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

I spent my early twenties collecting careers like stamps. Architecture degree, music production, entrepreneurship—each pivot made perfect sense at the time, but from the outside it looked like I couldn't commit to anything.

The truth was simpler: I had no idea who I was, so how could I know what to do?

I discovered this wasn't just my problem. Almost everyone I knew—smart, capable people with good degrees—felt completely lost about their careers. We'd been taught how to get jobs, but nobody taught us how to figure out what work would actually fulfil us.

That realisation changed everything. I saw that the real problem wasn't a lack of opportunities or skills. It was that most career advice starts at step 10 when people like us were still stuck at step 1: understanding ourselves.

Now I'm building tools and communities to fix this:

TrueNorth: An AI-powered career coach that starts with self-discovery, not job listings

MidWeek: London events bringing together people navigating career uncertainty

Still Wandering: A newsletter documenting the messy reality of finding meaningful work

I work with people in their 20s and 30s who know they want something more from work but can't articulate what that is. People who've tried following conventional career paths but felt like they were wearing someone else's clothes.

My approach is simple: you can't build a meaningful career until you understand what meaning means to you. Everything else—the skills, the networking, the applications—comes after that.

If you're tired of career advice that assumes you already know what you want, let's talk.

Alex McCann

The CEO of Anthropic just predicted a "white-collar bloodbath."

50% of entry-level white-collar jobs eliminated within five years. Unemployment potentially hitting 10-20%.

And the data backs it up.

UK tech companies cut graduate roles by 46% last year. They're expecting another 53% drop by 2026. I've spoken to people who've sent 300 applications and heard back from maybe five.

What gets me is the disconnect.

The people creating this technology are openly warning about what's coming. They're the ones sounding the alarm. Meanwhile, most of the advice young people receive still assumes the old system works. Get good grades. Build your network. Tailor your CV.

That advice was already struggling. Now it feels like teaching someone to be a brilliant switchboard operator in 1995.

I don't pretend to know exactly what replaces the current system. The honest answer is that nobody does, including the people building the technology that's reshaping it.

But I'm fairly confident about one thing: the gap between what's happening and what people are being told is getting dangerous.

When the CEO of Anthropic is more worried about entry-level job destruction than most of the infrastructure designed to help people find work, something has gone wrong.

Alex  McCann

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

He built a 20,000-person community. It didn't make him feel any less alone.

Two years ago, Charlie Rogers and AJ . told me to read 🌀 David Spinks's book. He co-founded CMX, built one of the largest networks for community builders in the world, had a successful acquisition.

Childhood isolation had made him hypersensitive to connection. He was brilliant at reading rooms, exceptional at bringing people together. The pain-into-purpose playbook.

But when I asked if that purpose had healed the original wound, he said no. If anything, it distracted him from healing it.

He spent fifteen years building something successful while struggling with anxiety and negative self-talk the entire time.

He calls it dirty fuel versus clean fuel.

Dirty fuel is when you're working to fill a hole, driven by fear or shame or the need to prove you're enough. Clean fuel is when you're already whole, driven by curiosity and connection and the work itself. Both look identical from the outside, both produce real results, but one burns you out.

Finding meaning in your suffering is different from healing from it. You can build an entire career on the former without ever doing the latter.

Full interview on my Substack. Link in comments.

The CEO of LinkedIn just called five-year career plans "a little bit foolish."

His words: "when you know technology and the labor market and everything is moving beneath you," mapping out the next five years makes no sense. You're planning for a world that won't exist by the time you get there.

I think he's probably right.

But here's what's interesting.

The school system rewards planning. University admissions reward planning. Job interviews ask where you see yourself in five years, and there's a correct type of answer. The entire infrastructure of career advice is built around the assumption that you can plot a trajectory and follow it.

Now the CEO of the platform that hosts most professional networking is saying the premise is broken.

So what replaces it?

"Be adaptable" is true but useless. "Build transferable skills" assumes you know which skills won't be automated next year. "Follow your curiosity" works if you have the financial cushion to experiment, which most people don't.

The uncomfortable truth might be that we're in a transition period where the old frameworks have stopped working but the new ones haven't solidified yet.

Which is a difficult thing to tell someone who needs to make decisions about their career right now.

By 2026, one in five companies will have eliminated half their management layers.

Middle managers made up a third of all layoffs in 2023. Companies are advertising 42% fewer management positions than they were two years ago.

The theory is that AI can handle the coordination, the reporting, the communication that middle managers used to do. Flatter organisations, faster decisions, lower costs.

I've been thinking about what gets lost when you remove those layers.

Mentorship becomes a luxury. The people who translate strategy into action disappear. Someone has to notice when things aren't working and flag it before it becomes a disaster. Someone has to develop the next generation.

Deloitte found that fewer than 4 in 10 managers feel equipped for the people side of their jobs. Now there will be fewer of them, responsible for more people, with less time for the human elements that technology can't replicate.

There's a version of this that works out fine. Flatter organisations with better tools, more autonomy for individual contributors, less bureaucratic friction.

But I suspect what we'll mostly get is the cost savings without the investment in making the new structure work.

Fewer managers. Same expectations. Everyone stretched thin. Nobody with time to develop the people coming up behind them.

The generation best equipped to work with AI can't get hired.

Gen Z workers have the highest AI readiness of any generation: 22% score high on AI quotient measures, compared to 6% for Baby Boomers.

This makes intuitive sense. They grew up with the technology. They're more comfortable experimenting with it, more willing to integrate it into how they work.

And yet companies are systematically eliminating the entry-level positions that would let them into the workforce.

I keep coming back to how backwards this is.

The people most equipped to figure out how AI integrates into work are being locked out of work entirely. Meanwhile, the people least comfortable with the technology are the ones making decisions about how to deploy it.

Only 23% of organisations offered any AI training last year. Employees are mostly teaching themselves. The companies loudly declaring themselves "AI-forward" aren't investing in helping people learn how to use the technology. They're using AI as a justification for headcount reduction.

There's a version of this transition that could have gone differently. Where companies invested in training, brought in younger workers specifically for their comfort with the technology, built institutional knowledge about what works and what doesn't.

Instead we got the version where AI is primarily a cost-cutting story.

Eliminate junior roles. Expect remaining staff to figure it out on their own. Declare victory.

I don't know what happens when an entire generation is told their skills are needed but they're not allowed through the door.

55% of companies regret laying off workers for AI.

That number stopped me when I first saw it.

The pattern is this: companies fire people based on what AI might be able to do in the future. Then they discover the AI isn't ready yet. Then, rather than admit the mistake, they quietly rehire offshore at significantly lower salaries.

The prediction is that half of all AI-attributed layoffs will follow this exact pattern.

Here's what I think is happening.

AI will fundamentally change how companies operate. The type of work people do. The skills that matter. That part is real.

But we haven't figured out how to get there yet.

What this data reveals is that many companies are rushing the transition, making layoff decisions based on capabilities that don't exist, and then scrambling to cover the gap. They're optimising for the press release rather than the actual transformation.

The companies that get this right will be the ones that lay foundations first. That invest in understanding what AI can and can't do before restructuring around it. That treat the transition as a multi-year process rather than a single dramatic announcement.

2026 might be the year that separates the companies managing this transition intelligently from the ones who rushed it and are now quietly cleaning up the mess.

McK's Enterprises

Founder & Lead Brand Strategist

Brand Master Academy

Student

Majestic Branding for Mindset Coaches.

Founder & Lead Brand Strategist at McK's Enterprises. 

Everything we do in our Relentless Pursuit of Excellence, Leads the way to the Future of Thought. We do that by Empowering Performance Mindset Coaches to achieve Audacious Impact Goals and become Masters at their craft. We just happen to Create the Brand Strategies fuelling the Revolution.

Interested? 
DM me "LION" now.

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Alex McCann

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The Battle

Alex McCann

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Likes

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