Why self-efficacy matters more than ever in the future world of work

As our working lives increase, Dr Naeema Pasha looks at what makes longer careers sustainable beyond skills

I’ve spent over a decade looking at what determines whether someone thrives in their career, and it isn't a skills taxonomy. It's confidence. Specifically, self-efficacy: whether someone believes they're capable of doing the thing in front of them.

When I spoke about this on the Reading Ahead podcast recently, I shared the story of a student I worked with who went on placement at IBM. Before she went, she said that she never imagined she could be someone who worked somewhere like that. When she came back, she said something that's stayed with me ever since: "I can't believe I am now — I could call myself an IBM'er." Nothing about her skills had changed overnight. What changed was her sense of who she was allowed to become.

And as all workers look at how to sustain long and healthy careers, the issue of self-belief will become even more important. This move away from just focusing on reskilling was a key topic of conversation at our recent World of World conference and a core theme tackled in my white paper ‘A 100 Year Career’.

Alongside skills and experience, long-term workforce sustainability depends on organisations helping employees build and maintain multiple forms of capital together: health, financial security, relationships, purpose and psychological capacity.

Because careers do not age evenly. A person can be thriving professionally while becoming depleted physically. They can possess considerable intellectual and social capital while having surprisingly little financial resilience. They can continue to accumulate expertise and reputation while relationships, health or a sense of meaning are being eroded by the effort required to sustain the career itself. These forms of capital also are not accessed or accumulated equally. Gender, race, class background, caring responsibilities, health, family resources, and organisational opportunity all shape what people can build and what they are required to spend simply to remain in the workforce.

People are working longer — not always by choice — and that changes how we think about identity, health and reinvention across a career, not just at its start.

We talk endlessly about career success. But success on whose terms — the employer's, the CV's, or the person's own sense of who they're becoming?

For further insights, listen to the Reading Ahead podcast or read the A 100 Year Career white paper.