Understanding Career Dynamics

Employee retention is not about bean bags or pizza Fridays. 🍕 It’s about how people feel at work. In 2025, with all the uncertainty—layoffs, AI replacing jobs, and pressure to do more with less—people don’t stay because of perks. They stay because they feel respected, trusted, and valued. As HR professionals and leaders, here’s what really helps people stick around: ✅ Give them real chances to grow—upskilling, promotions, meaningful projects ✅ Communicate with honesty—especially during changes ✅ Show up as a human, not just a manager—listen, guide, support ✅ Don’t just talk about work-life balance—make it possible ✅ Recognize the effort, not just the result—both matter ✅ Be consistent and fair—favorites destroy trust ✅ Create a culture where belonging is real—not just on a poster ✅ Protect their mental space—cut the unnecessary pressure ✅ Stand by your team—especially during tough times People leave bad environments, not bad jobs. And they stay where they are seen, heard, and supported. Retention doesn’t need to be expensive—it needs to be empathetic. What’s one small action that helps your team feel valued? #employeeretention #leadership #workculture #HR #peopleFirst #workplacewellbeing #bestadvice #careers

As a junior lawyer, I had to piece together information on how to get promoted. In case it helps somebody going through the process for the first time, here’s what I’ve learned going through 4 rounds of promotion cycles (most successful, some not): 1️⃣ Most people start the promotion process too late. The best time is 6-12 months before the application date. This gives you enough time to gather evidence of your achievements, work on any shortcomings in your promotion application and align with your manager / stakeholders before budgets and resourcing are locked in. 2️⃣ Promotion policies can contain 10+ criteria to meet, but trying to address them all in an application with a word limit will dilute your message. Instead, choose 3-5 criteria that you can craft a strong narrative around. 3️⃣ It's hard to remember and quantify your accomplishments if you aren't tracking them throughout the year. Setting up an ongoing tracker early is helpful (I use Microsoft Planner), especially around those 3-5 criteria you've chosen. 4️⃣ It’s okay to try for a promotion before you feel completely ready. Even if your first attempt is unsuccessful, you'll learn things from the experience that will make it harder for them to say no the second time (like I did). Better to apply a year early than a year late. 5️⃣ Understand that there are things outside of your control in determining whether your promotion will be successful or not (e.g. budget and resourcing constraints, stakeholders who aren’t fond of you for non-work reasons, economic conditions etc). The goal is to focus on the things that are within your control and maximise your chances as much as possible. Here’s what the timeline / process can look like using these principles: 🔹 1 year out- Learn about your organisation’s promotion process (deadlines, forms to submit, promotion criteria, stakeholders in the approval process) 🔹 6-12 months out - Have a discussion with your manager to let them know that you intend to apply for the promotion, identify any areas you may need to improve on, and agree on goals to achieve that would maximise your chance of success in the application. 🔹 6 - 12 months out - Choose a few promotion criteria to focus on and set up a system to track and quantify your contributions towards those criteria in your current work. 🔹 1 month out - Write up a draft promotion application (ask your colleagues if they can share theirs) 🔹 2-4 weeks out - Remind your manager and ask if they could review and provide feedback on your draft application. 🔹 Submission before the deadline. 🔹 If unsuccessful, follow up for feedback and agree on a plan for improving your application for next time. Anything else you’d add? ----- Next week, I’ll be sending out a step-by-step guide on how to apply for a promotion with practical examples to the 7,782 people on my mailing list. If you're interested, I hope you'll subscribe via my website or the link in my profile and give it a read.

HR Beyond Knowing People: Do We Know Work? A century ago, HR was a lot about the nature of work itself. The advent of scientific management, or Taylorism, during the industrial revolution introduced rigorous methods for measuring and optimizing human effort. Early “personnel” departments specialized in analyzing work—timing tasks, standardizing processes, and designing jobs for maximum efficiency. As economies evolved, so did the nature of work. Modern roles demand less repetition and more creativity, adaptability, and cognitive skill. Job design shifted from breaking tasks into isolated parts to empowering people to tackle complexity and change. In 1997, Steven Hankin of McKinsey & Company introduced the concept of the “war for talent,” driving HR departments to focus even more on the people aspect of the equation. Recently, companies have begun to treat skills as the new currency of talent management. The emphasis now extends beyond job titles and résumés to understanding the mix of abilities—both technical and human—that fuel performance and potential. HR leaders recognize that matching people to work requires deep insight into skills, learning agility, and cross-role mobility rather than relying solely on experience or credentials. This skills-based approach has been accelerated by the rise of AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platforms. These systems integrate data on employees and external labor markets to optimize hiring, workforce planning, and talent development—highlighting not just what employees know, but what they can do and where they could grow. The New Challenge: Human-AI Role sort. Today, another transformation is underway. Work is increasingly defined by how humans and AI share and shift activities. As AI and automation rapidly reshape jobs, even the most advanced HR systems struggle to keep pace with the fundamental changes in the content of work. Few tools can thoroughly support the analysis and redesign of work itself. Work content now evolves rapidly, as tasks are redefined, augmented, or automated. Traditional surveys and spreadsheets are no longer adequate. What’s needed is a solution for dynamic analysis of work and work redesign at scale. Organizations need a new generation of tools: Work Intelligence Systems. These AI-native platforms should: - Analyze real work activities and required skills, rather than just job titles or organizational charts. - Track how tasks evolve with emerging technologies such as generative AI. - Reveal where automation is shifting or creating new roles. - Deliver actionable insights for work design, organizational effectiveness, and workforce planning. There are already some pioneers in this space, such as the AI based Impact Assessment solution from TI-People, and likely many other HR technology providers are entering—or will soon enter—this promising new category. At least, I hope they do.

One of the best reports that exist. Huge fan 🙋🏼♂️ What is it about? The World Economic Forum’s bi-annual Future of Jobs Report has followed evolving technological, societal, and economic trends to understand occupational disruption and identify opportunities for workers to transition to the jobs of the future. The report comprehensively analyzes the interconnected trends shaping the global labor market. Key Takeaways: 🎯 Broadening digital access is expected to be the most transformative trend with 60% of employers expecting it to transform their business by 2030. 🎯 Increasing cost of living ranks as the second most transformative trend overall with half of employers expecting it to transform their business by 2030. 🎯 Climate change mitigation is the third-most transformative trend overall while climate change adaptation ranks sixth with 47% and 41% of employers, respectively, expecting these trends to transform their business in the next five years. 🎯 Two demographic shifts are increasingly seen to be transforming global economies and labor markets: aging and declining working-age populations, predominantly in higher-income economies, and expanding working-age populations, predominantly in lower-income economies. 🎯 Geoeconomic fragmentation and geopolitical tensions are expected to drive business model transformation in one-third (34%) of surveyed organizations in the next five years. Impact on the Labor market: 🎯 On current trends over the 2025 to 2030 period job creation and destruction due to structural labour-market transformation will amount to 22% of today’s total jobs. The creation of new jobs is 14% of today’s total employment, amounting to 170 million jobs. This growth is expected to be offset by the displacement of the equivalent of 8% (or 92 million) of current jobs, resulting in net growth of 7% of total employment, or 78 million jobs.  🎯 Frontline job roles are predicted to see the largest growth in absolute terms of volume. Care economy jobs and Personal Care Aides are also expected to grow significantly over the next five years, alongside Education roles such as Tertiary and Secondary Education Teachers. 🎯 Technology-related roles are the fastest-growing jobs in percentage terms as well as Green and energy transition roles. 🎯 Clerical and Secretarial Workers are expected to see the largest decline in absolute numbers. Similarly, businesses expect the fastest-declining roles to include Postal Service Clerks, Bank Tellers, and Data Entry Clerks. On average, workers can expect that two-fifths (39%) of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated over the 2025-2030 period. Data set: This year’s edition captures the perspectives of over 1,000 employers – representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. #economy #labormarket #jobs

The Most Valuable Financial Skill for Long-Term Career Success   Throughout my career placing executives and professionals across industries, I've observed a critical pattern that separates those with genuine career flexibility from those perpetually trapped in roles that no longer serve them.   The distinguishing factor isn't income level, investment knowledge, or even network - it's the ability to resist spending money to impress others.   This rarely-discussed financial skill creates a profound advantage in today's volatile job market.   Professionals who've mastered it can: • Maintain robust emergency funds that allow them to decline misaligned opportunities • Build investment portfolios that generate passive income, reducing dependency on salary • Create career pivoting runways that enable strategic moves rather than desperate ones • Negotiate from positions of financial strength rather than necessity   Meanwhile, their equally talented but financially-constrained counterparts remain tethered to positions they've outgrown, making career decisions based on immediate financial pressures rather than long-term fulfillment.   The irony is striking: the external trappings we acquire to signal professional success - luxury vehicles, prestigious addresses, designer wardrobes - often become the very anchors that limit our professional mobility and decision-making power.   True career independence requires financial independence, which begins with the psychological freedom from caring what others think about your spending choices.   What financial decision have you made that prioritized long-term flexibility over short-term status?   Sign up to my newsletter for more corporate insights and truths here: https://lnkd.in/ei_uQjju   #deepalivyas #eliterecruiter #recruiter #recruitment #jobsearch #corporate #careeradvancement #workplacesurvival #financialindependence #careerstrategist

RETHINKING POWER IN ORGANISATIONS For over a century, management theory has catalogued organisational forms—Weber’s bureaucracy, Mintzberg’s archetypes, coops, B Corps, social enterprises, DAOs. Yet this proliferation masks a remarkable evasion: virtually no mainstream framework systematically uses philosophical tools to analyse how power is legitimated within organisations. We classify governance codes, ownership structures, and culture, but consistently ignore political analysis that explains whose interests prevail, whose voices matter, and how compliance is enforced. This is no innocent oversight—Management science has deliberately severed itself from political theory to conveniently evade foundational questions of legitimacy. The result? We fail to ask by what right any organisation commands, excludes, allocates resources or value, thereby encoding systemic injustice into the architecture of organisational life. Imperium—the capacity to command and enforce rules—becomes “hierarchy” or “leadership style,” shorn of questions about what legitimates organisational sovereignty. Dominium—control over productive resources—becomes “fiduciary duty”, “minimum wage” or “business case,” occluding property as a social relation structuring power and exclusion through contracts. Potestas—the capacity for collective self-determination—shrinks to “employee engagement” or “empowerment”, while true constituent power is foreclosed. But every organisation is a political order. Just as societies struggle over state power, market dominance, and popular sovereignty, organisations mirror these tensions internally. State-owned enterprises concentrate imperium, suppressing both market discipline and democratic voice. Shareholder corporations prioritise capital’s dominium, reducing labour to disposable input. Cooperatives and NGOs attempt to maximise potestas—collective agency—but often suffer fragility without broader regulatory and legal scaffolding. Hybrids proliferate—social enterprises, platform cooperatives, steward-ownership, self-managed partnerships—each seeking to rebalance structures of authority, ownership, and agency. Yet even these “innovations” rarely confront core political questions. Most power distributions remain historically contingent, ethically incomplete, and open to manipulation. By mapping organizational forms onto the Political Triangle we can deploy rigorous political analysis to ask: What constitutes legitimate organizational authority? How do property regimes structure possible distributions of power and surplus? When does constituent power get captured by its own ideology? This is no mere academic exercise—it is the precondition for business to be a force for good. Only by reintegrating political theory with management and economics can we link macro justice to meso organisational design. Until we reckon with the legitimacy of power, management theory cannot become a genuine engine of societal transformation. #leadership

#PeopleAnalytics: Turning #HRMetrics into #Strategic Insights In today’s data-driven organizations, HR is evolving from a support function to a strategic powerhouse. These HR Metrics are more than just numbers; they’re lenses through which we can understand workforce dynamics, organizational health, and business impact. Let’s break it down: 🔹 Absenteeism Rate: A high rate may signal burnout, disengagement, or systemic issues in workplace culture. Tracking it helps identify patterns and intervene early. 🔹 Employee Attrition & Retention: These twin metrics reveal the stability of your workforce. High attrition can be costly and disruptive, while strong retention often reflects good leadership and employee satisfaction. 🔹 Internal Promotion Rate: A key indicator of talent mobility and succession planning. Promoting from within boosts morale and reduces hiring costs. 🔹 Cost Per Hire & Time to Hire: Efficiency metrics that reflect the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy. Long hiring cycles or high costs may point to process inefficiencies or misaligned sourcing channels. 🔹 Offer Acceptance Rate: A direct measure of your employer brand and candidate experience. Low acceptance rates might mean your value proposition isn’t resonating. 🔹 Human Capital ROI: This is the ultimate business case for HR—how much return you’re getting from your investment in people. It’s a powerful metric for aligning HR with financial performance. 🔹 Employee Engagement: Often measured through surveys, this metric captures how emotionally and cognitively invested employees are in their work. High engagement is correlated with productivity, innovation, and employee retention. 💡 Why it matters: These formulas empower HR teams to move from reactive to proactive. They help diagnose problems, forecast trends, and make evidence-based decisions that drive business value. People analytics isn’t just about tracking—it’s about transforming. #PeopleAnalytics #HRStrategy #HumanCapital #WorkforceInsights #EmployeeExperience #DataDrivenHR #Leadership #FutureOfWork #LinkedInHR #HRLeadership

🚀 The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 has just been published 🌍 This essential read examines the major trends shaping the global labour market—technological change, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts, the green transition, &c —and what they mean for jobs, skills, and business transformation in the second half of this decade. Here's some key insights that struck me as important for those of us driving #digitaltransformation in organisations: 🔹 60% of employers expect broadening digital access to transform their businesses. We need to do more to integrate digital tools across processes and ensure equitable access for employees 🔹 Demand for AI, big data, cybersecurity, and technology literacy is skyrocketing 🔹 BUT we have to navigate the dual realities of job creation (eg, AI specialists) and displacement (eg clerical roles). Change isn't going to be good for everyone. 🔹 Two-fifths of skills and projected to become outdated by 2030 — a terrifying proportion for both employees and employers. Up-skilling and re-skilling are going to be critical 🔹 That doesn't mean everyone needs to become a techie. Arguably the opposite — it brings the human side of work to the fore, either in face-to-face occupations or shifting the focus to creativity, flexibility, and adaptability to complement technological skills 🔹 Upskilling 59% of the workforce by 2030 will require embedding training into day-to-day operations. Create systems that encourage continuous skill development, curiosity, and adaptability 🔹 Employee health and well-being will be increasingly important as a talent retention strategy. Similarly, while DEI's reputation is being trashed by tech bros, it's still vital to broaden talent pools and foster innovation 🔹 Climate change, economic uncertainty, and demographic shifts will redefine workforce priorities If you're shaping the #futureofwork, this report highlights a bunch of opportunities to align strategy with these transformative trends. Read the report here:

India's job market is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by technological advancements, shifting economic conditions, and changing workforce expectations. In such a dynamic environment, data analytics is no longer just a tool—it's a necessity for businesses and job seekers alike. For Businesses: Smarter Workforce Planning & Hiring 📊 Predicting Hiring Trends – Companies can analyze hiring patterns and industry demand to identify talent shortages or surpluses before they impact operations. 📊 Skills Forecasting – AI-driven analytics can highlight emerging skills needed for the future, allowing businesses to reskill their workforce proactively. 📊 Optimizing Recruitment Strategies – Data-driven insights help recruiters fine-tune job descriptions, salary benchmarks, and even ideal hiring timelines to attract the best candidates. For Job Seekers: Finding the Right Opportunities 📈 Identifying In-Demand Skills – By analyzing job postings and market trends, professionals can focus on upskilling in high-growth areas like AI, cloud computing, and data science. 📈 Salary Benchmarking – Real-time compensation analytics help job seekers negotiate competitive salaries based on industry trends. 📈 Better Career Navigation – Data can reveal career progression paths, helping individuals make informed decisions about transitions and growth. 💡 The Bottom Line? Both businesses and professionals who leverage data analytics will have a significant edge in this ever-changing job landscape. Companies can hire more efficiently, and professionals can future-proof their careers. 𝑯𝒐𝒘 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒂 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒚 𝒂𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒋𝒐𝒃 𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒌𝒆𝒕? #dataanalytics #datadrivendecisionmaking #workforceplanning #workforcehiring #recruitmentstrategies

Your next hire has a 31% chance of quitting - and you have all the tools to keep them. It’s shocking, but out of every 10 talented people you bring on board, 3 will walk away in just six months. Not because they're difficult. Not because they're ungrateful. But because most companies are blindly missing the most obvious retention strategies. The talent retention breakdown: 1/ The Silent Killer: Unmet Expectations New hires don’t leave jobs—they leave broken promises. What you think you’re offering: - A job - A salary - Some benefits What they’re actually looking for: - A clear path to growth - Work that feels meaningful - A team they connect with 2/ The Recognition Gap Top performers don’t just work for paychecks—they work for recognition. Harsh truth: A salary is the starting point. Appreciation is what makes them stay. 3/ Culture: The Invisible Retention Lever Work isn’t just a contract, it’s an experience. Red flags that push talent away: - Micromanagement - Lack of feedback - Poor communication - No sense of psychological safety The Real Retention Playbook: - See your employees as humans, not resources - Create clear growth trajectories - Build genuine communication channels - Invest in their potential, not just their performance Retention isn't about keeping people. It's about making them WANT to stay. Have you ever left a job because something fundamental was missing? Or stayed despite challenges? #retention #hiring #value