Liquid Careers, Rigid Organizations: The Mismatch Few Are Looking At

200 years ago, working life revolved around a single trade. The 20th century consolidated professions and organizational careers: studying a profession, joining an organization, growing, and retiring. In the 80s and 90s, the "one organization for life" contract began to lose centrality.

Yet even today, in 2026, we largely continue to work within a 20th-century organizational model.

For years, our focus was on transforming individuals: new skills, adaptability, reskilling, learnability. Today, we are increasingly multi-profession, multi-career, and multi-job. Careers are evolving faster than organizations.

And demographic change increases the urgency of closing that gap: according to ECLAC, by 2050 one in four people in LATAM will be 60 or older. Personal transformation remains a priority, but if organizations and the social structures supporting work do not evolve at the same speed, they will come into conflict.

If we continue under the assumption that age brings experience, and experience necessarily means advancing toward positions of greater responsibility, leadership, and compensation, how do we sustain organizations where an ever-growing proportion of people continue to accumulate management positions and their associated costs? And, more importantly, who will fill the rest of the roles those organizations need?

That model is not sustainable.

The career must stop being a ladder. Professional development must no longer be viewed as an exclusively vertical journey.We need careers capable of moving in more than one direction. Fluid, liquid careers.

And that does not mean accumulated experience disappears. What changes is where and how it is applied.

We are not talking about something new. Nearly half a century ago, Henry Mintzberg already described adhocracy: decentralized structures with multidisciplinary teams and specialists organized around projects to respond to complex, changing environments.

Decades later, Zygmunt Bauman found in liquidity a metaphor to describe a society where the permanent loses ground to the transient, and individuals and institutions must continuously adapt. His ideas on liquid modernity eventually extended to organizational theory and the concept of liquid organization.

We also see this in agility. Team networks, roles that change depending on the project, and capabilities that can flow to work—flow to work—are already part of organizational models we know. McKinsey describes these models as mechanisms to allocate scarce capabilities to priority work and allow the same person to perform different roles across different teams as needed.

The concepts exist. The challenge is applying them now to a different demographic reality.

A contemporary case is Schneider Electric's Open Talent Market, which connects people's capabilities and interests with positions, projects, and mentoring within the organization. According to the company's integrated report, the platform uses artificial intelligence to match talent supply and demand within the group, incorporates a wide range of part-time project offers, and makes it easy to find internal mentors. It launched in April 2020, and in its first year, 30,000 profiles were created and 3,000 mentorships initiated.

Their experience shows that mobility can cease to be exclusively vertical and become a network of opportunities built around capabilities and needs.

And there is a business reason to do so: companies that quickly reallocate talent to opportunities are more than twice as likely to achieve strong performance, according to McKinsey.

But to achieve this, action must be taken simultaneously on individuals and on organizational design.We cannot build fluid careers inside rigid organizations.

This also requires a new mindset: stopping seeing job titles as the measure of our professional growth.

A longer career may involve leading during one stage, specializing in another, working on projects, taking on a fractional role, contributing from a specific function, mentoring, or even reskilling to perform a completely different job.

We can be very senior in one capability while simultaneously being junior in another that we are developing.

Accumulated experience remains part of our capital. Our job title ceases to be our identity.

A fluid organization is not designed around job titles. It organizes its human capital around its needs at any given moment. And those needs change.

This requires separating dimensions that for decades we advanced together: age, experience, function, level of responsibility, and compensation. In a longer career, responsibility and compensation can rise, fall, and rise again depending on the function performed and the value of that function at a given moment.

It also requires accepting that skills expire. Digital transformation and artificial intelligence are modifying tasks, roles, and capabilities at an accelerating pace. In careers that can last 45 or 50 years, learnability and reskilling cease to be one-off interventions and become permanent capabilities.

It is no longer just about updating skills to keep doing the same thing. We also need to prepare ourselves to do something different.

But if these ideas have existed for decades, an inevitable question arises: why do we still not predominantly organize work this way?

Because liquid does not mean structureless.

A fluid organization needs governance, accountability, coordination, and mechanisms that guarantee collective knowledge transfer. It needs clarity on who decides, who is accountable, and how capabilities are preserved when people move between functions and teams.

Fluidity does not eliminate structure. It separates what needs to remain stable from what needs to be able to change.

Purpose, governance, accountability, and knowledge can provide stability. Roles, teams, projects, dedication, and talent allocation can gain fluidity.

And perhaps it is precisely this balance that will finally bring these ideas to scale.

For decades, our focus was on preparing people to adapt to the future of work. Demographic change now forces us to ask the reverse question: are our organizations ready to adapt to longer careers and people who will change multiple times throughout them?

Fluid organizations do not eliminate experience, leadership, or different levels of responsibility. They eliminate the idea that these must always accumulate in a single direction.

Organizations that manage to anticipate this will have a competitive advantage: they will be better able to mobilize available talent and turn an inevitable demographic transformation into organizational capability.

To work for more years, we must be able to work differently.

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