TFN#80: 🪜(Part-1/2) Why focusing on upskilling may be dangerous to your career?

Reader, don’t get me wrong.
I’m a believer and practitioner of life-long learning.
In this two-part letter, I’m talking about “upskilling”—it is far from “learning”. It’s a deceptive term. So, I hope I don’t confuse you by mixing the two.

Now that’s out of our way, we can focus on the main subject.
If you’re in India and watch YouTube videos, you might have encountered some ads about upskilling. Almost all of them have a poster that looks like this:

• A beautiful model wearing a worksuite
• Using a power pose
• Looking directly at the camera
• Some hashtag that sounds powerful

There are hundreds of other companies making similar ads. And to fuel the fire, government agencies keep coming up with similar programs. Look at this news bite from 2021:

And if you work in an organization, you are likely aware of the effort they have been making to upskill their employees.
Like a war-cry, everyone shouts “upskill..upskill..upskill or vanish!”​
It feels like the whole world is going through great turbulence and everything is uncertain.
But..
But…

But we need to pause for a minute. And reflect.

When did we adopt this catchphrase: upskill?

Google Search Trends provides some clues. As you can see in this search trend analysis, the first peak in interest for “upskill” appeared in April 2020. And now the interest has almost quadrupled in 10 years!

Yes, that time when so-called EdTech and online certification companies had the full attention of work-from-home employees, with nothing much tangible to do.
I remember social media feeds full of people sharing some or other online certifications every other week. A social race to show a piece of electronic paper and then rush to another one.
My guess is, that’s how we ended up adopting this catchphrase: upskill.

Why “upskill” is a trap word?

When we use the term upskill, we automatically make some dangerous assumptions:
​Assumption no. 1: There is always a next upgrade possible for a given skill.

Assumption no. 2: The current level of skill is inadequate.

Assumption no. 3: Only skills are important.

Assumption no. 4: Everything is a skill​
Anything a human can do is a skill. This absurd assumption is the logical consequence of the third assumption. That’s why, now companies are coming up with terms such as “mental skills”, “emotional skills”, “people skills”, etc. And we all know, those are not skills. But if they don’t package them as “skills”, they won’t sell. See the third assumption: “Only skills are important”.

Assumption no. 5: All people are upgradable​
Probably, the darkest of all assumptions. Try waking up at 6 am every day and going for a walk, try to adopt a “healthy” diet. And you’ll realize–as I have realized many times–it is extremely difficult. No organization wants to admit this. Because if they do, then they don’t believe in their people. But it is fine if they set their people up for failure by assuming that attending a few weeks of “emotional skills” class by a consultant will make their emotional outbursts less frequent and make their team paradise on Earth. That’s not how things work.​
I can’t find a single useful way to use the word “upskill” in natural human-to-human communication.

The carrot of career-advancement

In most scenarios where organizations tell their employees or prospective hires to get upskilled, the employees/prospective hires think that once they’ve upskilled, they will be rewarded. When one round of upskilling is complete, they’re sent to the next round of upskilling and then next, then next…and so on.
The goalposts keep changing.

And most organizations don’t behave in this way intentionally. They just don’t know how to reward someone who claims to have been “upskilled”. Because businesses are not universities with fixed paths to career progression. We can get ahead in a university by producing a certificate. But businesses have to generate value by rewarding the people who produce value, not certificates.
So many organizations are dangling the carrot of career advancement through the stick of upskilling and it is not working.

So, shouldn’t we upskill?

The AI is going to take away our jobs and here I’m saying, we shouldn’t “upskill”.

Am I a lunatic?
​Not really.
As long as we use the term “upskill”, we are living in a trap.
Replacing “upskill” with “learn” changes many things.

For example, a customer-care executive may be assigned the work of talking to a customer, filling up customer reviews and retaining them or training new members in customer care. Out of curiosity or need, if she began learning new Customer Relationship Management software and helped with its implementation throughout the organization, they’d have generated enormous value by learning and contributing.
We’d be doing a grave disservice by saying “the customer-care executive upskilled herself”. She didn’t upskill. She followed her interest and learnt whatever was required.

Full-throttle upskilling

The saddest part is when people and organizations go into upskilling mode. Just search about news articles on upskilling and you’d be shocked how many people and organizations are undergoing the frenzy of upskilling.
Each party holding on to a single assumption:

Following this wrong assumption, organizations and people spend all their time, effort and money on only one thing: upskilling.
This full-throttle mode is not only dangerous but also flawed.
If you had a budget of Rs. 1,00,000 and 1000 hours a year to advance your career and you spent all of it purchasing online courses, attending workshops and what not, you’d have set yourself up for disappointment.
Because upskilling ≠ career advancement

Then what is career advancement equal to?

Luck: the secret ingredient to career advancement

Not many people talk about this because they fear being tagged as lucky.
We, humans, like to have an explanation for everything. The simpler the explanation, the better. Because that’s what our brains can understand and compute.
We immediately accept simple causal explanations, where Event-A leads to Event-B. In this case, Upskilling (Event-A) leads to Career advancement (Event-B).
​

But, the reality is far more complex than that. So, we cut the noise and call every other thing “luck”.
100s of factors bundled together and called luck. And it secretly implies we don’t have agency over those factors. So, what do we do? We give our all to the one that seems plausible: to the Event-A, expecting Event-B to take place.

While in reality, our equation looks like this:

Upskilling + 100s of other factors = career advancement

We can influence our luck(?)

For our communication, we will keep using the term “luck”, but what we mean is “factors”. Factors that affect career advancement.
We will talk about it in the next letter.
I know, it has been a long write-and-read today. It was worth it.

If this has resonated with you and you want to share it with someone, pls go ahead and forward this letter to them. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts on luck in this context? Hit Reply and tell me.

Reads of the week:

​Link​
In this classic, understandable write-up, Devon explains the whole idea behind going to Mars. I wish more people read this and their brains understood the science, technology and mainly, the ultimate human future achievable in our lifetime. He has made it quite easy to understand.
And this is not a fantasy piece.
If all goes well, this is what the future will look like in a few decades.
I’m unsure whether the critics would understand it. But then, how would I know? I’m suffering from the curse of knowledge. Perhaps, I have read too many science fiction stories and imagined the future a little too much.