Have you future-proofed your career yet? If you answer yes, I do not believe you.

If I am forced to hear a conference speaker or read some self-help publication claiming to show me how to future-proof my career I won’t believe them either, and neither should you.

Future-proof is an adjective that I gather means something like to ensure that the object of future proofing does not become obsolete in the future. In career terms, I presume this means ensuring that one’s skills will always be in demand.

Using the nifty Google Ngram viewer, one can get a sense of the historic frequency of usage of different words. It reveals that we somehow managed to get by without future proofing until the 1980s when the term took off and has since enjoyed an uninterrupted ascent.

Perhaps there is a clue to be had, when one considers that the rise of the use of future proofing has happened at the same time as the rise in the use of the words “chaos”, “complexity”, “transformation”, and “random”. A further clue might be that use of the word “predictable” peaked in 2008, and has been in decline ever since, whereas the frequency of usage of “unpredictable” continues to climb.

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About the only thing that is predictable in all of this, is that when people experience uncertainty in their careers, it is natural that they look for ways to increase certainty. Historically, they are facing a losing battle, given the word “certainty” has been declining (more or less) since 1800 – around the end of the Enlightenment, and, you guessed it, “uncertainty” took off in popularity around the end of World War II.

Our desire for certainty in our lives makes us vulnerable to opportunists, or even to the well-intentioned and overly optimistic types that claim they have a formula for certainty – hence future proofing. Apart from the fact that the world is inherently uncertain due to its sheer complexity, the real problem with future proofing is the assumption that a series of simple steps taken now will take care of the future.

It’s the same old trick of providing a simple, immediate and one-off fix, that will take care of everything. It is a variation on the hoary old story-ending of “and they lived happily ever after”. It may be less appealing to conference organisers or publishers wanting to offer quick and simple fixes, but this kind of oversimplification is not helpful.

Indeed, encouraging people to believe that there are quick and simple solutions that will take care of the rest of their lives will result in disappointment or worse damage, if it means people stop actively exploring, problem-solving and appreciating that we are works in progress, and we cannot “design” our lives now to set and forget.

Jim Bright, FAPS is professor of career education and development at ACU and owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @DrJimBright