When American newspapers began cutting staff, the journalists who lost their jobs didn’t all describe the loss in the same way. Some said they could not see themselves doing anything other than journalism. Others described the work in parts: interviewing, writing, taking a complicated subject and making it clear to someone with no particular reason to care.

Both groups had loved the job, but only one group went on to find work that felt like it.

Anyone choosing a career now, whether as a journalist, a consultant or a university professor is committing to something they cannot fully describe five years out. AI has made the substance of a job much harder to predict, and a title that survives the decade intact may by then involve very little of the work it does today.

Careers advisers have responded with a version of the instruction those journalists arrived at the hard way. Do not say you want to be a lawyer, say you want to work on social justice, or on the terms by which founders keep control of what they build. Do not say you want to be a banker, say you want a hand in how climate projects get financed, or in how a family business survives its second generation. 

The advice has circulated for a few years with very little behind it. There is now evidence. 

What INSEAD And Wharton Found When 72 Journalists Lost Their Jobs

Winnie Jiang, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, and Amy Wrzesniewski, the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor at the Wharton School, went looking for people who had just lost the job they expected to hold for the rest of their lives. They found 72 of them, all journalists at American newspapers, all laid off or recently departed from an industry that had been contracting for years. They interviewed them across two waves over five months, and spoke to 22 other people besides.

Journalism was chosen deliberately. It was an occupation in severe decline, and one that the people tended to describe as the most meaningful thing about them. If the loss of an occupation reveals anything about how careers are held together, it would show up here.

The two waves of interviews were deliberate. Returning allowed Jiang and Wrzesniewski to see whether the accounts held, and whether the way someone had made sense of the collapse early on had any bearing on what they did next.

Meaning Fixedness: Why Some Careers Survive Occupational Decline

Jiang and Wrzesniewski published the study in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2023, and gave the difference between the two accounts a name. They called it meaning fixedness: the degree to which a person binds what their work means to the particular setting where they happen to be doing it.

Both patterns came with their own emotions and their own behaviour. Those who held the meaning of their work as fixed acted to persist in journalism, in the hope that the occupation could be restored. The flexible group had noticed that interviewing and writing were needed in places that had never printed a newspaper.

Why “I Want To Make A Difference” Is Not A Career Goal

The journalists who moved did not talk about making a difference, or serving the public, or telling stories that matter. They named things they could do. Interviewing. Writing. Taking a complicated subject and making it clear to a reader with no particular reason to care. Those are components of a craft, precise enough to look for in a job advertisement that never mentions journalism anywhere.

A cause tells a candidate where to look. A skill is what they offer when they get there.

Job, Career Or Calling: What A Job Title Actually Predicts

Amy Wrzesniewski established something years earlier that makes the job title look an even weaker guide than the journalism study suggests. With Clark McCauley of Bryn Mawr College, Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania and Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College, whose book The Paradox of Choice was still some years off, they asked people whether they experienced their work as a job, a career or a calling, expecting the answers to sort by occupation.

They surveyed 196 employees across two work sites, then looked at the most uniform group in the sample: 24 administrative assistants at one university, doing near-identical work for identical pay. Describing the study to Yale’s president Peter Salovey in 2022, Wrzesniewski recalled what that subset showed.

About a third saw the work as a job. About a third saw it as a career, something to advance through. About a third saw it as a calling. The ones who experienced it as a calling were more satisfied with the work and with their lives, and missed fewer days.

Speaking to NPR, she said that people divide this way, “regardless of the type of work they do”.

The job title told you almost nothing about what the work meant to the person holding it. Two people in the same role were having different experiences of their working lives, and no amount of information about the role itself would have let you predict which was which. 

But if a calling is the most satisfying way to hold a job, why did journalism, which was plainly a calling for almost everyone in the 2023 study, leave so many of them stranded? Wrzesniewski’s answer, drawn from research on burnout in demanding professions, is that a calling can be narrated in two ways. 

Some people hold it as an identity already achieved, along the lines of being a physician who saves lives. Others hold it as something they are always trying to get better at and will never finish. Under identical conditions, the second group proves the hardier, because a person failing daily to be the thing they have declared themselves to be cannot keep it up.

Job Crafting: Reshaping A Role Before You Lose It

Amy Wrzesniewski is best known for a related idea, named with Jane Dutton of the University of Michigan in 2001. Job crafting describes how people redraw the boundaries of their own roles, changing the tasks they take on, the relationships they build and the way they understand what the job is for.

Job crafting came out of a study of hospital cleaners. Asked how skilled their work was, the sample split. One group said it was just cleaning, much like what anyone does at home. The other described adjusting the timing and the materials they used to suit the patients in a particular room, forming relationships with nurses so they could do so, and walking elderly visitors back through the hospital to their cars, which their job description explicitly forbade.

Asked what their role was, the first group gave their technical job title. The second described themselves as ambassadors for the hospital.

Same job description, same pay, two different jobs. It is the same mechanism at work in the journalism study. Someone who has spent years reshaping a role around the parts that matter to them already knows which parts those are. The sorting has been done in advance, rather than in the fortnight after a redundancy notice.

Why AI Breaks The Traditional Career Path

Winnie Jiang’s more recent work at INSEAD looks at how people change occupation, and what has happened to the ways they used to do it. She describes transitions that were once institutionalised becoming uninstitutionalised. Moving from journalism to law meant a law degree and a qualifying exam. Moving from banking to baking meant an apprenticeship or a course. The steps were public, and anyone could see what they involved before committing to them.

Much of that has gone. Jiang’s argument is that AI and geopolitical uncertainty have made a safe next step hard to identify at all, and that the anxiety this produces falls on people who have done nothing wrong. Someone who has fixed on a particular job has no way of knowing whether it will still be that job by the time they get there. Someone who knows which parts of the work they want has a better chance of recognising them wherever they turn up.

Jiang notes one consolation. Where career choices have long been bound up with family expectation and the promise of stability, the collapse of the safe route may free younger people to do work they actually want. When nothing is guaranteed, the respectable option loses some of its pull.

The Question To Ask Before Choosing A Career

None of which makes the advice easy to act on. Organisations recruit into roles they have scoped and budgeted, and they advertise them by title. The title still has to be won, but what changes is the reason for wanting it, and the range of titles that will do.

Wrzesniewski, who by 2022 had taught university students for twenty-seven years and heard back from them long after they left, gives a related warning. The ones who return to her in real trouble, unable to sustain their motivation, are those who paid too little attention to what the job would involve day to day. The firm’s name, the calibre of its people, the status of having won the position: all of it, in her phrase, “burns off pretty quickly”. A recruiter who talks up how exciting it is to belong, while saying little about what you would actually do, she treats as a red flag.

Jiang and Wrzesniewski set out to study loss rather than ambition. What they found was that the people who came through it had already separated what they cared about from the place where they had been doing it. Some did that deliberately over years. Others had never thought about it, and were left holding an identity with nowhere to put it.

Which is why the question to put to anyone choosing a career has never really been what do you want to be. If the job disappeared tomorrow, which parts of it would you go looking for somewhere else?

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