Licia Dewing

Career Strategist

My approach to career strategy is designed to help you cut through the noise, clarify what truly matters, and take confident action toward work that fits who you are now. I help you move forward with a strategy rooted in clarity, strength, and purpose.

Career Strategy that gets you unstuck, clear, and moving forward with purpose.

It's never too late to start and If you’re ready , Book a complimentary Career Strategy Connect.

How to Stay Relevant in Your Career When AI Is Changing Work

I was talking to Andrew, a recruiter, recently about what he's seeing in hiring right now. His observation stuck with me: CVs that read beautifully. Polished language, confident claims, all the right keywords. And then in the interview, none of it holds up.

That's the shift AI has brought to job hunting. Everyone now has access to the same tools to write a great CV, a great LinkedIn headline, a great cover letter. Which means the CV isn't what sets you apart anymore.

So here's the real question underneath all the AI-and-jobs headlines: how do you remain valuable when everyone has access to the same tools?

That's not a question about prompts or productivity hacks. It's a career strategy question, and it's one I think about constantly with my clients right now.

1. Don't confuse polished with credible

AI can make your CV look impressive in a matter of minutes. It can smooth your language, tighten your bullet points, and make an average role sound like a leadership stretch.

What it can't do is manufacture the capability behind it.

Recruiters like Andrew are catching on fast. Polish is no longer the differentiator, it's practically the baseline now. What gets you through the next round is whether you can back up what's on the page, in an interview, in a case study conversation, in the way you talk about your own decisions and trade-offs.

Polished gets you noticed. Credible gets you hired.

2. Your authentic voice is becoming more valuable

Here's the paradox worth sitting with: when everyone can generate professional-sounding language, generic professionalism becomes less distinctive, not more.

If your LinkedIn posts, your CV and your interview answers could belong to anyone, you're going to disappear into a very crowded, very polished middle.

Your actual perspective, the specific way you see a problem, the opinions you've earned through experience, the language you naturally use, is now one of your only real points of differentiation. That's uncomfortable if you've spent years trying to sound "professional" rather than sounding like yourself. But it's where the value now sits.

3. Build transferable Career Capital

This is where I want to introduce a concept I use with clients: Career Capital.

Career Capital is what you carry with you from role to role, sector to sector, organisation to organisation. It isn't your job title, and it isn't even your CV. It's the compounding asset you build over the course of your working life, made up of six parts:

Knowledge – what you know and can apply
Identity – how clearly you understand and can articulate who you are professionally
Visibility – whether the right people know what you're capable of
Social – the strength and breadth of your professional relationships
Reputation – what people say about you when you're not in the room
Opportunity – your access to the roles, projects and rooms that move you forward

AI tools can help you communicate parts of this. They cannot build it for you. Career Capital is accumulated through the work you do, the relationships you invest in and the reputation you earn, none of which can be automated.

The people who stay relevant aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who've been quietly compounding Career Capital for years, often without ever naming it as such.

4. Stay outside your professional bubble

One of the things Andrew said that I keep coming back to: some of the best career advice he's seen people receive came from mentors who weren't in HR, and often weren't even in their industry.

There's a reason for that. When everyone around you shares your context, your assumptions go unchallenged. You start optimising within a narrow frame, what's normal in your function, your sector, your level, and lose sight of how things look from outside it.

Deliberately staying in conversation with people outside your professional bubble keeps your thinking honest. It's often where the most useful challenge to your assumptions comes from.

5. Say yes strategically

I'm not telling you to say yes to everything. That's a fast route to burnout and a diluted career.

Saying yes strategically means staying open to experiences that stretch your capability or your perspective, even when they don't obviously map onto your current job title. The cross-functional project. The industry panel. The mentoring relationship where you're not sure who's learning more.

These are rarely the opportunities that show up in a job description. They're the ones you have to notice and choose for yourself.

6. Work ON your career

Most people work in their career full-time and never step back to work on it.

Build in deliberate space, a quarterly hour, a proper end-of-year review, whatever rhythm suits you, to honestly assess:

your relevance in your field right now
the skills you're building versus the ones quietly going out of date
the strength of your key relationships
your visibility to the people who matter
the opportunities coming toward you, and the ones you're not yet positioned for

This isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between drifting through your career and directing

7. Don't wait for your employer to develop you

Your employer has a role to play in your development. Training budgets, stretch projects, mentoring programmes are all useful, all worth asking for.

But your employer's priority is the organisation, not your career. That's not cynicism, it's just how the relationship works. Which means if you're waiting for someone else to hand you your next skill, your next opportunity or your next chapter, you could be waiting a long time.

Your career belongs to you. Nobody else is going to strategise it on your behalf.