The Only Constant in a Multichapter Career Is You

Callum Borchers offers this year's graduates a candid and useful map in The New Career Odyssey Waiting for Today's College Grads in The Wall Street Journal. LinkedIn projects that people entering the workforce now will hold twice as many jobs over their careers as those who started 15 years ago. Careers are stretching longer, many grads are working outside their majors, and AI will reshape work in ways no one can predict.

His advice comes from people who have changed course successfully. Jim Jaffe, a 90-year-old consultant, keeps a personal one-sheet of strengths that are not tied to any job or industry. Sarah Iselin studied photography and art history and now leads Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, crediting art with training her to see and communicate clearly. And Joe Catrino, who leads Dartmouth's newly renamed Center for Career Design, teaches students the habit of reflection. As he puts it, "I'm foundationally opposed to bridging major to career."

The column closes with the right challenge: help employers see your potential for jobs you have never done.

I agree. And I would add what makes that possible.

Skills Travel. Identity Steers.

The column frames adaptability largely as portable skills: a one-sheet, a skills section on LinkedIn, abilities that transfer from one role to the next. Those matter. Recruiters increasingly search by skills because titles are losing meaning.

But a list of skills does not tell you where to go next. It tells you what you can carry. In a career with many chapters, the jobs will change, the industries will change and the skills will change. The only constant is you.

That is what Jaffe's one-sheet and Iselin's path really reveal. Iselin did not simply transfer a photography skill into healthcare. She carried a way of seeing that was hers, and she applied it to new problems. Her identity steered. Her skills followed.

Evolution or Substitution

Here is where I want to be precise. Knowing who you are does not mean what you contribute stays frozen. When I ask leaders what they solve for, I am not asking for a permanent answer. What you solve for changes over a career. The question is how it changes.

It can evolve. Each chapter deepens what you bring, so your next role builds on who you have become. The executive who once solved for clarity on a single team now solves for clarity across an enterprise. The value is recognizably theirs, and it keeps growing.

Or it can stay in substitution mode. One job replaces another, one title replaces the last, and nothing underneath grows. A person in substitution mode can hold many jobs and still feel stuck, because each move swaps the setting without building the self.

As I often say, without strategy, change is merely substitution, not evolution. That is true for organizations, and it is true for careers. Twice as many jobs can mean twice as much growth or twice as much churn. The difference is whether people are evolving who they are along the way.

Reflection Is the Engine

This is why Catrino's emphasis on reflection is the most important idea in the column. Reflection is how people notice what they are becoming. It turns a string of jobs into a story with direction.

The stakes are high right now. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at about 5.6% in the second quarter of 2026, and their underemployment rate edged up to 42%. Many grads will start in roles that do not match their degrees. Reflection helps them treat those roles as chapters rather than detours.

In my work, reinvention is a skill, not a personality trait. It begins with discovering what you bring, then deciding how to grow it in each new chapter. I describe three doors people walk through in their careers: Claim, Reclaim and Transform. Graduates stand at the first door. When they claim who they are early, every later change has something to build on.

As I explored in The Return of the Generalist Starts With Knowing What You Solve For, range without identity is just rotation. And as I wrote in Confidence Is Leaving Through the Entry Level, early-career professionals need conviction more than certainty.

Three Questions for Graduates, and the Leaders Who Hire Them

What do I solve for today, and how is it changing? Write it down after every role. If the answer never changes, ask whether you are evolving or substituting.

What did this chapter add to who I am? Not just what you did, but what you can now see, connect or lead that you could not before.

For leaders: Are we hiring for who people are becoming? Employers who look only at past titles will miss the people most capable of growing into roles that do not exist yet.

Borchers is right that today's graduates face an odyssey. The jobs will keep changing. The best careers will belong to people who keep evolving the one thing they always carry with them: themselves.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.