Meta strategies for career-oriented collaboration

The pace of knowledge growth is so rapid during the last decades that even the valedictorian knowledge become obsolete in the coming years and the lifelong learning emerges as a natural solution. However, unlimited access to unimaginable amounts of data determines a paradigm shift as far as a learning process: from learning to learning to learn. Technology will continue to be the driving force in changing the world: computing, mobility, automation and robotics, an open world of science, neuro-technology, chemistry, nanotechnology, fabulous new intelligent materials – to mention just a few of them. Career paths of the future must be understood and conceived from a quite different viewpoint: the future shall stretch as much as possible our abilities to grow, adapt and learn. Volatile, temporary roles may be superposed over what shall consider being the backbone of our profession. Professions will change dramatically and fast and switching from one profession to another is going to become the norm. The career planning is turning into professional life planning: from making strategic decisions for career progressing within the certain profession to integrate them in meta-strategic decisions made for fore-sighting one’s successful sequence of professions. The purpose of this paper is to launch a discussion about professional life planning – which is changing professions across an extended active life-span (made possible by an increased life expectancy, as result of the same extraordinary technology progress): are we, educators and students, human resource managers and policy makers, ready for this type of meta-strategic decisions?