Our resumes tell the story of our careers – where we’ve worked, for how long, and what we did in each of those roles.

Recruiters look at the resumes of job applicants, hoping to see how the prospective employee has progressed through the ranks, one careful step on the career ladder after the next.

Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper have a different idea. Together, they created Amazing, “ … an award-winning company with a mission to make careers better for everyone.”

Instead of seeing the corporate ladder as the inevitable staircase to career success, they came to understand that the fixation on getting that next promotion was holding back their personal development.

Proving true that opposites attract, introvert Sarah and extrovert Helen advocate for ‘squiggly’ career paths, a work life that is much more centred on our ambitions, interests and talents.

As Helen says in this TEDxLondonWomen presentation from February 2021,a squiggly career is full of uncertainty, but also possibility. It builds our resilience; it introduces us to new connections, and it opens us to new opportunities.

Unlike the limiting corporate ladder, a squiggle mindset helps people to reflect on and actively pursue what they really want in their careers.

One insight from the presentation that was especially salient for the Switched ON community was the unfairness of our work learning opportunities being locked into the level we reach in our organisations.

When members of the Switched ON Community hear that, we instinctively say, “That sucks!”

The whole point of Switched ON Living is that we smash through the barriers of age prejudice and narrow-minded conformity so that we can set our Wellbeing Plan exactly where we want our lives to take us.

More politely, Sarah calls it curating our own curriculum where we take advantage of the near-endless learning content available to us in cyberspace.

By stark contrast, the risk for organisations with a mindset still firmly locked in the 20th century is they’ll lose the staff they should most value, the people who are most adaptable and most committed to life-long learning.

These are the people who are the most Switched ON, just like Sarah and Helen.

If you would like to listen to more from Sarah and Helen, please listen to any of their excellent Squiggly Careers podcasts.