Henley Centre for Leadership Learning Event: Can You Really Craft Your Way to the Top? The Promise and Limits of Job Crafting

What if the secret to career success is not finding the perfect job, but reshaping the one you already have? Job crafting offers an appealing proposition: by redesigning aspects of their work around their strengths, interests and ambitions, employees can create more meaningful careers, improve their performance and potentially accelerate their professional development. But how far can this approach really take you? And what happens when the next step in your career requires skills that cannot simply be worked around?

For leaders and employees alike, these questions raise an important dilemma. The freedom to reshape work can unlock motivation, creativity and opportunity, but career progression also depends on developing the expertise required to take on more demanding responsibilities. In technical professions, where specialist knowledge and professional judgement are essential, the limitations of individual choice become particularly apparent. Can people genuinely craft their way into more senior roles, or does there come a point when ambition must be matched by demonstrable capability?

This webinar brings together Professor Benjamin Laker, co-author of Job Crafting (MIT Press, 2024), and Harriet Taylor, Chief Architect at Capgemini, to explore the possibilities and boundaries of shaping one's career. Drawing on the research underpinning his book, endorsed by Jacqueline Brassey of McKinsey and Company and Professor Thomas Roulet of the University of Cambridge, Benjamin will examine how individuals can reshape their tasks, relationships and perceptions of work and what organisations must do to enable these changes to succeed.

Harriet will bring an industry perspective from Capgemini, the Paris-headquartered French multinational specialising in business and technology transformation. The group works with major corporations and public-sector organisations on complex transformation programmes spanning consulting, engineering, cloud technologies, cybersecurity, data and artificial intelligence. As a Chief Architect, Harriet brings first-hand experience of the technical expertise, continuous learning and professional judgement required to design and deliver sophisticated enterprise technology solutions.

Together, Benjamin and Harriet will examine whether job crafting can genuinely accelerate career progression, particularly when advancement requires capabilities that employees have yet to develop. They will consider where greater autonomy creates opportunities for growth, where specialist expertise places boundaries on individual choice and how leaders can help employees shape their careers without compromising the standards their organisations depend upon.

With artificial intelligence transforming professional roles and changing the skills organisations value, the discussion will also explore a question that reaches far beyond technical careers: if the requirements for professional success are constantly evolving, how much control do individuals really have over where their careers take them?

This webinar will be of interest to executives, managers, HR professionals, technology leaders and anyone seeking to understand how individuals can take greater ownership of their careers while developing the capabilities needed to progress.

This webinar will be held on 1 December 2026 at 12:00pm via Microsoft Teams and is open to all. To register for this event, please submit the booking request form here.

The event will be hosted by Dr Sinem Bulkan, Associate Professor in Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at Henley Business School and Henley Centre for Leadership Alumni Learning Event Organiser. You will have the chance to hear from our speakers as they illuminate the following learning outcomes:

• Understand how job crafting enables individuals to reshape their work around their strengths, interests and ambitions and its potential implications for career progression.
• Examine where job crafting reaches its limits, particularly in professions where specialist knowledge, technical competence and professional standards are essential.
• Explore how employees can use job crafting to develop new capabilities, rather than simply reorganising their responsibilities around existing strengths.
• Identify how leaders can support individual career aspirations while ensuring employees develop the skills and expertise required for organisational success.

Professor Benjamin Laker is Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School, University of Reading, where he has held a professorial chair since 2018. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Human Resource Management, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Vocational Behavior and Organizational Research Methods. Benjamin has translated findings from his research into 22 Harvard Business Review articles and three bestselling books: Too Proud to Lead (Bloomsbury, 2021), Closing the Service Gap (Financial Times, 2023) and Job Crafting (MIT Press, 2024).

Benjamin is Consulting Editor of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Associate Editor at The International Journal of Human Resource Management and the Journal of Business Research and Editorial Board member at Long Range Planning.

In 2025, Benjamin was appointed to a Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029 sub-panel. In 2026, he assumed the directorship of the Army Higher Education Pathway (AHEP), a major partnership between the British Army, Henley Business School and the University of Reading that provides undergraduate and postgraduate education in Leadership and Strategic Studies to serving army officers, supporting their professional development and progression into senior leadership roles.

Harriet Taylor is Chief Architect at Capgemini, the Paris-headquartered French multinational specialising in business and technology transformation. Founded in 1967, Capgemini operates in more than 50 countries, employed approximately 423,000 people at the end of 2025 and reported annual revenues of €22.5 billion that year.

Harriet graduated from the University of Kent with a first-class BSc in Physics, where she also received the university's Physics Prize. She began her career as a Developer at Oracle in 2013 before joining Capventis as a Software Engineer in 2016. In 2019, she joined Capgemini as an Integration Architect, progressing to Senior Integration Architect in 2020 and Managing Solution Architect in 2023. By 2026, she had been recognised by the Capgemini Architect Board as a Chief Architect (Architect Level Three).

Alongside her technical responsibilities, Harriet has completed Capgemini's Future Leaders programme and obtained the AWS Certified Security - Specialty qualification. She has contributed to mentoring, coaching and architecture training, including the Architecture Core Concepts and Unlocking Chief Architecture programmes. She is also involved in Capgemini's Women's Network and was featured in its 2021 Gender Pay Gap Report for her involvement in supporting women pursuing careers in technology.