Michele Volpi has worked as a consultant and a CEO for multiple companies across the world. Drawing on that experience (and plugging the inevitable tie-in app, tal&dev), THE CAREER REMIX: Build a Future That Fits You. Pivot. Grow. Thrive. is effectively a call for reflection and intention in career decision-making (rather than allowing professionals to drift from one role to the next).
At its core, THE CAREER REMIX makes obvious and timely sense: career decisions should be made by considering the needs and abilities of a worker and then matching them with a corresponding workplace. “When these align,” the text argues, “careers stop feeling forced and start feeling natural, energizing, and sustainable.” This book in particular uses a three-part system, addressing not only the worker’s strengths and the environments in which they thrive, but also what they’re willing to give (i.e., their real, meaningful boundaries about work-life balance). The text leans into quantification, approaching this system with lots of small spreadsheets that offer different ways to frame a question or balance multiple considerations around a difficult choice. THE CAREER REMIX also provides some useful appendices with general info about specific professional problems, including basics on communication. This overall schema will be useful for nearly anyone: as with anything else in life, it’s preferable to think, to inform oneself, and only then to act.
That said, THE CAREER REMIX isn’t applicable wholesale to just any career. The text is clearly geared toward “professional”-class workers with the privilege of being picky about their jobs, and that just doesn’t characterize the majority of workers or job-seekers (at least in the United States, and likely globally). That also characterizes the advice about finding new jobs, which has nothing to do with the actual processes of looking for and applying for work; THE CAREER REMIX suggests romantically courting a company by attending their events, engaging with them on social media, and worst of all, giving away labor for free in the hopes of getting a job. The text’s advice also belies some of the biases common in recent economic writing, most particularly a kind of AI fatalism. These strains can intersect in interesting ways. For instance, Volpi suggests that career builders leave or avoid “entry-level” or “tier 1” roles in a variety of fields, due to the expectation that these jobs will inevitably be replaced by AI. But it never considers how someone is supposed to begin a career if not at the entry level, nor does it consider the long-term damage to an industry when there are no longer entry-level workers building experience and working up to higher-level positions. Moments like these do not undercut the value of the book’s central ideas, but they do bound the practical applicability of those ideas.
It won’t solve everyone’s problems, nor does it address the current (and rapidly evolving) economic realities of building a career, but THE CAREER REMIX still provides useful tools for orienting a professional mindset and negotiating the relationship between work and real life.
Michele Volpi’s THE CAREER REMIX: Build a Future That Fits You. Pivot. Grow. Thrive. offers a system of useful tools and references, although their applicability is specific and limited.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader