Attaining Plateau

Today, there comes a time a person's career when they need to manage money or people or both if they want to make progress, get promoted etc. For some, this is not a transition they are looking forward to. They may be perfectly happy doing their job and doing it very well but they don't want responsibility for money or people. That is recipe for attaining a career plateau with no place to go but down because your job can be done for a lot less by people less than half your age. 

It was interesting to read this article on robots making manager obsolete in the future. My first boss was likely the best I ever had. That was a long time ago and yet, he was one of those a robot could never replace. He showed us how we could improve ourselves individually and function better as a team. He left us much better than he found us. 

There will be fewer managers because they won't be able to evolve as administrative, project and team management and direct report development tasks are automated. On the latter, a bot will start interventions with a direct report instead of you.

To stay relevant, managers would need to add value beyond project, budget and team herding. In a future of intelligent assistants and automation, maybe the plateau which is the end of the line for an individual contributor will be a more fulfilling and rewarding place.