, students will adjust their models as they uncover assumptions. Once they have done this, they will test their model with a real employer.
  • Test—Students are attempting to further validate their Earning Models during testing. If the test fails, they will need to adjust their models and test them again, until they are validated.
  • Do—Once their model is valid, they put their idea into practice through an internship, volunteer opportunity, part-time job, or project work.

Download the student version of The Shift to Adaptive Work and Life Models_Student to get the conversation started.