You’re Not Lost. You’re in the Middle.

When people talk about technological change, the story is usually told in clean phases.

A breakthrough appears. Companies adopt it. Productivity rises. New industries form.

What gets skipped is the part most people actually live through.

The messy middle. The phase we explore in Open to Work.

Careers used to feel more predictable than they do now. Titles defined what you did. Progress looked like a ladder. If you developed expertise and kept performing, the path forward was usually visible.

That model has been evolving for a while, but AI is accelerating the shift.

Ten years ago, the average job changed about 25 percent in terms of the skills required to do it. By 2030, that number is expected to reach roughly 70 percent.

That statistic is easy to misinterpret. It doesn’t mean most jobs disappear. It means the work inside them keeps getting reassembled. Tasks move around. New capabilities become expected. Parts of the job that once required expertise become automated or assisted.

From where we sit at LinkedIn, you can already see this happening across industries. The titles often stay the same, but the actual work behind them evolves faster than people expect.

Living through that kind of shift rarely feels orderly.

A lot of the conversations I have with professionals right now carry the same underlying question: If the work is changing this quickly, what should I be doing differently?

That’s what we mean in the book when we talk about the messy middle.

It’s the phase where organizations are still figuring out how to incorporate a new technology, and individuals are trying to understand where they create the most value within it. There’s experimentation, uneven adoption, and a fair amount of uncertainty.

It’s also the phase where people can start to feel stuck. Not because they lack ambition, but because the old signals of progress are less reliable.

What people need most during this period isn’t perfect clarity about the future. It’s agency. The sense that they still have influence over how their career evolves.

That usually begins with a shift in mindset.

For decades many of us approached work with a fairly fixed idea of what our role was supposed to be. Today a more durable posture is openness. Openness to expanding the boundaries of what you do. Openness to experimenting with tools that change how the work gets done. Openness to stepping toward problems that didn’t exist a few years ago.

When I look at the people navigating this transition well, it’s rarely just about credentials or titles. The common thread is curiosity. They engage with change early instead of waiting for clarity.

The messy middle can make people feel like they’re off track.

More often than not, it’s simply the phase where the next version of their career is being built.

If you want to go deeper on navigating the messy middle, you can pre-order Open to Work here.