At a glance: the work worth doing is increasingly found outside the job, and your experience becomes valuable in the moment it meets a real problem.
Valentine Gatard has spent 15 years self-employed in Paris, watching how work is changing.
People are increasingly finding the work that needs doing and getting on with it, often outside formal jobs.
One visible sign is the growing refusal to step into management. Underneath it sits a deeper shift. As the cost of coordinating work falls and AI takes on routine tasks, value moves towards what experienced people see when they meet a real problem, the reading of a situation that comes from having met many like it, and towards the relationships through which that value is created.
For anyone building an independent practice, this changes where to look for work and how to describe what you offer.
Your experience becomes valuable the moment it meets a particular problem, a particular client, a particular conversation.
Valentine Gatard has been self-employed in Paris for almost 15 years, long enough to watch the world of work change around her.
When I asked her, on her second visit to the Wisepreneurs Podcast, what she's seeing now, she described people quietly finding the work that needs doing and getting on with it, often well before anyone has thought to turn it into a job.
Some of it is paid. A lot of it isn't, at least not yet. Either way, the work is appearing in a different place from where most of us were taught to look for it.
That matches what I see among the experienced professionals I talk to. They've left, or are thinking of leaving, the organisations that once held their work, and they're trying to work out what they actually do now that no one is handing them a role.
This article is about that shift: why work is moving outside the job, what is replacing the job as the thing that creates value, and what it asks of you if you're building a practice on your own terms in your fifties, sixties, or beyond.
What is real work, and how is it different from the job you were given?
Valentine makes a distinction worth borrowing. Prescribed work is the job as it's written down: the tasks, the forms, the things a role says you're meant to do. Real work is what actually has to happen for something to come good. In a healthy organisation the two line up. In a lot of organisations they've drifted apart, and most of us have spent years quietly doing the second while being measured on the first.
The anthropologist David Graeber gave the extreme version of this a name when he wrote about what he called bullshit jobs: paid roles so pointless that the person doing them has to pretend they aren't. Valentine is less interested in the insult and more interested in what people do once they notice the gap. When the prescribed work stops meaning anything, attention starts to move to the real work, wherever it happens to be.
She told a small story from her years in market research that captures why this matters to people as much as to organisations. Clients would come to watch focus groups from behind the one-way glass, and what struck her was how excited they were to see, with their own eyes, people responding to the thing they'd been working on. It made their work real.
Most of us who work in our heads rarely get that. We sit at a screen, send the work off, and never see it land. Valentine's point is that the hunger to see your work make a difference is part of why people are starting to organise their working lives around contribution they can actually feel, rather than tasks they can only file.
Prescribed work is what your role says you do. Real work is what actually has to happen for something to come good. As routine tasks are automated, attention moves from the left column to the right.
Why are so many capable people turning down management?
One of the clearest signs of this shift is something Valentine sees strongly in France and that shows up across the data: people increasingly don't want to be managers. For most of the last century, becoming a manager was the obvious reward for being good at your job. That assumption is breaking down.
The numbers are striking. In Boston Consulting Group's research with Ipsos, only around one in eleven non-managers in Western economies said they aspire to become a manager in the next five to ten years, while the great majority of current managers reported the job is markedly harder than it used to be.
Visier's research in the United States found fewer than four in ten employees interested in people management at their current organisation. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82 per cent of UK managers are what it calls accidental managers, promoted into leading people with no formal training for it, and that only 27 per cent of employees rate their manager as highly effective.
This is a considered choice. People look clearly at what management has become, the larger teams, the longer hours, the emotional labour of holding everyone together while still hitting their own targets, and decide the trade is not worth it.
Edgar Schein, who spent a career studying organisations, once asked a group of management students what being promoted to manager meant to them. Their answer was immediate: it means I can now tell others what to do. The hidden assumption, as Schein noted, is that once promoted they would know what to do. Many discover they don't, and were never taught.
Valentine reaches for a different image of how people might work together, drawn from her own life as a jazz singer. A traditional manager behaves like a conductor enforcing a written score. A jazz ensemble works by listening, trust, and responding to what each player offers in the moment.
When she performed, her musicians were behind her and she had to follow their cues as much as they followed hers. As she put it, the quality of what happens depends on the quality of your presence and your listening. When organisations keep the conductor model and call it leadership, experienced people decline the baton and look for somewhere they can actually play.
There's a sharper edge to this for women, which matters given who Wisepreneurs is for. Visier found about 32 per cent of women interested in people management against 44 per cent of men, and the recent contraction in management ranks has fallen harder on female managers.
Lucy Ryan, in her work on women leaving organisations in midlife, describes capable women stepping away from structures that exclude them on the grounds that they are not male, not young, and rarely following a linear career. For many of these women, leaving is the start of the independent practice that suits how they actually want to work.
See also Why most marketing fails experienced professionals
Why is the job itself loosening its grip?
To understand why all of this is happening at once, it helps to ask a question that sounds odd at first: why did we ever bundle work into jobs in the first place?
The late Esko Kilpi, a Finnish thinker on the nature of work, built much of his writing on the answer the economist Ronald Coase gave back in the 1930s. Coase asked why firms exist at all, and concluded that for most of the last century it was simply cheaper to coordinate work inside a company, through managers and hierarchy, than to find, agree, and pay for it out in the open market. The job, the office, and the org chart existed because coordinating through a market was expensive and slow.
Kilpi's argument is that this cost has now collapsed. It has become cheap to find people, agree terms, and work together without a firm in the middle. When you add AI absorbing the routine, rule-following tasks that filled so many roles, the old reason for bundling work into jobs weakens from both ends.
The work still has to be done. It simply moves outside the job, into networks of people who connect around a problem and disperse when it's solved. Kilpi put it plainly: in the new economy you work more from your presence and your network than from your stored skills, because work is interaction.
This isn't a brand new idea, which is part of why it's worth trusting. Charles Handy described it decades ago in The Empty Raincoat, picturing work organised around a small core with a ring of portfolio workers and independent contributors around it, rather than everyone inside one set of walls.
Dror Poleg, whose conversation on the Jacob Shapiro podcast I drew on, calls the destination a non-linear economy, [see AI wants to make you interchangeable, and that changes everything about how you build a practice ]where work becomes more distributed, more specialised, and where outcomes are less predictable. The shift Valentine is watching in Paris is the same one, arriving at street level.
If that sounds abstract, here's the concrete version for an experienced professional. The structures that used to carry your work, the role, the title, the department, are becoming less reliable as the place value gets created. What carries it instead is the web of live relationships you're part of, the clients you work with as much as the peers you think alongside. That web is now the productive asset, in the way the factory or the office once was.
The job existed because, for most of the last century, coordinating work inside a firm was cheaper than doing it any other way. As that cost falls and AI absorbs the routine tasks, the work moves into networks of people who form around a problem, where the value comes from the interaction.
From competencies to agency
This is where Valentine's main theme comes in, and where it turns out she and Kilpi are pointing at the same thing from different directions. Her current work centres on agency. In French the word is agentivité, and she notes that most of her audiences have never heard it.
In plain terms it's the capacity to act with conscience and autonomy on yourself and your environment.
She's quick to add a condition that keeps it honest: wanting to act is pointless without knowing the room you actually have for change.
Kilpi reached the same conclusion and even gave one of his essays the title we need to shift our focus from competencies to agency. His reasoning is that work used to be describable as a fixed bundle of skills, and you were paid according to the bundle you carried. When work becomes varied, contextual, and full of exceptions, that breaks down.
What matters is no longer the competencies you hold in reserve but your capacity to act well in a specific, changing situation, with other people. Agency, in his words, is an emergent property of cooperative interaction. It shows up between people, not inside one person's CV.
Valentine adds a second layer she found in her research: narrative agency, an idea from the Finnish scholar Hanna Meretoja. The stories we live inside, about what a career should look like, about what counts as work, about who gets to set the terms, shape how we act, often without our noticing.
As we become more aware of those inherited stories, we gain some power over them, and we can choose to act differently. For someone leaving a long institutional career, this is a hard, practical idea. The story that says a real job has an employer, a title, and a Monday-to-Friday shape is exactly the one that needs examining before you can build something else.
Valentine has practised this across 15 years of self-employment, and it shows in how deliberately she's built her work. She went back to university to do a master's at La Sorbonne, paused a PhD to write a book she actually wants people to read, ran a podcast for a well-known French HR nonprofit, became president of another, and now builds management training, writes, and codes small applications when she needs them. Agency, for her, is something she has done, repeatedly, the kind of knowing you can only build by acting.
Where does your experience actually become valuable?
What happens when your experience meets the problem
The client finishes describing what they think they need, and the younger consultant starts listing deliverables. You stay quiet, because you recognised this situation several times before and you can already sense that the brief describes a symptom rather than the cause. You ask one question that puts it in a different frame. The room goes quiet, the client sits back, and the real work starts there.
If value no longer sits in a job description or a fixed bundle of skills, where does it sit? The most useful answer I've found comes from an unexpected place, the physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose work has influenced my thinking.
Rovelli argues that at the deepest level things don't carry their properties on their own. A property only shows up in a relation. A key becomes useful only in relation to a lock. A rock is only hard in relation to something it meets.
Expertise works the same way, which is why it's so hard to put on a CV. Your experience becomes valuable the moment it meets a particular problem, a particular client, a particular conversation.
In storage it's potential. In the interaction it turns into something a client can use: the question that reframes what they thought their problem was, the pattern you recognise from a situation years ago, the connection between two things they assumed were separate.
Valentine put the human version of this beautifully when she described work as overlapping our maps of the world. The value appears between people, in the response that an offer calls forth, which is exactly why a story about a problem you once solved does more than a list of your credentials.
The social philosopher George Herbert Mead made the general version of this point a century ago: the meaning of anything we offer shows up in the response it calls forth, not in the offer held on its own.
This also explains the limits of describing yourself with object language. When you say you have thirty years of experience, you're treating expertise as a thing you carry. The reason that line never quite lands is that it points at the wrong place.
What clients actually pay for is what you see when your accumulated experience meets their situation: the pattern you recognise, the question that reframes the problem.
The fix is to describe the interaction, not the inventory: what changes in the room when you're in it, what you notice that others miss, what becomes possible once you reframe the question.
There's a quiet piece of good news buried in all this, and it's worth saying plainly because the future-of-work conversation so often skips it. As AI takes over the routine, rule-following work, the routine knowledge that used to be worth paying for gets cheaper by the month.
What does not get cheaper is the reading of a situation that only comes from having met many like it.
Jon Younger draws the useful distinction: knowledge has a half-life, and AI keeps shortening it, but the accumulated sense of what actually works in a particular context does not decay the same way.
If anything it appreciates the longer you practise. So the very thing that felt like a liability, that your value is hard to name and hard to systemise, turns out to be the thing that is becoming scarce while everything around it is becoming abundant.
The same logic clarifies how to think about AI, and Valentine is a good guide here because she's neither frightened nor dazzled. She uses it as a thinking partner, to challenge her ideas and to research widely, and she vibe codes a working app when she needs one.
She's also honest about the limits. She lost ten hours trying to solve an automation problem with a chatbot before a thirty-minute conversation with a human expert sorted it out. As she said, thank God there are things we don't need AI for, and nothing compares to a human conversation.
It helps to separate two kinds of problem here, a distinction the French thinker Edgar Morin draws.
A complicated problem, however intricate, can be broken into parts and worked through, and that is exactly the kind of thing AI is getting very good at.
A complex problem, a particular client, a particular team, a situation that shifts as you act on it, can't be reduced to its parts without losing the thing that matters, and that is the part that stays yours. Used well, you and the tool together produce something neither would alone, an outcome that emerges from the interaction rather than one the tool simply hands you.
The reading of the situation, what to make of it and what actually matters, stays with you, because that's the part that only appears in the human interaction.
The catch: this work doesn't happen alone
There's a hard edge to a relational view of work, and Valentine names it from experience. If your value appears in interaction, then isolation carries a genuine professional cost, blunting the very thinking clients pay for.
Kilpi made the same point through the mathematician Henri Poincaré, who observed that a system whose parts don't interact can only repeat itself; it can't produce anything new.
Take away the friction of other minds and live problems, and even the sharpest reading of a situation, built over years, begins to harden into the same handful of answers. It's the same erosion that researchers studying AI and expertise have started to call intuition rust: remove the steady feedback of real problems and other people, and a sharp read of a situation slowly dulls without your noticing.
Valentine has felt this directly. The co-working space that first drew her into thinking about the future of work closed last year, and for the first time in 15 years she found herself working alone and feeling lonely.
The friends she still thinks with, and the partners she's starting new projects with, are central to how she works. They're where her best thinking happens.
She's also clear-eyed about the wider reality of going independent: there's a whole palette of things you end up doing, running the business, the marketing, the sales, the unpaid hours of networking and reshaping your offer, and the expertise that made you want to go out on your own is only part of the week.
This is the part of the future-of-work story that the cheerful version skips. The work worth doing is increasingly the work that only appears when your experience meets a real problem, in good company.
Almost every experienced professional I've interviewed who has built something durable on their own terms has had help with their thinking: a mentor, a peer group, or a partner who asks the questions you can't ask yourself when you're too close to your own expertise.
Deciding to go independent and deciding to go it alone are two different decisions, and the second one is the one that quietly defeats people.
This is the gap I work in. The reason it's hard to describe your own value is that you're too close to it, and your expertise shows up in interaction rather than sitting still where you can point at it. A thinking partner who asks the right questions is often what turns decades of experience into a practice a client can recognise and pay for.
The Positioning and Practice Audit is a three-week way to work on exactly this together, and the audit fee credits in full against the twelve-month Marketing Partnership if you decide to continue.
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What does this mean for your own practice?
If you're building or rebuilding a practice in the second half of your career, a few practical things follow from all of this.
Look for work where the problems are still being defined. Kilpi argued that in a fast-changing environment the smart position is wherever the flow of new problems is richest, in the conversations where things haven't been figured out yet, rather than in delivering solutions that are already standardised and easy to automate. Your accumulated experience is worth most exactly there, where a genuinely novel problem meets someone who has seen many like it.
Examine the inherited story before you rebuild. Notice where you're still measuring yourself against the shape of a job, an employer, a title, a five-day week, even though you've left that world. Valentine's narrative agency is a tool you can use on yourself: name the assumptions you're carrying about what real work looks like, and decide which ones still serve the life you want now.
Describe the interaction, not the inventory. When you talk about what you do, resist the urge to list what you know.
Tell the story of a specific situation that changed because you were in the room. That's the form your value takes, and it's the form a prospective client can actually recognise.
Build the company you keep on purpose. [ see The Neo-Shamrock a cognitive architecture for independent practice ] If your best thinking happens in interaction, then the peers, mentors, and collaborators around you are part of your practice. Be as deliberate about that as you are about your offer.
Valentine ended our conversation honestly. There's plenty to be worried about in the world of work, and she's not naive about it. What keeps her steady is watching the people around her find real work and do it, often together, often for the greater good, well before anyone has worked out how to pay for it.
The future of work she describes is already happening, in Paris and a good deal closer to home, among people who decided to act rather than wait for permission.
Frequently asked questions
Why are fewer people willing to become managers?
Surveys from Boston Consulting Group, Visier, and the Chartered Management Institute show low aspiration to management alongside high manager stress and a large share of managers who were promoted without any training. Experienced people are weighing the larger teams, longer hours, and emotional labour against a modest pay rise and choosing their own work instead. The refusal reflects a clear-eyed assessment of what management has become.
What is workplace agency, and how is it different from motivation?
Workplace agency is the capacity to act with conscience and autonomy on yourself and your environment, combined with an honest sense of the room you actually have to change things. It differs from motivation because it joins the desire to act with the awareness and ability to act effectively. Valentine Gatard also draws on the idea of narrative agency: as you become aware of the inherited stories shaping your work, you gain some power to act differently.
I've got decades of experience but I struggle to explain what makes me different. How do I talk about my value without sounding dated?
Describe what happens in the interaction rather than listing years or credentials. Tell the story of a specific situation that changed because of how you read it, the question you asked, or the pattern you recognised. Value appears when your experience meets a real problem, so the most convincing evidence is a concrete account of a problem you transformed, not a longer CV.
I want to go independent but I'm worried about working alone. Can I build a practice without becoming isolated?
Yes, and building in company is important rather than optional. Because professional value emerges in interaction, working entirely alone tends to dull the very thing clients pay for, your feel for what matters in a situation. Building deliberate relationships with peers, mentors, and collaborators keeps your thinking sharp and is part of how a durable practice actually works.
References
Valentine Gatard returned for episode 94 of the Wisepreneurs Podcast, Future of Work: Workplace Agency from 15 Years Self-Employed, after first appearing on episode 29. A Paris-based future of work researcher, speaker, and host of the Work Narratives podcast, her thinking on agency, narrative, and the meaning of work anchors this article.
Her first appearance on the Wisepreneurs Podcast was on episode 29: Valentine Gatard Career Independence and Work Narratives: From Jazz to Coaching
This article is based on her upcoming Wisepreneurs appearance for episode 94 Valentine Gatard Future of Work: Workplace Agency from 15 Years Self-Employed to be published on July 3, 2026.
Esko Kilpi, the late Finnish theorist of work, in essays including We Need to Shift Our Focus From Competencies to Agency and Rethinking Skills and Responsibility. His application of Ronald Coase's theory of the firm, and his claim that work is interaction, underpins the argument about why the job is loosening.
Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm (1937). His explanation of why firms exist, in terms of the cost of coordinating work, is the foundation Kilpi builds on.
Carlo Rovelli, physicist, whose relational view that properties exist in interactions rather than inside objects provides the article's account of why expertise becomes valuable only when it meets a specific problem.
George Herbert Mead, social philosopher, whose account of meaning emerging in the response to a gesture supports the point that a client's response, not the credential, is where value shows up.
Jon Younger, who draws the distinction between the half-life of knowledge and the more durable value of accumulated judgement about what works in context. Listen to Jon Younger Professional Relevance: Positioning Expertise When AI Does the Routine Work on the Wisepreneurs Podcast.
Edgar Morin, French philosopher, whose distinction between complicated and complex systems explains what AI handles well and what stays with the human professional.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. His description of pointless paid work informs the distinction between prescribed work and real work.
Charles Handy, The Empty Raincoat. His picture of organisations as a small core surrounded by portfolio workers prefigures the move of work outside the job.
Edgar Schein, Humble Inquiry. His account of what people assume being a manager means illustrates the gap between the title and the skill.
Hanna Meretoja, literary scholar, whose concept of narrative agency Valentine Gatard draws on: awareness of the stories that shape our lives gives us some power to act differently.
Boston Consulting Group with Ipsos, Visier, and the Chartered Management Institute, whose workforce research provides the figures on management aspiration, manager stress, the gender gap, and untrained managers. [VERIFY these figures against the original sources before publishing.]
Lucy Ryan, Revolting Women, on why capable women leave organisations in midlife.
Dror Poleg, on the non-linear economy and the distribution of work, drawn from his conversation on the Jacob Shapiro podcast, "Warp Speed for Everything" (2026).
If this resonates, the place to start is the conversation itself. Listen to episode 94, Valentine Gatard, Future of Work: Workplace Agency from 15 Years Self-Employed, on the Wisepreneurs Podcast.
https://www.wisepreneurs.au/valentine-gatard-future-of-work/