Specifically these days, if you ask yourself, ‘what are you going to do?’ I think what’s really changing is us less thinking about what roles you could do, but more thinking about where you can actually make an impact.

My name is Manuel. I’m working for Bayer. And I’m the head of skills intelligence and the talent flow strategy. We’re a life science company with health for all hunger for none.

I’ve always looked at my own career as being curious about what’s going to happen and what’s the impact you’re going to make, and less about what role you want to embark on. And that has learned me a lot of lessons.

I think the easiest thing where you’re going to start is starting as a trainee somewhere, so I tried to apply in companies where I felt I could have started early on in my career as a trainee. So gladfully, Bayer accepted me and I had the pleasure to go through the traditional Dave Ulrich model, and basically learned HR from the peak.

I think specifically in an AI world, we’re moving a little bit away from static roles, because what’s happening is that agentic AI is knocking on everybody’s door and is influencing the work that we do. And I think that’s true for all of us.

It’s also true for us as HR Professionals, because it does change the way we get work done. And if you apply this to your career understanding. It goes exactly with the notion that where do you want to make an impact rather than what role would you like to have. So this shift from a role-based to a more skill-based organization, is something at least that resonates very much with me. And that is also the way I thought about developing myself to the stage where I’m now.