Your job has a shelf life. And you are ignoring it.
Every role will ship with an expiry date.
The qualification that got you in is not the qualification that keeps you in.
Last quarter, retrenchments rose to 3,830 in Q1 2026, the highest quarterly figure since Q3 2023. But the number that should stop you is not that. It is this: degree holders now have the highest retrenchment incidence of any qualification group, rising to 3.1 per 1000 resident employees.
The people who did everything 'right' — studied hard, got the qualification, built the career — are the ones being let go fastest.
In 1980, the American psychologist Donald E. Super introduced the Life Career Rainbow, describing career development across five stages: Growth, Exploration, Establishment, Maintenance, and Decline.
For most of the twentieth century, that model worked as a straight line. You climbed, you plateaued, you retired.
Protean Careers
Then Douglas T. Hall named what was actually happening in his work on Protean Careers — the traditional psychological contract, where you joined a firm, worked hard, stayed loyal, and received ever-greater security in return, has been replaced by a contract based on continuous learning and identity change.
Today's career is not organisation-centred. It is individual-centred.
Which means, the cycle: Explore, Attempt, Establish, Master; is no longer something you go through once. It is something you now repeat, for the rest of your working life.
Instead of a-career-for-a-lifetime, we are looking at a-lifetime-of-careers.
The part nobody tells you
Here is what I see in coaching rooms over and over again.
People do not get retrenched because they got worse. They get retrenched because they stayed exactly the same while the world around them changed shape.
The engineer who was excellent at the thing that stopped being valuable. The manager whose entire edge was knowing how the old system worked. The specialist who specialism quietly became a feature in someone's software.
None of them was lazy. They were in MAINTENANCE when the market had moved to EXPLORATION.
Nobody is indispensable. But you can be absolutely become irreplaceable.
The difference is that indispenability is about your position. Irreplaceability is about you.
There is good news buried in that report
The same MOM data shows the six-month re-entry rate for retrenched residents rose for the second consecutive quarter: from 57.4% to 60.7%, with improvement concentrated among PMETs and degree holders.
PMET job vacancies actually rose in March 2026. Financial services alone went from 4,300 to 5,800 openings in a single quarter.
So, the market isn't closing. It is re-sorting. And the people who move through it fastest are the ones who already knew their shelf life and started reinventing before the letter arrived.
A Personal Reflection
It can be a scary thought, isn't it? Especially listening to podcasts like this:
And perhaps there are more challenges that we need to face collectively. If we were to lump them together and think of a solution, it would not quite make sense, and I find myself feeling anxious when that happens.
Your one action this week
Not five, just one.
Write down 3 tasks that take up most of your working week. Then ask: could someone else (ideally competent) with good AI tools do 80% of this in the next 2 years?
If the answer is yes, you have just found your expiry date. You now have two years, which is a great deal more than most people get!
If the answer is no, write down: why not? That "why not" is your irreplaceable edge, and it belongs at the top of your resume, your LinkedIn, and your next performance review.
