You Won't See the Next Disruption Coming. Here's How to Futureproof Your Career Before It Arrives.
By: Jackie Ferguson, Founding Partner & Senior Advisor, ExecBrand Authority
Jackie Fergusion will be on our Futureproofing Your Career + Reinvention at Any Stage at our 7th Annual 2026 Summit for Women in Tech.
More than 20 years of my career happened before anyone would have called me a DEI expert, because that wasn't part of the job. I built my career by learning how a business runs from the inside, earning the trust of executives who needed someone reliable next to them, and solving whatever operational problem was in front of me that year. DEI came later, in July 2019, when I co-founded The Diversity Movement.
Within months, I was helping run that company through a global pandemic, an economy nobody had a playbook for and a moment that spotlighted the systemic inequality and injustice built into how this country works. The words "diversity, equity, and inclusion" entered boardroom vocabulary overnight. The Diversity Movement grew from a single professional development course into a full-service consultancy serving more than 100 client organizations, built almost entirely during conditions none of us could have anticipated.
In 2023, Workplace Options (WPO) acquired our company. Two years later, TELUS Health acquired WPO in a $500 million deal. Throughout these shifts, I continued to contribute content and thought-leadership to promote better workplaces and greater employee engagement.
Even as saying DEI out loud became a liability in some board rooms, nothing about the underlying work – employee belonging, equitable systems, psychological safety – had changed. The skill set underneath the label survived. I still explored how culture drives performance, but I now spoke in the language of employee engagement and wellbeing instead of diversity programming.
Employee wellbeing isn't going anywhere, which is one reason I've stayed close to that work. But I've also become a Founding Partner and Senior Advisor at ExecBrand Authority, building executive brand strategy, because that's where I see the market heading next. Trust in institutions keeps eroding, and how people search for who to trust is changing fast. Executive presence is becoming as important to a company's credibility as its balance sheet. This new business is less a reinvention than a reaction to a changing business environment, an awareness that has guided every shift in my career.
People rarely get to choose when they must pivot, and never when transformational technology is involved. Here's what I've learned about staying futureproof, instead of scrambling to catch up.
Reinvention isn't a young professional's problem
The same advice I give leaders about helping employees map their own career journeys applies to your own career: get specific about where you're headed, and revisit it on purpose instead of by accident. I pivoted into an entirely new discipline well into an established career, and I was a successful founder when I had to find a new vocabulary for work that hadn't changed at all. Reinvention showed up uninvited every time, and the choice was to adapt or fail. Resilience matters; it stays constant even when your career path changes direction.
The workplace under you will keep changing, whether you're ready or not
The physical workplace itself has shifted more since 2019 than most leaders like to admit. It will never again look like it did seven years ago, and pretending otherwise only delays the adjustment.
The location of work isn’t all that's shifted. AI is rewriting how the work itself gets done: which tasks deserve a person's judgment, how fast a deliverable moves from question to draft, and what a junior employee is expected to know. Early adopting teams redesigned their workflows around AI and are far ahead of teams still trying to layer AI onto existing roles and processes. Your career sits inside that same disruption, whether or not your title mentions AI.
The conditions you built your plan around, your industry's structure, your company's priorities, even the vocabulary your own expertise is spoken in, can shift before you notice. Futureproofing means building the habit of noticing a shift early enough to move with it.
Build a strategic plan for yourself, not just for your employer
Most professionals have never written a one-page plan for their own career the way they would for a product launch or a department budget. That's where to begin. A detailed plan names what you're good at, what's shifting in your market, what skills you're actively building right now, and what you'd do if your role, company, or industry changed without warning. Vague intentions won’t keep you steady in a bad quarter, but a concrete plan will.
Evaluate the plan on a schedule, not in a crisis
A plan you never revisit is a time capsule, not a strategy. Put a recurring quarterly review on your calendar, the same way a business reviews its numbers. Ask three questions every time: What has changed in the last 90 days? Does my plan still hold up against that change? What's one thing I need to start, stop, or adjust before the next review? The goal is to stay aware of what’s happening around you and have a plan in place that will help you adjust.
Stay in the know, on purpose, especially when the world feels heavy
The discipline it takes to lead well when the news cycle won't let anyone look away also applies to leading your own career. Being in the know is a practice, and most professionals let it happen by accident, noticing only what appears in their feed that week. Business trends, technology shifts, and world events, move together. A shift in interest rates changes hiring. A new AI capability changes what your job requires you to know a year from now. Block time every week to read outside your own function; keep a standing conversation with at least one person who sees your industry from a completely different perspective. That person may tell you things your own network won't. Manage your exposure so you stay informed but aren’t drained of the energy you need to act.
Know when it's your language that needs to change, not your expertise
This is the lesson that took me the longest to learn: the language used to describe the work and the work itself are not the same thing. While I wanted to keep talking about DEI, the better path was to separate the words from the work. My mission never stopped mattering, and to continue that work, I changed how I talked about it, who I talked about it with, and which parts I led with in a given room. I didn’t compromise my values. Language is a tool for being heard, and tools that stop working get replaced. Audit your own vocabulary regularly, and retire any polarizing terms before people stop listening.
Build your bench before you need it
The people who reinvent themselves again and again, don’t do it alone. They have a bench: mentors who are further along, peers who are going through the same shift, and people earlier in their careers who have a different perspective on what's actually changing. Build your bench before you need it. Mentor someone junior to you, even when you don't feel like you have time, and stay close to at least one person more senior who will tell you the truth. Your bench will keep reinvention from feeling like starting over.
The technology industry, in particular, doesn't reward standing still, and the last several years have made clear that business conditions, technological change, and world events can turn a career upside down within a single budget cycle. Futureproofing was never about predicting exactly what's coming. It's built from a plan you revisit, a practice of staying informed, a willingness to adjust your language before you're forced to, and a bench of people who'll tell you the truth. Helping other professionals build that same foundation is the work I do now.
Jackie Ferguson is an award-winning founder with three decades in business and 100-plus keynote stages. She is Senior Advisor and Founding Partner at ExecBrand Authority and continues her work in content and thought leadership at Workplace Options. Jackie wrote the bestselling The Inclusive Language Handbook and was named to the 2023 Inc. Female Founders 200 list.
Learn more about this year's Summit for Women in Tech, September 28-29, this year in Asheville, HERE!
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