Being Good at Your Job Is Changing

One of the strange things about becoming good at something is realizing the work doesn’t stay still.

By Sabrina Orque

There is a strange thing that happens when you become good at your job. At some point, you stop having to think so hard about every part of it. You know what to do when something goes wrong. You know which questions to ask. You can usually tell when something doesn’t look right before you can even explain why. Things that once took you an hour take twenty minutes because you’ve seen some version of them before. That is experience, and there is comfort in it.

Then someone changes the system, the process, or the way your team works. A new technology comes along. Your customers expect something different. The company restructures. Suddenly everyone is talking about AI and asking whether the thing you’ve done successfully for fifteen years could be done another way. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, you may have a thought you don’t necessarily say out loud: But I was already good at this.

I think that’s one of the more complicated things happening at work right now. Being good at your job is changing. Not because the things that used to matter don’t matter anymore. They do. Experience matters. Reliability matters. Knowing your craft matters. Judgment matters. But the conditions around all of those things have changed remarkably quickly, and we haven’t completely caught up.

COVID had already started changing the rules before AI entered the conversation. For many people, it disrupted assumptions about where work happened, how much of our lives it should occupy, and what we were willing to trade for a career. Not everyone came to the same conclusions. Some people wanted more flexibility. Some wanted less stress. Some couldn’t wait to get back into an office. That may have been the bigger shift: once people experienced work differently, some of the old rules stopped feeling quite so permanent.

Then, while businesses and employees were still figuring out what those new expectations meant, AI arrived and began changing the work itself. I think AI makes people nervous partly because we talk about it as though it either knows everything or is going to replace everything. I don’t see it that way. I think about it more like a calculator.

I learned how to do math before I learned to rely on a calculator. I had to understand multiplication and division, and I needed some sense of what the answer should look like. The calculator made the work faster and, in many cases, more accurate. There would be no virtue today in insisting that I do complicated calculations by hand simply to prove that I can. But I also can’t type nonsense into a calculator and assume the answer must be right because a machine produced it. I still have to understand the problem.

AI is a far more sophisticated tool, but the same principle matters. It can help write the email, organize information, find patterns, generate ideas, summarize a long document, or get you to a first draft faster. But someone still needs to know whether the answer makes sense. Someone still has to understand the customer, the business, the people involved, and what might happen next. Someone has to notice what the machine didn’t.

That is why I don’t think expertise is becoming less important. In some ways, it may become more important. The better the tools become, the easier it is to produce something that looks good. Knowing whether it actually is good is different, and that isn’t something we learn from a prompt.

We learn it over time through education, experience, and mistakes. We learn by watching good and bad decisions, by having our thinking challenged, and by getting something wrong and having to fix it. That is how judgment develops.

The challenge is that the very experience that gives us good judgment can also make change uncomfortable. Once you know how to succeed, there is a natural temptation to keep doing what made you successful. Sometimes that’s exactly the right thing to do. And sometimes the work has moved.

Being adaptable doesn’t mean throwing away everything you know every time a new idea comes along. It doesn’t mean chasing every trend or assuming newer automatically means better. It means being willing to ask whether what has always worked is still the best way to do the work now. It means being experienced enough to have an opinion and open enough to reconsider it. Sometimes, it means being willing to become a beginner again.

That’s hard. There is humility involved in being very good at something and then sitting down to learn a system you don’t understand, asking someone with less experience than you to show you a tool they’ve already figured out, or admitting that the process you created five years ago may no longer be the best process.

The interesting part is that the person asking someone else to adapt may be going through exactly the same thing. A manager may be learning the new system while asking the team to use it. A business owner may know AI should change the way some work gets done without yet knowing exactly what that should look like. Leaders are trying to redefine jobs at the same time employees are trying to figure out how to succeed in them. That uncertainty is understandable. Leaving people to guess isn’t.

If what good performance looks like has changed, say so. If someone now has more authority to make decisions, they need to understand where that authority begins and ends. If a new tool has become part of the job, people need a reasonable opportunity to learn how to use it. You cannot quietly change what success looks like and then be frustrated that people haven’t figured it out.

Employees have a responsibility here too. We have to remain willing to learn. We have to recognize that a job can evolve without that evolution being a threat. Sometimes we have to let go of the comfort of knowing exactly what we’re doing long enough to learn what comes next. But employers have to make that possible. The expectation cannot simply be, Keep up. People need to know what they are keeping up with.

I don’t think the future of work means there will be less opportunity for people. I think the opportunity will look different. There will always be value in someone who really knows what they’re doing. Increasingly, there will also be value in the person who can say, ‘I know how this has been done. Let me learn how it’s being done now.’ Someone who can use the new tool without handing over all of their thinking to it, and who is confident enough in their experience to stay curious instead of defending every old way of doing things.

Maybe that’s the uncomfortable part of becoming good at something. We tend to think competence is a place we arrive. We put in the years. We learn. We gain experience. Eventually, we know what we’re doing. And we do.

But perhaps being good at your job isn’t something you achieve and then keep. Maybe it’s something you have to keep becoming. Not because everything you learned before is suddenly obsolete, but because everything you learned before is what gives you the foundation to learn what comes next.