Future-Proof Your Career + Stand Out in the 2025 Job Market with Catherine Fisher of LinkedIn
Show Snapshot:
Feeling stuck in your career or worried about staying relevant in today's fast-changing job market? This episode is your guide to navigating what's next. Join host Katie Fogarty and LinkedIn's top career expert Catherine Fisher as they break down the latest data on where jobs are headed, reveal insider tips for standing out on LinkedIn, and share practical strategies for continuous career growth. Learn how to combat age bias, showcase your value to ace an interview, and stay relevant in an AI-driven world. Whether you're actively job hunting, considering a pivot, or looking to future-proof your career, you'll learn how to leverage your age and experience as assets while mastering the new skills employers want.
Show Links:
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LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise Report- 2024
Quotable:
As you're looking to future-proof your job, go where the growth is, understand what industries are growing, the types of jobs that companies are looking for, the types of skills. Then you want to have a growth mindset and do continuous learning.
Transcript:
[00:04] Katie Fogarty: Katie, welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. We have an incredible show today, but before we dive in, I want to share a very quick story.
Most of you know me as a midlife podcaster, but I also have a day job as a career coach. I help people share their professional story, both on LinkedIn and other platforms. My clients have amazing careers, and I make sure their career stories work as hard as they do.
Before I launched my coaching company, The Reboot Group, I had several other careers at six or seven other companies. I worked as a journalist at places like CNN, and I wrote the morning news in New York City. I've also worked at big and small PR firms. I worked on Capitol Hill for a U.S. Senator. I even taught English in Japan for a couple of years.
I am a big believer that it is never too late to reinvent, pivot, or change your professional story, which is why I'm so excited to introduce today's guest. We are welcoming to the show Catherine Fisher, who is LinkedIn's top career expert. Yes, the top career pro from the biggest career advancement platform on the globe is with us today, and she's here to share hot-off-the-presses information on where the hot jobs are today and where they will be in the future.
[01:48] Catherine Fisher: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Katie Fogarty: I am thrilled. I am like a LinkedIn groupie, and I've actually been following you on the platform for many years now. So I'm really excited to be having this conversation.
[02:25] Katie Fogarty: I know you've got some incredible research out. I'm excited to explore it all, and we are having this conversation at a fantastic time because your new research reveals that nearly 60% of people globally are looking for a job right now. It's pretty astonishing.
We're going to be exploring all things career and work in 2024, how to stand out among a sea of applicants, how to future-proof our careers, and I want to hear all about your latest research on the LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise report. But I want to start with some stage-setting for listeners who are on the market or want to remain relevant and advance in their current jobs. How can they stand out? What are three key steps that we should be taking to stand out on LinkedIn?
[02:55] Catherine Fisher: Yes, great question. The first thing you're going to want to do is be adaptable. The reality is that the job market is shifting so rapidly, work is changing. If you think about work, we are seeing that people have twice as many jobs as they did 15 years ago. You have four generations from Gen Z to Boomer in the workplace. You have new skills being added to the roster, like AI. So work is changing rapidly, and you're going to need to be super adaptable.
With that, you mentioned Jobs on the Rise. That shows the fastest-growing jobs. Based on those in-demand skills, I would say what I found the most interesting there is that almost half the jobs didn't exist over 20 years ago. So there's a lot to get your arms around.
The second thing is to keep your profile updated. When I talked about how people have twice as many jobs now than they did 15 years ago, one thing is that with that change, there's less sitting in your role and not updating things for years on end. You want to make sure that you're constantly evolving who you are as a professional externally to people, and you never want to be caught on your back foot.
I always talk about the importance of being prepared for the unexpected. I think we all learned this in middle school with pop quizzes. Well, it's the same thing with your job – you want to make sure that you're always ready to go and have the right skills that we know hiring managers are looking for.
And when I talk about skills, this is where we see a lot of change happening. It can feel overwhelming if you think you have to go learn something new in this big, grandiose way. What you really want to do here is take an inventory check of the skills that you have, look at the skills that are in demand, and figure out how you can learn those. So again, the three things: be adaptable, keep your profile updated, and keep building those skills.
[05:00] Katie Fogarty: I could not agree more about being ready to rock and roll whenever you need to. I mentioned earlier that I had worked on Capitol Hill. I worked for U.S. Senator Bill Bradley from New Jersey. He had an expression he used all the time: "The time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining." So you want to be updating your profile before you actually need to put it to work for a job hunt.
But as you know, LinkedIn is way more than job hunting. It's a great networking tool. It's a great way to be in conversation with your clients or strategic partners, your vendors. It's not simply about job hunting, but we're here to talk about the research that you've got about where jobs are today and where they're going to be tomorrow.
I'm 55, most of my listeners range in age from 45 to 65 and beyond. I know from my work as a career coach that people are concerned about ageism, loss of relevancy as they gain more and more experience. Do you have any advice for age-proofing a job hunt, and then second, how do you age-proof your career?
[05:50] Catherine Fisher: Yes, I think the most important thing is you have to keep learning. Where people get nervous is they feel that their skills are going to be less relevant or they won't be seen as understanding how things are changing. The reality is, we're all learning it together. So whether you're 65 or 25, as things are changing, you should be learning.
Stay sharp with the new technology, leverage those LinkedIn Learning courses, follow people who are doing interesting things, and see how their careers are evolving. Really important, though, I think, is that those of us who've been in the job market for a lot longer bring incredibly valuable experience to the table. Those leadership skills, communications, those soft skills or people skills, are in really high demand.
So if you combine that with learning new skills, like AI, that is powerful. It's not about sitting back thinking that you're no longer relevant, but how do you stay relevant and combine that with the skills that you really acquire through experience? Think about people who lead teams – the better manager is someone who has had some bad bosses and knows what not to do. That doesn't happen overnight. So if you're longer in your career, that experience is irreplaceable.
[07:14] Katie Fogarty: Absolutely. Those EQ skills – navigating bad bosses, resilience, expertise – all of that comes from steady application over years of time. I really enjoyed diving into your research. One of the things that I saw, which I've heard from clients as well, is that job seekers are applying more and more to more and more jobs. The ease of applying online makes it very easy.
It's kind of like watching my 17-year-old apply to college. I used to have to put the application in a typewriter, so I did about six. Now they're applying to 16 because it's as easy as hitting a button, which is wonderful. We love the fact that it's easy to apply for work. However, according to your data, people are applying to more jobs but hearing back from fewer.
No one wants to be ghosted, either in a job hunt or from friends. So what do you recommend? Should job hunters be more selective about where they apply? Is it more a matter of diving in and tapping your networks versus cold applying? Do you have strategies that you think people are overlooking?
[08:15] Catherine Fisher: It's a combination of things. You have to be strategic. It is absolutely not a competition for how many jobs you can apply for – that's not going to get you the job. Tapping into your network, understanding the skills that the company is looking for, acquiring those skills, having a strong story about your transferable skills, all of these things make a difference when you're looking for a job.
Cold applying is like shouting into the void. What you want to do is prioritize your connections. Think if you see a job listing that's really interesting to you, and you see that someone you know is connected to that hiring manager. That's when you tap into your network and say, "Can you please make an introduction for me?"
You also want to be super strategic about whether or not you are the right fit. We just launched something called Jobs Match, and basically what that does is it shows you the job that you're applying for and if you qualify. You have two routes to go: if you are a great candidate, go for it. If you're not, understand why you're not, and we'll tell you. What are those skills that they're looking for that you don't have? You can either pivot and learn those skills or pivot and go look for a role that better suits the skills that you have.
[09:45] Catherine Fisher: When I look back at my career, when I started 30-plus years ago, LinkedIn didn't exist and I studied art history. My first job out of college was as a bank teller because I had no idea what to do. No one was telling me, "Hey, these are the skills, and this is what you can do. This is what a career would look like in this role, and these are the skills you need."
There is so much information now. Had I had the ability to follow people, to see what they did with their career, to be able to connect to people, to see if my skills matched the roles that seemed interesting – I think I would have gone down a different path. So the great news is that there's so much out there to help and guide you, but you have to be strategic about it. It's not just going to come to you.
[10:20] Katie Fogarty: Yeah, and you have to put LinkedIn to work. One of my favorite things to do is to look at people's career histories and see how they got from A to Z, because most people are not taking linear paths. There's a lot of cool zigzagging.
We're gonna head into a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna explore how to use this new Jobs Match feature, and then also explore where the hot jobs are today and where they're gonna be tomorrow according to what you've uncovered recently. We'll be back in just a minute.
[10:45] [Advertisement Break]
[13:46] Katie Fogarty: Catherine, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we talked about how LinkedIn has rolled out a new Job Match feature and has done a lot of research on hot jobs. Let's start with the Job Match feature. You gave us a quick overview of how it works, but for a listener who's on LinkedIn right now and is thinking, "Yeah, I want to do that" – how does it work in action? Is it a button you're clicking? Is it something that's happening when you're reviewing jobs on LinkedIn? How does one access and utilize this new feature?
[14:15] Catherine Fisher: So what you're going to do is go to the Jobs tab, and you're going to find a job. You'll put in what you're looking for, and then it'll show you the types of jobs that match what you're interested in, and it'll tell you how strong of a candidate you are.
I'm on here right now, and I clicked on a role, and it says my job match is medium. So update my profile, and it'll then walk you through to show the match details. It'll ask, "Am I a good match for this job?" And it will actually evaluate, based on my experience that is in my profile, whether or not I'm a good fit, whether or not I'm a good match.
It's about taking the time to do those extra steps so that you're being more strategic. I think sometimes when we talk about being more strategic in your job search, that feels a little overwhelming. The good news is that LinkedIn has made it easier for you to be strategic about it.
Now, job searching is not linear – it is multifaceted. So maybe you're not as strong of a match for this job. You understand the skills that you need to get, but you see that you know someone who works there, and you could ask them, "Hey, could you make an introduction? I'm in the process of developing these skills." So it is a piece of the puzzle to help you get where you need to be.
[15:30] Katie Fogarty: Yeah, it's one more data point which is so useful when conducting a job search. When I work with clients, sometimes when we look at job specs together, we'll often see that the client actually has that experience, but they have not yet articulated it fully on their profile. So it seems like this is another great tool to help you figure out, "Oh, you know, I actually do have that skill, or I do have something that's transferable. I just haven't added it to my profile yet."
[16:52] Katie Fogarty: Let's switch gears for a minute now and talk about your recent jobs research. You came out with LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise. You mentioned at the top of the show that half of these jobs didn't even exist 20-25 years ago. A lot of them have to do with AI and other iterations in sustainability and the rise of certain types of careers. When I looked at the research, I was thinking, these careers and these jobs are basically the same age as my children.
It's pretty astonishing. We touched on this earlier – we want to future-proof our own careers. If we do have young adult children, we might want to help direct them into careers that are hot and make them hireable and marketable. What should we be thinking about for our own career longevity and future-proofing our skills?
[17:18] Catherine Fisher: It's a shift in mindset. It's no longer that you get the job and you stay doing that same job for the rest of your career.
[17:25] Katie Fogarty: Wouldn't that be easy? Although honestly, Catherine, don't you think that might be boring? Like, isn't evolving and growing better?
[17:35] Catherine Fisher: Yeah, exactly. So I think that you go where the growth is, for one. I think that as you're looking to future-proof your job, go where the growth is, understand what industries are growing, the types of jobs that companies are looking for, the types of skills. Then you want to have a growth mindset and do continuous learning.
What I don't mean is that you need to go back to school and get a new degree. Now, if you want to – like, if you're in real estate and want to become a doctor, yeah, you're going to have to go back to school. But most of the time, you can learn these skills through bite-sized learning.
I think if you look at it in small chunks, it's much less overwhelming. It's kind of like with your New Year's resolutions and people say, "Oh, I'm gonna walk 10,000 steps a day. I'm gonna cut out sugar and only drink on the weekends." Okay, well, if those are brand new habits for you, it's impossible to suddenly make that happen in one day.
But if you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna add 500 steps a week, I'm gonna maybe not drink on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and I'm gonna cut out sugar Thursday, Friday, Saturday" – it's taking these smaller steps to learn the new things. I think this gives you the right mindset to rest and reflect.
Where people get overwhelmed is when they think that they have to do five different things and completely change everything. The reality is, a lot of your core skills are still very valid, and you want to make sure that you're still showcasing those skills, like communication, leadership, adaptability. You want to have stories around that, plus that growth mindset of learning.
[19:30] Katie Fogarty: And so when we're walking into a job interview, you know, I know that you also do coaching and share ideas on how one aces an interview. What are we saying when we're trying to communicate our transferable skills? If we're trying to communicate that we are the right fit for the job?
[19:45] Catherine Fisher: If you are in the interview, they know that you can do the job. That is a really smart thing for people to really focus on, right? If you've made it in there, they believe that you might be the right fit.
What they're looking for is the impact that you can make and how you do the job. So there are two tracks for you to work on. The first is how you do that storytelling to show how you really helped the business, how you helped grow a team, how you handled a crisis – putting those skills into practice.
The other thing is, most of the time in an interview, they're looking to see: are you going to come in and help energize the team? Are you going to help the team? Or, if you're an individual contributor, are you going to go in and really embrace what the company is trying to do? That comes into your communication skills, your leadership skills, adaptability.
So also having stories around those people skills is really important, and you want to make sure that you're prepared to package that up so that it's easy for that person on the other end, who's talking to many people, to see why you would be such a great fit for that role.
[20:45] Katie Fogarty: I love how you're emphasizing storytelling, because I think when people think about an interview, sometimes they think of it as being grilled, or they have to prove something. But everyone can tell a story. Everyone can share what they're up to, and it feels a lot less intimidating.
Early in this podcast, I got to interview the workplace futurist Carrie Hannon. She writes a lot of books on personal finance, but also on career and career longevity. And she called it CAR stories – go in with a Challenge, an Action, and a Result. And it was a great acronym for me. It stuck in my mind, you know, I'm thinking of it several years later. Just thinking of a story where you've had a challenge at work, what was the action you took, and what result you drove – it feels manageable.
[21:30] Catherine Fisher: Yeah, and I think we can all do that across all the different areas. So I love that piece of advice.
[21:45] Katie Fogarty: So storytelling is one key thing we need to do for interviews. We also need to be talking about our skills, our expertise. What did the research show about what employers are looking for? I know we're not going to go out and madly re-skill, but we still want to be smart about what's desirable and what makes us marketable.
[22:00] Catherine Fisher: The good news is that some of the top skills that always come up are those people skills that you frankly acquire through years of experience. It's leadership, it's communication, etc., so we know that they're looking for that.
We are seeing increased demand for AI skills. And this is where I think people sometimes retreat and think, "Oh my gosh, that sounds too much. How do I do this?" What I'm not saying is you have to know how to go build AI, but what you do need to do is understand how to incorporate it into your workday in a way that creates more productivity.
Back to that bite-sized learning concept – if you haven't done it, just try 10 minutes a day, trying incorporating one thing. So for example, with me with Copilot: how I first started dipping my toe into it is I started transcribing meetings, and then it would show me the meeting notes, and it would show me the action items. All of a sudden, it was like this light bulb went off that it made my work so much easier.
So now that's just kind of ingrained in my habit. Take those little bite-size steps with AI and start practicing with it. Again, we're not asking you to go build it, but then make sure that you are updating your profile with that skill. So it's the learning and it's applying it, and then it's showcasing it.
[23:15] Katie Fogarty: Yeah, such smart advice, and we don't all need to be experts in building AI, as you pointed out. The good news is we're all sort of on the same relative playing field, because AI is new for everyone, and no one is necessarily further behind the eight ball than somebody else. And the way technology works, it's never been easier to learn something new.
[24:00] Katie Fogarty: A lot of my listeners and a lot of my clients in my day job get to a certain stage in their career, and they start to think about what's next for a variety of reasons. They either are realistic and they look at the changing demographics – yes, we have a five-generation workforce, but at a certain age, it does become harder to be employable in certain industries. Maybe people are looking because they want a pivot for purpose, or they want to follow and explore a passion that they did not yet get to realize in their current career. What would be advice you would give to somebody who wants to explore a pivot – not a completely different career, as you said earlier, like become a doctor after you've been maybe a teacher – but if somebody wants to sort of move into an adjacent career?
[25:18] Catherine Fisher: There are several things. First, you want to do your research and network – network early. So before you start jumping into it, I think it's really about understanding the landscape out there. If you're wanting to make a pivot, you had talked about one of the best things that I always tell people is looking at other people's profiles to see what was their career trajectory, what courses did they take, what jobs did they have, what skills did they have? So really getting an understanding of what that pivot actually means.
And then obviously tapping into your network. This is the time to have those conversations. A very practical tip I always give is that if you're asking to get time with someone, reach out to them. Tell them what you're looking for. What are those three questions you have? And make it short – make it "Can I take 15 minutes of your time? Here's my availability. Here are the three questions." So that's the first thing.
The next thing is, you want to think about your transferable skills. So once you've figured out, okay, if I'm going to make a pivot, this is what's important to that industry, that job, that role – what can I take with me? And we were talking about the importance of storytelling. How do you tell that story?
And then you have to upskill to open up opportunities. Whether it is once a week you take a course to learn something new – it could be a 20-minute course, or it's every day for 10 minutes, you try something to get you those skills. It's not going to happen overnight, and you're going to have to put some work into it, but it is absolutely attainable.
[26:45] Katie Fogarty: And we look at your own career – I hopped on your LinkedIn, I've been following you and your content for years, but I hadn't ever done a deep dive into your own background. I obviously did my research on my favorite research platform, LinkedIn, to learn more about you because it was going to make me smarter and more informed for this conversation, which is exactly what you want to be doing with anyone you're interacting with on your job hunt.
I looked at your own career journey, which includes roles at huge brands that we all know, like Netflix and eBay, One Kings Lane. You have had different careers at different organizations. So here's a question: many of us, when you know – I'm 55 – we grew up hearing to specialize in one sort of thing, or you don't want to job hop. Those were sort of the truisms that informed my early career. But you have moved, and so I'm curious to hear about the balance between specialization, really honing a strong set of skills, and the adaptability, which is important, as you mentioned – it was your number one thing that we need to do to be a good job candidate. How has that played out in your own life?
[28:15] Catherine Fisher: So a couple of things. One is that I've always had a core – there's something that's been core to my career, which is, in the simplest terms, storytelling. So whether I do that through communications, spokesperson work, what I'm doing right now, to social media, to events – that has always been kind of the core of what I did. But then I found new ways to reach audiences with that, and it kept it interesting.
I have asked for, I would say, 80% of the – if you look at my tenure at LinkedIn, I've been here for 12 years – I've had many different jobs. Most of the time I asked for that job. Even the job of being our career expert was me talking to my boss, saying, "I think there is an opportunity here to help our members and really build a platform so that people can have a place to go to learn all this great knowledge that we have."
It's getting comfortable with asking for what you want, and having that growth mindset, and also being really comfortable with rejection. Because I will say throughout your career, people will say no, and you don't have the right skills, and we don't have time right now to train you. So you can go train yourself, or just train by osmosis. So I think it is kind of having that core set of who you are and what you're really good at, and how does that splinter off into different roles, industries, jobs.
[29:45] Katie Fogarty: That's the resilience that we talked about earlier. That kind of resilience, I think, only comes from being on the north side of 40. You have gone through some things to develop that sort of inner confidence, that resilience, to recognize that "no" sometimes means "no, not right now," or like, "all right, let me figure out a way of opening it if that door's not opening." And that definitely comes from age.
I love that you talked about storytelling as being the narrative thread that runs throughout your career. I feel like that is the narrative thread that runs throughout mine. It's been storytelling as a journalist, it's been as a PR executive where I did it for clients, I do career storytelling for my clients now. But I woke up one day and said, "I want to do something that feels creative, that's telling stories that I'm interested in," and that's what led me to launch a podcast to feature and spotlight the stories of a demographic that I'm obsessed with – women who are knocking it out of the park as they get older.
So I am so thrilled that you joined me today to share some of this research, to share a little bit about your career background, and to give us some excitement about the opportunities that exist and share a little bit of LinkedIn research. Before I let you go, Catherine, where can our listeners both follow your work and do a deep dive into the LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise report?
[31:30] Catherine Fisher: Yes, well, thank you for asking. If you follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to my newsletter "Career Companion," you will find some hopefully – what I believe is – really great advice based on the data and experience, including our Jobs on the Rise list.
[31:43] Katie Fogarty: Fantastic. Okay, I'm putting that all into the show notes. Catherine, thank you for your time today. So appreciate it.
[31:48] Catherine Fisher: Thank you.
[31:50] Katie Fogarty: This was such an incredible conversation. I took so many mental notes on everything that Catherine shared. I've been following her work, all of her incredible resources on LinkedIn for years. So it was truly a pleasure to spend time with her in conversation, and I hope you enjoyed listening in as well.
And we are pulling you into the conversation today. All year long, I'm going to be taking listener questions to end every show, and this is the question that came in from a bunch of you over the last year. And that question is, "Katie, where are the show notes and the transcript?" Because truthfully, I had fallen behind. We are now at 217 shows, but guess what? I spent most of the Christmas break feeling a little bit sick on my sofa, and I am catching up. 164 shows are now on the website with the complete transcript and all of the show notes, and I've also been adding all of our 2024 shows to the website, so we are all caught up over there, and I plan to put in the missing 40-some-odd shows any day now.
So please hop on over to acertainagepod.com for show notes, transcripts, links that we talk about on the show, all of the good stuff. And if it's missing one that you want, you know how to reach me. Hit me up over on Instagram at @acertainagepod, or you can email me directly at katie@acertainagepod.com, and I'm happy to send the transcript your way.
But fear not, beauties, I am getting caught up. The website will be updated. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women for aging without apology. Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, keep aging boldly, beauties.