Nigel Dalton on how to stay relevant (and employed) in an AI world

It was a great discussion about the future of AI and what mid-career professionals can do to pivot, and we encouraged the audience to ask a bunch of questions. The only problem was, we received too many. There was no time to answer them all!  
 
Luckily, Nigel has (very generously) taken it on himself to run through some of the best ones here. 

“It’s important to be curious about the underlying reasons for jobs leaving the building,” Nigel says. “Is it really cost arbitrage to a low-wage country? Is the work (or task) genuinely able to be automated so easily that a bot can do it? Is it that new, lower margin disruptors have entered the market, and the response is to simply cut costs of any kind?  

With that in mind, in the short term being comfortable with prompts for LLM tooling (from images to words and spreadsheets) might be a sensible starting place. Learn how things work.

- Nigel Dalton

If you’re a mid-career professional still coming to terms with AI, and its impact on your field, this one’s for you.  

Nigel: Domain expertise is often over-rated as a requirement for hiring someone in Australia. To me, your critical thinking skill, a learning mindset, systems thinking, curiosity, and good emotional regulation are what counts. Evidence of each of those in the form of stories is good to get onto your resume. 

My observation of people jumping domains or industries is that the new employer is going to be very interested in why you’d consider doing that (they probably haven’t personally considered it), especially at a senior level. “I’m bored with banking”, “healthcare is chronically underfunded”, “I got made redundant for the 3rd time”, or “government work lacks excitement” might be true, but might not be killer answers to that question!

From what I can see of the Australian job market, the arms race between applicants with ChatGPT and hiring managers with AI-powered keyword search tooling in HRIS platforms is clogging the process, and leading to frustration on both sides. LinkedIn reports 45% more applicants per job online now, fuelled by the ease of clicking the ‘apply now’ button after running your profile through Gemini or ChatGPT. The lazy way out has been to just choose the people with exact job titles as the vacancy, in the exact industry. So much bias!

Completing a qualification of any kind definitely sets you apart from most candidates - it’s proof that if you had the tenacity to see through some structured learning, and it’s very likely you have the attributes to learn a whole new industry as well.

Nigel: Relationships are key to succeeding in the 2020s: for businesses (especially partnerships), for teams, and for individuals. The shortcomings in the delivery of business value by all this new AI magicware seems to be tied up with the fact it’s mostly teams that deliver outcomes via what we call ‘work’, not individuals (unless you are in a small startup). 

Being good at making teams interface with other teams becomes key. Whole reams of literature like Team Topologies (Skelton and Pais) and Dr Lisa Kwan’s Collaboration Blindspot are valuable to consult on the topic.

As a mid-life individual navigating the disrupted AI world of 2025, getting on LinkedIn and really understanding how the algorithm can benefit your career is key. As the job market becomes a candidate AI vs HR AI arms race, it’s likely a single personal introduction or nudge will be the competitive advantage that delivers you a break. 

Nigel: It’s a myth that everyone is using AI in its current LLM forms, and that you’re falling dangerously behind. There’s a lot of companies using that pressure to FOMO their way into wealth and unicornity (yes, new word). But realistically, the genie is out of the bottle and there is no way back.

You use AI whether you realise it or not. Harnessing algorithms and personal data has fuelled the growth of smartphones and the world wide web since 2010. Governments use ‘AI’ to do good and bad with data: Robodebt in Australia is easily re-characterised as an AI mess, where we left machines to automatically conclude the status of people in complex employment situations, with severe consequences. It’s everywhere.

Generationally, our youngest citizens seem pretty wary of the many AI ‘clankers’ (a nod to the pejorative term used to describe early drone robots in the Star Wars universe from 2005), and to be fair, face a lifetime of the unintended consequences of being able to fake, generate and bullshit almost anything online. Ask them how much they are enjoying doing job interviews Max Headroom style, with a bot judging them in or out.

We can learn from them. They want to know when it is real, and when it is AI. They are natural learners. They want to know how it works. That’s a good first step to embracing the technology, and the part it’s playing in our lives. Small steps with the day-to-day tools (co-pilots, drawing tools, etc), and understanding that the way your phone converts voice to text, is you making the best of using AI already.

Using this kind of tech to improve the position of people with accessibility issues to the mainstream is a heart-warming story. And trust me, as we all age and lose our eyesight and hearing, we’re going to enjoy the way AI might give it back to us.

Nigel: My favourite question in my day job at Thoughtworks is the very simple, “So, how did we get here?” It’s the best opener for so many situations: from a performance coaching moment with a staff member, to unravelling a technology snarl-up, to beginning a 5-year strategy for a major organisation. 

How we got here quite often sets the trajectory for where we go next. You can say it with raised eyebrows, a frown, a smile, with emphasis on the ‘so’ or the ‘here’. It’s a wonderful opening position. Even works with teenagers sometimes.

This question is a good way to trigger the ‘mechanic’ of curiosity, which is fairly natural for most people, but sometimes beaten down by the routine of daily life.

If you need a philosophical driver for burning some brain cycles being curious, I recommend reading or listening to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.