What happens when work stops being about having a person in a seat and starts being about delivering an outcome?

This week, we’re joined by Giselle Gonzales, founder of Equal Reach, to explore a different way of thinking about how work is structured. Drawing on her experience connecting businesses with teams of refugee and local talent, Giselle has a unique view of the changing jobs market, from the digital tasks that can provide a first rung into work to the rise of freelancing, collectives and project-based careers.

We talk about what AI is doing to the traditional career ladder, why both entry-level work and traditional senior roles could be squeezed, and whether more of us are heading towards a future somewhere in the freelance middle.

Giselle also shares why she believes the answer might be to stop going it alone. We explore the rise of collectives, sharing the feast-or-famine reality of independent work, testing ideas alongside a nine-to-five, and why finding your tribe could become increasingly important as careers become less linear.

Is project-based work less secure than a traditional job, or are we starting to realise that the traditional job was never quite as secure as we thought?

LinkedIn feels a bit weird right now. Reach is down, feeds are filling up with AI-generated content and even the people who have built careers on the platform are questioning whether the effort is still worth it.

So we asked Ash Jones, founder of Great Influence and In Good Company, and one of the UK’s leading voices on personal brand.

We talk about what LinkedIn is actually useful for now, why genuinely interesting content has an opportunity to stand out, whether video really is the future of the platform and what happens when employees build audiences bigger than the brands they work for.

Ash also makes the case for a shift from “personal brand” to “creator”, explains why founders might want to think of themselves as founder creators, and tackles what all of this means whether you’re 22 and starting out, 50-something and building a portfolio career, or already creating content and wondering how much AI is too much.

And yes, we ask the big question: is LinkedIn still worth the effort anymore?

Graduate hiring is falling, the first rung of the career ladder is disappearing, and the deal many of us grew up with, work hard at school, get qualifications, go to university, get a good job, suddenly feels a lot less certain.

So, what on earth are we supposed to tell our kids?

Oliver Pickup, human work evolution storyteller, founder of Pickup Media and author of Go Flux Yourself, is back on the pod to tackle one of the biggest questions facing parents right now: how do I prepare my kids for the future of work?

Between us, we’re three parents with six children aged three to fifteen, trying to make sense of a world of AI, shrinking entry-level opportunities and changing expectations of what a career even looks like.

We talk about the seven ‘heart skills’ Ollie believes will matter more as machines get smarter, why he wants his children to be AI agnostics rather than martyrs or zealots, whether university still offers the same value proposition, the importance of work experience, humility and human connection, and what employers owe the generation coming up behind us.

Plus, we put Ollie through a quickfire round: what should parents encourage, what should schools teach, what should young people experiment with, and what should employers do differently?

And, naturally, we somehow invent a new word along the way: breadpool.