Alexandra Levit joins Ligia and Jason on The New Talent Code to share her five pillars of career durability, and how companies can help employees visualize their career paths. From an emphasis on applied technology skills to deciding which skills employees should really focus on in their upskilling and reskilling efforts, Alexandra shares practical insights for anyone reshaping their mindsets towards work and non-linear career paths while enabling companies to make skills-based talent decisions.

Alexandra is the Founder and CEO of Inspiration at Work, a consulting business preparing organizations and their employees to be competitive and marketable in the future business world. She is also a columnist for many top-tier publications including the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

To begin, Alex shares her own non-linear career path. As a high-achieving student, entering the business world gave her a harsh awakening. A colleague at her first job in PR suggested Alex take the Dale Carnegie Course, which is where she learned the importance of making a good first impression and how to gain collaboration and cooperation with colleagues. She got the idea to write a book aimed at her own age group advising them on navigating the business world. Much to her surprise, the book, They Don’t Teach Corporate in College, allowed her to establish a new career path as a workplace author and speaker focused on the 20-something demographic. Alexandra later went on to write Humanity Works, a book detailing how talent and machines can work side-by-side to make organizational structures more agile and innovation-focused.

Then, Alexandra identifies the five pillars of career durability, which is all about the ability to be gainfully employed at any given time. The five pillars are hard skills, soft skills, institutional knowledge, growth mindset or learning agility, and applied technology skills. She then speaks to the difficulty in building rapport and interpersonal relationships in the distributed environment we live in. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen employee well-being emphasized more than ever.

While having a growth mindset is an attitude, it is also something that you can control and take steps to learn. By developing learning cultures within our organizations, we can make it acceptable not to know everything right off the bat. Project-based employment is on the rise and Alex offers advice for strategic workforce planning and navigating the talent marketplace. Finally, she shares her secret passion for fiction writing.