Helping businesses deliver impact by enhancing their visibility and reputation | Founder of arco.

You'll spend roughly 80,000 hours of your life working. Most people give this decision almost no serious thought.They skip straight to applying. Hundreds of applications to roles they half-want, hoping something sticks. It's exhausting and it rarely works, because the problem is sequence. You can't find the right opportunity if you don't know what you're looking for. And you can't know what you're looking for without understanding yourself and the market you're entering.I've spent the last year researching why so many capable people feel lost about their careers. Hundreds of conversations, in-depth interviews, and a questionnaire study that confirmed the same pattern over and over: people make career decisions based on salary, status, and what seems reasonable, with almost no understanding of themselves.I'm building Rumbo to fix this. AI career coaching that starts with self-understanding. Structured assessments, a personal AI coach, and a clear plan for what comes next.I also write Still Wandering, a newsletter with 15,000+ subscribers exploring career confusion and the future of work.

Alex McCann

Microsoft just published the 40 jobs most resistant to AI. 

Roofers, cement masons, nursing assistants, plant operators, chefs. 

Only 3 out of 40 require a degree.

The other 37 can all be trained through apprenticeships or vocational routes.

Meanwhile, the UK sent £3.3 billion in apprenticeship levy funding back to the Treasury between 2019 and 2022. Employers couldn't figure out how to spend it. Plumbing apprenticeship starts have fallen 37% since 2021. 

Only 41% of apprentices who do start complete the programme. And only 8% of UK construction workers are under 25.

Germany has 342 recognised apprenticeship occupations and a system that's been working for over a century. The UK renamed its failing levy the "Growth and Skills Levy" and carried on.

Close to a million young people are currently not in education, employment, or training. The system funnelled them towards the kinds of work AI is now replacing and away from the kinds it can't touch. And the one mechanism that could reconnect them to those jobs, apprenticeships, returned £3.3 billion to the Treasury because nobody in the system could work out how to use it.

This is fixable. The jobs exist, the demand is enormous, and the training routes are well understood. Germany proved that decades ago. 

The failure is entirely in the plumbing of the system, not the people it's supposed to serve.

Alex  McCann

Founder of Rumbo | Re-thinking Traditional Career Advice and helping people find meaningful work | Writer at Still Wandering Newsletter

Today is one of the most important days of my life.

After 9 months of building, Rumbo is live.

And what an incredible journey it's been so far:

- Thousands of conversations with people who feel stuck
- Hundreds of iterations of the product
- A complete rebrand halfway through
- Viral content that reached millions
- Late nights, early mornings, moments of real doubt
- Beta users whose honest feedback changed the direction of the product entirely
- A waitlist of over 2,000 people
- Partnerships with some incredible organisations

There is an epidemic of career meaninglessness. Millions of people feel stuck, lost, or trapped in work that doesn't suit who they are.

The entire careers infrastructure is set up to help with the job-searching part: here are jobs, here are salaries, here's what's hiring, apply now. There are hundreds of tools for this, and they work fine once you have a direction. But the part that comes before all of that, the figuring-out-who-you-are part, has almost nothing.

I feel incredibly lucky to say that I've found work that feels meaningful and aligned to me: rethinking traditional career advice and helping people find meaningful work. I want to help more people find theirs.

That's what Rumbo is. A platform designed to help you better understand yourself, better understand the market, and make more informed career decisions.

It starts with a series of assessments and reports that build a picture of who you are: your personality, your interests, your skills, and the kinds of problems you're drawn to. From there, Rumbo helps you explore the market through the lens of what you've learned about yourself, and gives you the tools to make career decisions that are grounded in self-understanding rather than guesswork.

And this is just the beginning. We're shipping new features every month. What you see today is the foundation, and it's going to get significantly better over the coming weeks and months based on how people use it and what they tell us they need.

To everyone who has supported us on this journey so far, whether you've been reading the newsletter, sharing posts, filling out the waitlist, testing the beta, or just sending a message of encouragement when we needed it most: thank you. We're just getting started.

If you're struggling with career uncertainty, head to the link in comments to try it out.

The jobs your parents told you to avoid are the safest from AI.

Microsoft Research analysed 200,000 real Copilot conversations and ranked every job by how much of its core work AI could already do. The 40 most resistant roles were almost entirely trades: roofers, cement masons, nursing assistants, plant operators, chefs. Only 3 out of 40 require a degree.

And right now, across construction, engineering, plumbing, and electrical work, there are 106 job vacancies for every single apprenticeship place. The UK needs over a million additional construction workers by 2032, and by 2035, over a third of the current workforce will have retired. 

The government has pledged 1.5 million new homes by 2030, and there is nobody to build them.

Self-employed plumbers are earning £40,000 to £60,000. Gas engineers, £45,000 to £65,000. Electricians have just secured a three-year wage deal delivering roughly 13.8% in cumulative pay increases through to 2028. These aren't ceiling figures. These are normal earnings in a market where demand massively outstrips supply.

Meanwhile, the average UK graduate earns £26,000 in their first job, takes 5.6 months to find it, and 700,000 are now claiming jobseeker's allowance.
We built an entire education system around the idea that university was the path to a good career and trades were what you did if you didn't have other options. That hierarchy is collapsing. 

The question of what kind of work to pursue has never been more important, and the old signals people relied on are increasingly pointing in the wrong direction.

If you're trying to figure out where you fit, that's what we've been building Rumbo to help with. Waitlist link in comments.

2018: Engineering intern. No idea what I wanted to do.

2026: Launching a platform to help people find meaningful work.

Most people don't know how I got here. 

I've been writing about careers and the future of work for the last six months, but it occurred to me that I've never properly explained why I care about this so much. So here's my journey:

2018: Interned as an engineer. Knew in weeks it wasn't for me. 
2019: Switched to music production. The opposite of everything I'd studied. 2022: Graduated. Realised I didn't want to be a musician either. 
2023: Started a marketing agency. It failed. 
2024: Creative director at a startup. Learnt a lot. 
2025: Hired a career coach and spent 7 months travelling around Latin America with 12 friends.

When I got back from the trip I started writing about career confusion and thinking about a solution to the problem I kept seeing. 

The writing took off...The newsletter gained over 17,000 subscribers and millions of views, and we started building the Rumbo platform.

When I reflected on my own experience, on the career advice my peers had received, and on how little of it had been useful for any of us, the same thing kept coming up. The people I knew who felt stuck weren't lazy or unambitious.

They just hadn't been helped to figure out what kind of work would suit who they are. And the infrastructure that's supposed to help with that wasn't designed to answer that question.

I wanted to figure out if there was a way to scale high-quality career advice and make it accessible to everyone.

So that's why we built Rumbo. A platform designed to help you go through the process of better understanding yourself, better understanding the market, validating the assumptions you have about your own strengths and interests, and making smarter career decisions.

We're launching on Monday, and I'm feeling a beautiful mix of terrified and excited to show the world what we've been building for the last nine months. 

If any of this resonates, you can sign up to the waitlist at the link in comments.

People will spend 6 months job hunting and 0 hours observing themselves.

They'll rewrite their CV twelve times, apply to hundreds of jobs, scroll job boards every evening, and still have no idea what time of day they think best, which tasks they avoid without realising, or what they're doing when they forget to check their phone.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD, a neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments, calls this "self-anthropology." For 24-48 hours, you treat your own life like a field study, jotting down everything you notice: when you feel engaged, when you feel flat, what decisions you're making on autopilot, why your day is structured the way it is.

I've had hundreds of conversations with people stuck in career uncertainty over the past two years, and this pattern comes up constantly. Someone will tell me they want a career that feels meaningful, that gives them autonomy, that uses their strengths. Then I'll ask them what their strengths are, or when they last felt properly engaged in a piece of work, and there's a long silence. They've spent months thinking about what they want from a career and almost no time observing what they're like as a person.

This is the problem we're building Rumbo to solve. The platform walks you through a structured process of self-understanding before you ever look at a job listing, helping you map out what holds your attention, what drains you, what you value, and how you think. Because the best career decision you can make starts with knowing who you're making it for.

If you're stuck in career uncertainty, you can join the waitlist in the comments.

What happens after you find your life's work.

Much of what I write about is concerned with the searching, the confusion, the uncertainty of not knowing what you want to do. But it occurred to me recently that for the first time in my life, I feel like I'm on the other side of that process, as much as anyone can be.

My friend and former coach Charlie Rogers is in a similar place. He spent five years writing his debut book on life design, drawing on his background as an elite triathlete and years of coaching people through career transitions. It just hit number one in its category. We went for a two-hour walk through the Surrey Hills last month and recorded the whole thing, catching up and exploring what the process of building looks like once you've found the thing you want to commit yourself to.

We covered a lot:

- What Cal Newport's definition of deep work misses

- The role that movement and environment play in your best thinking

- What happens to your friendships when you start building something ambitious and public

- Where real confidence comes from when you're doing something new

But the thing I took away most from our walk was how similar both of our journeys have been in shape. Neither of us planned any of this. We both just kept showing up, kept writing, kept talking to people, and at some point the work revealed itself. There was no moment of grand clarity. Just a slow accumulation of evidence that pointed in a direction, and eventually enough confidence to follow it.

There's something that feels symbolic about publishing this a week before we launch Rumbo. Charlie was there at the very beginning of this journey. He was the coach I hired when I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, and those sessions are where the seed of everything I've been building since first took shape. It feels right to mark that before the next chapter starts.

Full conversation is on Still Wandering, link in comments. And if you're still in the figuring-it-out phase, we've been building Rumbo to help with exactly that. Waitlist link is there too.

"Have you tried wanting it more?"

This is the core of most hustle culture advice. Work harder, network more, wake up earlier, grind.

And discipline obviously matters, you can't build anything worthwhile without it. But this advice neglects something fairly fundamental: a lot of the people I talk to don't have a motivation problem, they have a direction problem. 

They're perfectly willing to work hard, they just have no idea what to work hard on, and being told to try harder doesn't help with that.

The hustle crowd and the anti-hustle crowd are mostly having two completely different conversations. One group found the thing that feels like play to them and can't understand why everyone else isn't just doing that.

The other group is burnt out from years of grinding on something that was never right for them in the first place, and they've concluded that ambition itself is the problem. They're both partly right, which is why the debate never goes anywhere.

The people I know who work the hardest barely think of it as work. They found something where the work stopped feeling like work, and everything that looks like discipline from the outside just followed. The hustle was a byproduct of finding the right thing, and the burnout was a byproduct of forcing the wrong one.

Spend less time forcing yourself through the grind and more time figuring out what you'd grind on willingly.

"That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult."

A 12-year longitudinal study of 1,775 people backs this up. Researchers found that adolescents whose careers matched their early interests were significantly more satisfied with their jobs over a decade later. Early interests also predicted degree attainment, income, and occupational prestige.

The part that should concern anyone in the wrong career: interest changes during adulthood were largely irrelevant. It was the original interest levels, the stuff that was already there when you were young, that did the predicting.

Most people lose access to that data. They lose it slowly, through a system that rewards conformity and punishes deviation, and by the time they're sitting in a careers office at twenty-one, the most useful information they have about themselves has been buried under a decade of optimising for grades, social approval, and whatever their parents thought a respectable career looked like.

Harvard researchers have found that children's curiosity drops significantly by the fourth or fifth grade. Teachers claim to value creativity and independent thinking, but research shows they reward obedience and conformity. Creative subjects get labelled as electives, treated as less serious than maths or science, and the message lands.

The kid who spent hours building worlds out of cardboard boxes becomes an adult who says "I'm not really a creative person."

Your childhood contains some of the most honest career data you have, because it formed before the filtering started. Before you learned to perform competence in subjects you didn't care about. Before you absorbed the message that art is a hobby and finance is a career.

I wrote about four ways to use that data in this week's article.

Link in comments.

Microsoft's head of AI wants you to panic.

He's also selling you the product that's supposed to replace you.

Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times last month that accounting, legal, marketing, and project management will all reach "human-level performance" from AI within 18 months. Every task that involves sitting at a computer, he said, will be fully automated.

It's worth remembering who's talking here. This is the CEO of Microsoft AI, speaking to the press about how powerful Microsoft's AI products are going to be. He wants businesses to buy Copilot licences, and the pitch is simple: adopt this or get left behind. 

The incentive to make it sound dramatic is enormous, and the gap between "AI can assist with parts of most white-collar tasks" and "all white-collar work will be automated in 18 months" is the gap between a useful tool and a headline designed to sell subscriptions.

That said, the underlying trend is probably accurate, but these wild predictions are largely just a marketing tactic. The nature of knowledge work is changing quickly, and the skills that got people hired five years ago are becoming less valuable in ways that are hard to ignore. 

Entry-level roles are shrinking across tech, legal, and finance. Graduates are entering a job market that looks fundamentally different from the one they were prepared for, and the pace of that shift is accelerating whether Suleyman's 18-month prediction lands or not.

What concerns me is that the conversation stops at the headline. People are being told from every direction that the world of work is transforming, but almost nobody is helping them figure out what to do about it. The anxiety is everywhere. The guidance on how to navigate it, how to understand what kind of work suits you when the landscape keeps shifting underneath you, barely exists.

That's what we've spent the last year building. It's called Rumbo, and it launches on the 16th. If you're dealing with career uncertainty right now, you can sign up to the waitlist at the link in comments.

You'll spend 80,000 hours of your life working.

Most people spend under 80 deciding what to do.

That's 0.1%.

Pick a degree at 17 based on what you were good at in school. Apply for graduate jobs in a vaguely related field. Take the first offer that pays enough to cover rent. Move to the next thing that pays slightly more. Ten years pass, and the sequence of decisions made sense individually, but nobody planned it. Nobody sat down at any point and seriously worked through what they were building towards or why.

If you spent just 1% of your career, around 800 hours, thinking seriously about what work suits you, what you're good at, what problems interest you, and what the market will pay for, it would be the most valuable investment you ever made. 800 hours spread across a few years is less than an hour a day. For most people that's less time than they spend on their phone.

Only 17% of British workers say they love their job. 69% of people considering a career change feel they lack the skills to make one. One in three workers over 30 already feel it's too late. These aren't motivation problems. These are people who never had the time, the tools, or the structure to figure out what they were aiming for in the first place.

We spend more time choosing a car than choosing a career, and then wonder why so many people end up somewhere they never intended to be. 

That's what we're building Rumbo to help with. Link to the waitlist in comments.

Renters aged 18-25 now spend 50% of take-home pay on rent.

In London, 12 boroughs are above half. Every single borough exceeds the 40% threshold that financial advisers consider the outer limit of affordability.
Last week I wrote about how homeownership has shaped our relationship to work. The UK is obsessed with owning property, and that obsession structures career decisions in ways most people never think about.

A lot of people were quick to point out that renting isn't much better. Fair point. So I thought I should do a comparison.

The monthly costs are pretty close. Hamptons found the average mortgage repayment is £1,328 and the average rent is £1,356. In London, renting is actually cheaper by about £115 a month. The costs are similar, but there are clear differences in the career implications of each.

Owning a home means building an asset, which is why people do it. But it also ties you to a location and commits you to a payment that demands a specific salary for 25 years. If a job opportunity comes up in another city, you can't just take it. If you want to step back and retrain, you still need to cover the mortgage. 

You can't easily downsize, and if the boiler goes or the roof leaks that's your problem. Homeowners spend £1,200 to £2,500 a year on maintenance alone. The number taking in lodgers rose 89% between 2021 and 2024 because a lot of people need help covering the costs. That's a small business on top of your day job.

Renting means you aren't building anything. But you can move cities for the right role. You can take a pay cut for work that interests you more without worrying about defaulting on a 25-year commitment. If something breaks, your landlord deals with it. You aren't managing a property on top of managing your career. That frees up space to make decisions about work without a mortgage shaping every one of them.

I'm being purposefully broad here. Plenty of homeowners feel settled and secure, and plenty of renters are stressed about rent increases and never knowing where they'll be living in a year. It's never that simple. But when I think about what each option does to your relationship with work, renting carries less weight even if it builds less wealth.

I'm exploring this more on Still Wandering. Link in comments.

The single best accelerant for career growth is slowly disappearing from companies.

Mentorship. And I don't mean the formal kind where HR pairs you with someone you meet twice and never speak to again. I mean the informal, everyday version where a more experienced person shows you how things actually work. How to handle a difficult client. How to read the room in a meeting you've only just walked into. How to recover when something goes wrong.

That kind of mentorship has always depended on proximity to people with more experience than you. And those people are being cut at a remarkable pace. Korn Ferry surveyed 15,000 workers across 10 countries in late 2024 and found that 44% of Americans said their company had removed managerial levels in the previous year. The corporate world calls it "unbossing." Zuckerberg made it famous when he cut thousands of roles at Meta.

I get the logic. Too many organisations had layers of people approving other people's approvals, and flattening those structures often makes companies faster and leaner. I'm not arguing we should keep bloated hierarchies for the sake of tradition.

But I think we're underestimating what disappears alongside them. 83% of Gen Z workers say a workplace mentor is important for their career, yet only 52% report having one. Across all ages, 76% of professionals say mentorship matters, but only 37% have a mentor. The demand keeps growing while the supply is being restructured out of existence.

And it compounds. People who never receive proper mentorship become the managers who don't know how to give it. The knowledge that used to transfer naturally, through years of working alongside someone more experienced, gets thinner with every round of cuts.

I don't have a clean answer for what replaces the old model. But I think we need to start having the conversation, because right now the focus is entirely on efficiency, and almost nobody is asking what we're losing alongside it.

The standard career reward for being good at your job is to stop doing it and start managing other people who do it.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to interview Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer. When he arrived in 2023, he found 87,000 employees, twelve layers of management, and a 1,362-page rulebook. Five signatures to replace a pump. As he told Business Insider: 

'We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy.

He spent the next two years collapsing the structure. Twelve layers to six. Management positions roughly halved. Most of those people are still at the company, using their expertise rather than approving things.

Bayer is extreme, but the pattern is everywhere. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people who become managers in the UK have received no formal management training. There are 2.4 million of them. 

They call them "accidental managers." 28% of employees have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager, and half of all employees who rate their manager as ineffective plan to leave within the year.

The OECD estimates this costs UK employers approximately £84 billion a year. If the UK matched Germany's management capability, that gap could be worth £127 billion to the economy.

We treat management as a reward. It's a completely different skill set, and we keep being surprised when people who were never trained to do it turn out to be struggling.

57% of UK workers plan to quit this year.

Most of them won't.

They'll think about it on Sunday evening, forget about it by Tuesday, and repeat the cycle for another six months. I've spoken to hundreds of people stuck in this loop, and the patterns are remarkably consistent. 

Here are 5 signs it might be time.

1. You've stopped learning anything. You could do your job on autopilot and you have been for months. Hays found that limited development is now the number one reason people are unhappy at work, cited by 48% of dissatisfied employees. When growth disappears, resentment fills the gap pretty quickly.

2. You constantly find yourself arguing for your job. When someone asks how work is going, you lead with the salary, the benefits, the stability.

3. Your best thinking happens outside of work. You have creativity and focus for side projects, hobbies, conversations with friends. Then you sit at your desk and something switches off.

4. You're performing a version of yourself. There's a growing gap between who you are at work and who you are everywhere else, and maintaining it takes more effort than the actual job. You've learned to say the right things in meetings, care about the right metrics, laugh at the right jokes.

5. You can describe what you hate with perfect clarity but go blank when someone asks what you'd do instead. This is the most common thing I hear. People will talk for twenty minutes about everything wrong with their current situation and then have nothing when you ask what they want.

If you recognised yourself in three or more of these, it's probably worth investigating properly. 

I wrote a longer piece on how to think through the decision to quit, with a framework for understanding your data and your risk capacity. 

Link in comments.

957,000 young people in the UK are not in work, education or training.

That's almost one in seven 16 to 24 year olds.

Youth unemployment has gone from 11% to 15% since 2022. The Bank of England's Chief Economist told parliament last week that rising employer costs are making it harder for young people to get a foothold, and most of the increase is coming from young people who are actively searching for work rather than dropping out of the labour market entirely.

The typical policy response to this kind of thing is more careers guidance, and on paper the UK has that. A short skills assessment, a list of career suggestions, some CV workshops.

But a list of directions is useless if you haven't figured out what you're looking for, and a five-minute quiz doesn't get anyone closer to that. A study published this week by FlexJobs found that 43% of people are trying to change career fields this year, and the problem for most of them is that they haven't defined the role they want or understood how their skills translate. 

They have plenty of options and no framework for choosing between them.
The support system is still built around the same model it's been built around for decades: show people what's available, help them write a CV, point them towards employers. 

That made sense when career paths were more linear and the question was which door to walk through. 

It makes much less sense when most people's problem is that they don't know which building they want to be in. This is exactly the problem we build Rumbo to solve.

Humans are good at one thing above all else...

Worrying.

Christopher Columbus calculated the world would end in 1658. The Cold War gave us a Doomsday Clock that has never been more than 17 minutes from midnight. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we had Y2K within a decade, then climate catastrophe, then the Singularity.

We evolved to scan for threats, and for good reason: the ancestors who worried about the rustling in the bushes survived, and the ones who didn't, didn't. The snakes and tigers are largely gone, but the wiring remains.

Right now, in my world, that wiring is pointed squarely at AI.

The story I hear in almost every conversation goes like this: AI destroys jobs, without jobs humans lose purpose, without purpose society collapses. It's a tidy narrative, and it maps perfectly onto our appetite for catastrophe.

But the data so far tells a different story. The WEF projects a net gain of 78 million jobs globally by 2030, workers using AI save an average of 7.5 hours per week according to LSE research, and 60% of jobs that existed in 2018 did not exist in 1940. 

Meanwhile, the CEOs building this technology fundamentally cannot agree on what's coming: one predicts half of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear, while another says that's nonsense based on everything history tells us.

I've spoken to hundreds of people about career confusion over the past year, but I would not bet on myself to crack a question that has the people building AI at odds with each other.

What I will say is this: things have historically worked out well because people worked to make them work out well. The agricultural revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, every major transition required labour laws, education reform, retraining, and decades of deliberate effort. None of it happened passively.

I wrote about this in more detail this week. Link in comments.

1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate roles.

That's the UK job market right now.

The ISE recorded the highest number of applications per job since they started tracking the data in 1991. 

And the response from the careers industry has been predictable: more CV workshops, more interview prep, more LinkedIn optimisation tips. All of it assumes you already know what you want.


I spent three years studying music production because I had no idea what I wanted and it seemed like the opposite of engineering (which is what my teachers told me to do). I then started a marketing agency, watched it fail and learnt loads, got a job as a creative director to save money, and eventually hired a career coach because I was still lost. 

I was 24 before anyone asked me a useful question about what kind of work would suit my personality, after A-levels, a degree, an internship, and three different career attempts.

I've spent this last year talking to hundreds of people in similar positions, and the Deloitte 2025 Gen Z survey confirms what I keep hearing: 89% of young workers consider purpose important to their job satisfaction, but only 6% say reaching a leadership position is their primary career goal. 

These are people who want meaningful work and have no idea how to find it, entering a job market where the World Economic Forum estimates 39% of existing skill sets will be outdated by 2030.

Careers are long. These are strategic decisions with decades of consequences, and the entire support system treats them like tactical ones. 

There is almost nothing that helps you understand what kind of work suits how your brain works, what problems you'd find worth solving for ten years, or which growing industries match your particular strengths. The stuff that determines whether those 80,000 hours feel like something you chose or something that happened to you.

That's why we're building Rumbo. It's a career coaching platform that starts with self-understanding, helping you figure out what kind of work fits your personality, your strengths, and how you think, before you start applying anywhere. 

We're launching soon and the waitlist is in the comments.

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