What Do You Tell the Next Generation?

Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay, and Ali Al Mokdad work through a question all three keep getting asked, from students, emerging leaders, and colleagues who lost their jobs: what do you tell someone about a career in humanitarian and development work now that the old pathway in has broken? The conversation moves from motivation versus identity, the job is only the vehicle for the values you enact, to Ali Al Mokdad's distinction between purpose and task, the task is disappearing into AI while the purpose of a role, building judgement and learning how an organisation actually works, must not. Kim Kucinskas presses on where the next generation earns hard-won judgement if the entry-level work is automated away. It gets honest about private truths and public lies, the sector fracturing, and humanitarian diplomacy as the work of keeping the door open, and closes on the strange advantage emerging leaders have: they do not need to unlearn a version of leadership built for a world that no longer exists.