Account Manager @ Kurogo | Sharing lessons from a life in Marketing

Hey, I'm Joe 👋

I post about: 

- Careers
- Marketing 
- Leadership 

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Joseph Rudd

One of the most underrated career skills:

Being respectful to everyone in the room.

I was raised to treat the janitor the same as the CEO.
And it's a lesson that's carried me through my career.

It might sound simple.
But it often gets overlooked.

And yet, being polite, respectuful and empathetic of everyone else (regardless of their role or postion) goes much further than most realise.

✅ It builds trust with colleagues.
✅ It creates opportunities with mentors.
✅ It shapes your circle of people.

Because career growth is built on trust.

3 simple lessons to carry forward:

1/ Value every role.
↳ A title doesn’t define a person’s worth.
↳ Show equal respect at every level.

2/ Listen before you speak.
↳ Everyone carries a story you don’t know.
↳ Be curious about their perspective.

3/ Actively make an effort to show kindness.
↳ Small acts of respect cost nothing.
↳ But they’re remembered for years.

It's not about being perfect.
It's about making small, conscious efforts.

When you do that:

Colleagues turn into mentors.
Bosses became advocates.
Peers became friends.

Respect costs nothing.
But it can shape your whole career.

What's a small act of respect that stood out to you?
Let me know if the comments 👇🏻

Repost to encourage respect ♻️
And follow Joseph Rudd for more.

Helping businesses deliver impact by enhancing their visibility and reputation | Founder of arco.

You'll spend roughly 80,000 hours of your life working. Most people give this decision almost no serious thought.They skip straight to applying. Hundreds of applications to roles they half-want, hoping something sticks. It's exhausting and it rarely works, because the problem is sequence. You can't find the right opportunity if you don't know what you're looking for. And you can't know what you're looking for without understanding yourself and the market you're entering.I've spent the last year researching why so many capable people feel lost about their careers. Hundreds of conversations, in-depth interviews, and a questionnaire study that confirmed the same pattern over and over: people make career decisions based on salary, status, and what seems reasonable, with almost no understanding of themselves.I'm building Rumbo to fix this. AI career coaching that starts with self-understanding. Structured assessments, a personal AI coach, and a clear plan for what comes next.I also write Still Wandering, a newsletter with 15,000+ subscribers exploring career confusion and the future of work.

Alex McCann

Microsoft just published the 40 jobs most resistant to AI. 

Roofers, cement masons, nursing assistants, plant operators, chefs. 

Only 3 out of 40 require a degree.

The other 37 can all be trained through apprenticeships or vocational routes.

Meanwhile, the UK sent £3.3 billion in apprenticeship levy funding back to the Treasury between 2019 and 2022. Employers couldn't figure out how to spend it. Plumbing apprenticeship starts have fallen 37% since 2021. 

Only 41% of apprentices who do start complete the programme. And only 8% of UK construction workers are under 25.

Germany has 342 recognised apprenticeship occupations and a system that's been working for over a century. The UK renamed its failing levy the "Growth and Skills Levy" and carried on.

Close to a million young people are currently not in education, employment, or training. The system funnelled them towards the kinds of work AI is now replacing and away from the kinds it can't touch. And the one mechanism that could reconnect them to those jobs, apprenticeships, returned £3.3 billion to the Treasury because nobody in the system could work out how to use it.

This is fixable. The jobs exist, the demand is enormous, and the training routes are well understood. Germany proved that decades ago. 

The failure is entirely in the plumbing of the system, not the people it's supposed to serve.

Alex  McCann

Founder of Rumbo | Re-thinking Traditional Career Advice and helping people find meaningful work | Writer at Still Wandering Newsletter

"Have you tried wanting it more?"

This is the core of most hustle culture advice. Work harder, network more, wake up earlier, grind.

And discipline obviously matters, you can't build anything worthwhile without it. But this advice neglects something fairly fundamental: a lot of the people I talk to don't have a motivation problem, they have a direction problem. 

They're perfectly willing to work hard, they just have no idea what to work hard on, and being told to try harder doesn't help with that.

The hustle crowd and the anti-hustle crowd are mostly having two completely different conversations. One group found the thing that feels like play to them and can't understand why everyone else isn't just doing that.

The other group is burnt out from years of grinding on something that was never right for them in the first place, and they've concluded that ambition itself is the problem. They're both partly right, which is why the debate never goes anywhere.

The people I know who work the hardest barely think of it as work. They found something where the work stopped feeling like work, and everything that looks like discipline from the outside just followed. The hustle was a byproduct of finding the right thing, and the burnout was a byproduct of forcing the wrong one.

Spend less time forcing yourself through the grind and more time figuring out what you'd grind on willingly.

People will spend 6 months job hunting and 0 hours observing themselves.

They'll rewrite their CV twelve times, apply to hundreds of jobs, scroll job boards every evening, and still have no idea what time of day they think best, which tasks they avoid without realising, or what they're doing when they forget to check their phone.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD, a neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments, calls this "self-anthropology." For 24-48 hours, you treat your own life like a field study, jotting down everything you notice: when you feel engaged, when you feel flat, what decisions you're making on autopilot, why your day is structured the way it is.

I've had hundreds of conversations with people stuck in career uncertainty over the past two years, and this pattern comes up constantly. Someone will tell me they want a career that feels meaningful, that gives them autonomy, that uses their strengths. Then I'll ask them what their strengths are, or when they last felt properly engaged in a piece of work, and there's a long silence. They've spent months thinking about what they want from a career and almost no time observing what they're like as a person.

This is the problem we're building Rumbo to solve. The platform walks you through a structured process of self-understanding before you ever look at a job listing, helping you map out what holds your attention, what drains you, what you value, and how you think. Because the best career decision you can make starts with knowing who you're making it for.

If you're stuck in career uncertainty, you can join the waitlist in the comments.

I got my first hate article.

Over the past year, I've been writing about career confusion, why traditional career advice is broken, and what I think we should be doing about it.

In less than three months, Still Wandering went from zero to 15,000 subscribers. Articles were picked up by The Financial Times and The Free Press. CEOs of companies I genuinely admire reached out to talk.
For all of that, I am EXTREMELY grateful.

But along the way, I've faced criticism that I think is worth addressing openly:

1. Privilege

"What a luxury it is to sit around thinking about the meaning of your work."

And yes, they're right. If you're thinking about meaning, you're not thinking about survival. I acknowledge that completely. But I know a lot of intelligent, ambitious people in extraordinarily fortunate positions who are spending the vast majority of their time on work that has precisely zero positive impact on anything. 

I want to help people stop wasting that privilege.

2. Trust

"You're selling something, so we can't trust you." 

This one baffles me. The implication is that anyone who builds a solution to a problem and charges money for it is automatically a grifter. I would understand this if what I was offering was rubbish, but I believe in what we're building and I think it addresses a real, widespread problem.

3. Youth

"You're just a kid who's never worked a real corporate job." True. I've been open about that from the start. There are plenty of people who know far more than me about careers and the future of work, and I've done my best to seek out their expertise and bring it into what we're building. I've also had hundreds of conversations with people who have lived these experiences and shared them with me in detail. 

I don't think age or lack of experience should prevent anyone from trying to solve problems they genuinely care about.

I'm not famous, I'm not a public figure, I'm just someone writing about careers on the internet. To see people take the time to tear that apart conjures up a real mix of self-doubt, frustration, and curiosity.

But I think the internet needs more people who are willing to share what they're working on honestly, admit when they're wrong, and change their mind publicly. If the price of doing that is occasional hate from strangers, I think it's worth paying.

I wrote about this in more detail on Substack. Link in the comments.

"That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult."

A 12-year longitudinal study of 1,775 people backs this up. Researchers found that adolescents whose careers matched their early interests were significantly more satisfied with their jobs over a decade later. Early interests also predicted degree attainment, income, and occupational prestige.

The part that should concern anyone in the wrong career: interest changes during adulthood were largely irrelevant. It was the original interest levels, the stuff that was already there when you were young, that did the predicting.

Most people lose access to that data. They lose it slowly, through a system that rewards conformity and punishes deviation, and by the time they're sitting in a careers office at twenty-one, the most useful information they have about themselves has been buried under a decade of optimising for grades, social approval, and whatever their parents thought a respectable career looked like.

Harvard researchers have found that children's curiosity drops significantly by the fourth or fifth grade. Teachers claim to value creativity and independent thinking, but research shows they reward obedience and conformity. Creative subjects get labelled as electives, treated as less serious than maths or science, and the message lands.

The kid who spent hours building worlds out of cardboard boxes becomes an adult who says "I'm not really a creative person."

Your childhood contains some of the most honest career data you have, because it formed before the filtering started. Before you learned to perform competence in subjects you didn't care about. Before you absorbed the message that art is a hobby and finance is a career.

I wrote about four ways to use that data in this week's article.

Link in comments.

You'll spend 80,000 hours of your life working.

Most people spend under 80 deciding what to do.

That's 0.1%.

Pick a degree at 17 based on what you were good at in school. Apply for graduate jobs in a vaguely related field. Take the first offer that pays enough to cover rent. Move to the next thing that pays slightly more. Ten years pass, and the sequence of decisions made sense individually, but nobody planned it. Nobody sat down at any point and seriously worked through what they were building towards or why.

If you spent just 1% of your career, around 800 hours, thinking seriously about what work suits you, what you're good at, what problems interest you, and what the market will pay for, it would be the most valuable investment you ever made. 800 hours spread across a few years is less than an hour a day. For most people that's less time than they spend on their phone.

Only 17% of British workers say they love their job. 69% of people considering a career change feel they lack the skills to make one. One in three workers over 30 already feel it's too late. These aren't motivation problems. These are people who never had the time, the tools, or the structure to figure out what they were aiming for in the first place.

We spend more time choosing a car than choosing a career, and then wonder why so many people end up somewhere they never intended to be. 

That's what we're building Rumbo to help with. Link to the waitlist in comments.

Renters aged 18-25 now spend 50% of take-home pay on rent.

In London, 12 boroughs are above half. Every single borough exceeds the 40% threshold that financial advisers consider the outer limit of affordability.
Last week I wrote about how homeownership has shaped our relationship to work. The UK is obsessed with owning property, and that obsession structures career decisions in ways most people never think about.

A lot of people were quick to point out that renting isn't much better. Fair point. So I thought I should do a comparison.

The monthly costs are pretty close. Hamptons found the average mortgage repayment is £1,328 and the average rent is £1,356. In London, renting is actually cheaper by about £115 a month. The costs are similar, but there are clear differences in the career implications of each.

Owning a home means building an asset, which is why people do it. But it also ties you to a location and commits you to a payment that demands a specific salary for 25 years. If a job opportunity comes up in another city, you can't just take it. If you want to step back and retrain, you still need to cover the mortgage. 

You can't easily downsize, and if the boiler goes or the roof leaks that's your problem. Homeowners spend £1,200 to £2,500 a year on maintenance alone. The number taking in lodgers rose 89% between 2021 and 2024 because a lot of people need help covering the costs. That's a small business on top of your day job.

Renting means you aren't building anything. But you can move cities for the right role. You can take a pay cut for work that interests you more without worrying about defaulting on a 25-year commitment. If something breaks, your landlord deals with it. You aren't managing a property on top of managing your career. That frees up space to make decisions about work without a mortgage shaping every one of them.

I'm being purposefully broad here. Plenty of homeowners feel settled and secure, and plenty of renters are stressed about rent increases and never knowing where they'll be living in a year. It's never that simple. But when I think about what each option does to your relationship with work, renting carries less weight even if it builds less wealth.

I'm exploring this more on Still Wandering. Link in comments.

The single best accelerant for career growth is slowly disappearing from companies.

Mentorship. And I don't mean the formal kind where HR pairs you with someone you meet twice and never speak to again. I mean the informal, everyday version where a more experienced person shows you how things actually work. How to handle a difficult client. How to read the room in a meeting you've only just walked into. How to recover when something goes wrong.

That kind of mentorship has always depended on proximity to people with more experience than you. And those people are being cut at a remarkable pace. Korn Ferry surveyed 15,000 workers across 10 countries in late 2024 and found that 44% of Americans said their company had removed managerial levels in the previous year. The corporate world calls it "unbossing." Zuckerberg made it famous when he cut thousands of roles at Meta.

I get the logic. Too many organisations had layers of people approving other people's approvals, and flattening those structures often makes companies faster and leaner. I'm not arguing we should keep bloated hierarchies for the sake of tradition.

But I think we're underestimating what disappears alongside them. 83% of Gen Z workers say a workplace mentor is important for their career, yet only 52% report having one. Across all ages, 76% of professionals say mentorship matters, but only 37% have a mentor. The demand keeps growing while the supply is being restructured out of existence.

And it compounds. People who never receive proper mentorship become the managers who don't know how to give it. The knowledge that used to transfer naturally, through years of working alongside someone more experienced, gets thinner with every round of cuts.

I don't have a clean answer for what replaces the old model. But I think we need to start having the conversation, because right now the focus is entirely on efficiency, and almost nobody is asking what we're losing alongside it.

The standard career reward for being good at your job is to stop doing it and start managing other people who do it.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to interview Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer. When he arrived in 2023, he found 87,000 employees, twelve layers of management, and a 1,362-page rulebook. Five signatures to replace a pump. As he told Business Insider: 

'We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy.

He spent the next two years collapsing the structure. Twelve layers to six. Management positions roughly halved. Most of those people are still at the company, using their expertise rather than approving things.

Bayer is extreme, but the pattern is everywhere. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people who become managers in the UK have received no formal management training. There are 2.4 million of them. 

They call them "accidental managers." 28% of employees have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager, and half of all employees who rate their manager as ineffective plan to leave within the year.

The OECD estimates this costs UK employers approximately £84 billion a year. If the UK matched Germany's management capability, that gap could be worth £127 billion to the economy.

We treat management as a reward. It's a completely different skill set, and we keep being surprised when people who were never trained to do it turn out to be struggling.

57% of UK workers plan to quit this year.

Most of them won't.

They'll think about it on Sunday evening, forget about it by Tuesday, and repeat the cycle for another six months. I've spoken to hundreds of people stuck in this loop, and the patterns are remarkably consistent. 

Here are 5 signs it might be time.

1. You've stopped learning anything. You could do your job on autopilot and you have been for months. Hays found that limited development is now the number one reason people are unhappy at work, cited by 48% of dissatisfied employees. When growth disappears, resentment fills the gap pretty quickly.

2. You constantly find yourself arguing for your job. When someone asks how work is going, you lead with the salary, the benefits, the stability.

3. Your best thinking happens outside of work. You have creativity and focus for side projects, hobbies, conversations with friends. Then you sit at your desk and something switches off.

4. You're performing a version of yourself. There's a growing gap between who you are at work and who you are everywhere else, and maintaining it takes more effort than the actual job. You've learned to say the right things in meetings, care about the right metrics, laugh at the right jokes.

5. You can describe what you hate with perfect clarity but go blank when someone asks what you'd do instead. This is the most common thing I hear. People will talk for twenty minutes about everything wrong with their current situation and then have nothing when you ask what they want.

If you recognised yourself in three or more of these, it's probably worth investigating properly. 

I wrote a longer piece on how to think through the decision to quit, with a framework for understanding your data and your risk capacity. 

Link in comments.

1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate roles.

That's the UK job market right now.

The ISE recorded the highest number of applications per job since they started tracking the data in 1991. 

And the response from the careers industry has been predictable: more CV workshops, more interview prep, more LinkedIn optimisation tips. All of it assumes you already know what you want.


I spent three years studying music production because I had no idea what I wanted and it seemed like the opposite of engineering (which is what my teachers told me to do). I then started a marketing agency, watched it fail and learnt loads, got a job as a creative director to save money, and eventually hired a career coach because I was still lost. 

I was 24 before anyone asked me a useful question about what kind of work would suit my personality, after A-levels, a degree, an internship, and three different career attempts.

I've spent this last year talking to hundreds of people in similar positions, and the Deloitte 2025 Gen Z survey confirms what I keep hearing: 89% of young workers consider purpose important to their job satisfaction, but only 6% say reaching a leadership position is their primary career goal. 

These are people who want meaningful work and have no idea how to find it, entering a job market where the World Economic Forum estimates 39% of existing skill sets will be outdated by 2030.

Careers are long. These are strategic decisions with decades of consequences, and the entire support system treats them like tactical ones. 

There is almost nothing that helps you understand what kind of work suits how your brain works, what problems you'd find worth solving for ten years, or which growing industries match your particular strengths. The stuff that determines whether those 80,000 hours feel like something you chose or something that happened to you.

That's why we're building Rumbo. It's a career coaching platform that starts with self-understanding, helping you figure out what kind of work fits your personality, your strengths, and how you think, before you start applying anywhere. 

We're launching soon and the waitlist is in the comments.

Humans are good at one thing above all else...

Worrying.

Christopher Columbus calculated the world would end in 1658. The Cold War gave us a Doomsday Clock that has never been more than 17 minutes from midnight. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we had Y2K within a decade, then climate catastrophe, then the Singularity.

We evolved to scan for threats, and for good reason: the ancestors who worried about the rustling in the bushes survived, and the ones who didn't, didn't. The snakes and tigers are largely gone, but the wiring remains.

Right now, in my world, that wiring is pointed squarely at AI.

The story I hear in almost every conversation goes like this: AI destroys jobs, without jobs humans lose purpose, without purpose society collapses. It's a tidy narrative, and it maps perfectly onto our appetite for catastrophe.

But the data so far tells a different story. The WEF projects a net gain of 78 million jobs globally by 2030, workers using AI save an average of 7.5 hours per week according to LSE research, and 60% of jobs that existed in 2018 did not exist in 1940. 

Meanwhile, the CEOs building this technology fundamentally cannot agree on what's coming: one predicts half of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear, while another says that's nonsense based on everything history tells us.

I've spoken to hundreds of people about career confusion over the past year, but I would not bet on myself to crack a question that has the people building AI at odds with each other.

What I will say is this: things have historically worked out well because people worked to make them work out well. The agricultural revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, every major transition required labour laws, education reform, retraining, and decades of deliberate effort. None of it happened passively.

I wrote about this in more detail this week. Link in comments.

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