Take ownership of your career
Written by Sonia Nash without AI but put together into a podcast by NotebookLM!
Many people ask me the question: how did you get into AI? And the shortest answer is: curiosity.
Let me take you back to my early career in Finance back 16 years ago. It’s mid-afternoon, mid-week, and I am frantically typing what I see on a PDF on screen 1 into an ERP on screen 2. As this task - which was at least 70% of my working time – was only requiring a handful of braincells, I did not notice myself fade away into a little nap. At the office. In the open-plan office. I can still feel the embarrassment 16 years later.
This was a pivotal moment for my career. Back then a lot of back office finance jobs were heavily reliant on manual data entry. It dawned on me that we spend a third of our life at work, and there was no way this was going to be my work life. Surely, there’s a better way to do this in the 21st Century? – I wondered as I laid in bed that night contemplating a mind-numbing work future.
I handed my resignation a few weeks later. The job was on my doorstep and adequately paid in line with the job market, yet the Finance Director offered me more money to stay. I politely declined. And I went back to the previous company (an hour drive away) where a large ERP transformation project was about to kick off.
I discovered a new business function called IT-Finance. A bunch of techies who could make my life easier by adding a button here and building integrations there to stop me manually posting stuff. I was hooked instantly – there was indeed a better way, you just had to ask the right questions to the right people. I channelled my inner 5 year-old and spent the best part of 4 years starting most sentences with “why” and “how”. I was lucky to have found very patient techies, and a wealth of additional resources online.
Then OCR came into the picture and I watched my Accounts Payable department tremble at the thought that the machines were going to replace them. The fear was genuine, and so was the risk. But what happens when you give people 50% of their working time back? (The answer isn’t: we all spent more time at the coffee machine!)
They could actually dedicate it to real value-added work. Yes, it sounds like the usual corporate bla-bla but it can be a true statement.
Many Accounts Payable departments have no time to look at aging reports and statement reconciliation, to chase old credit balances and sometimes they don’t even have time to deal with invoices on hold. “we deal with the ones that scream the loudest” is an actual process in AP. Read here, the suppliers that shout at you over the phone because you haven’t paid their invoice which was due 2 months ago.
Did the Accounts Payable back-office function disappear after the arrival of OCR technology? No. the tasks within it changed and evolved. And those who decided to embrace the change and be curious about the technology that made it possible are the ones thriving today.
Jobs and the tasks within them often evolve over time. And while I feel employers have an obligation to ensure the workforce is able to adapt and embrace those changes, I also feel very strongly that we, individuals, are responsible for our own careers.
You can wait for a new piece of technology, or someone who knows how to use it, to take your job. Or you can keep abreast of what is going on in your industry and function and actively educate yourself. The proliferation of online learning platforms, many of which offering free courses, means that learning isn’t confined to the economically and time rich people. You can now learn while commuting, queuing for a coffee or on a grocery run.
In 2022, I had been educating myself on AI principles for 2 years when ChatGPT was unleashed onto the world. The second biggest light bulb moment of my career happened after a month of using it – this is technology that will change the face of business, and likely society, forever. I had the choice to wait and see, or to actively pivot my career towards it. I guess you know which pill I took :)