As artificial intelligence becomes part of everyday work and careers extend well beyond traditional retirement ages, professional relevance is becoming a moving target. Conventional wisdom suggests the answer is simple: keep learning new skills. But according to Emmanuelle Léon, Associate Professor of Human Resources at ESCP, staying relevant is less about chasing every new trend than about understanding how work itself is changing.
Drawing on her expertise in the future of work and organisational transformation, she argues that experienced professionals possess assets that are becoming more valuable, not less.
1. Stay close to real work
One of the risks of seniority is gradually becoming disconnected from the way that work is actually evolving on the ground. Yet the most important transformations – hybrid collaboration, AI usage and new forms of coordination – tend to emerge first in everyday practices, long before they appear in strategy decks or executive briefings.
Remaining relevant requires genuine curiosity about how people really work, improvise and adapt under constraint. Leaders who stay too far from operational reality end up managing the organisation they remember, not the one that exists. The mental models built over decades of experience are powerful, but only if they are regularly tested against what is happening on the ground. Ultimately, you cannot look at today through the glasses of yesterday.
Leaders who stay too far from reality end up managing the organisation they remember, not the one that exists.
2. Never outsource your curiosity
AI can help process information faster, summarise documents and generate ideas instantly. But there is a hidden risk in relying on it too heavily: outsourcing not just tasks, but intellectual exploration itself.
Professional relevance depends not only on efficiency, but on the ability to remain genuinely curious – to ask unexpected questions, to sit with uncertainty and to challenge what the algorithm confirms.
Professionals over 40 have lived and worked in a world without AI. That is not a disadvantage; it is a perspective. They know what it means to search, to doubt and to build an argument from scratch. Used consciously, that experience can provide a powerful (and increasingly rare) advantage: critical thinking that goes beyond prompt and response.
3. Protect and grow your relationships
As technical skills evolve faster and become easier to replicate, relational abilities gain strategic value. In hybrid and technology-rich environments, organisations increasingly depend on people who can create trust, facilitate cooperation and connect fragmented teams. Yet relationships are often treated as secondary compared to measurable performance indicators.
The paradox is that the more digital work becomes, the more human connection matters. And here, experienced professionals hold a real advantage. After all, trust is not one thing but two: trust in someone’s competence, and interpersonal trust. Conflating the two is one of the most common mistakes made by managers. Knowing the difference, and being able to build both deliberately, is a rare and increasingly valuable capability.
Professional relevance is not just about what you know, but about your ability to make collaboration work.
4. Accept the need to unlearn
Long careers create expertise, but they also create habits, reflexes and deeply rooted assumptions. Some of these become obsolete as technologies, organisations and social expectations evolve – sometimes quietly, sometimes brutally.
The professionals who remain relevant are not necessarily those who know the most, but those who are willing to question what they know. This is psychologically demanding because accumulated experience becomes part of our professional identity. Letting go of a conviction can feel like losing ground. Yet the Reinventing Work research agenda consistently points to the same conclusion: adaptability depends more on intellectual flexibility than on certainty. Unlearning is not weakness. It is the precondition for learning what comes next.
5. Master the art of being present. Really present.
In a hybrid world, physical presence has become both rare and precious. But scarcity alone does not create value; intentionality does. What happens in person must now be worth the commute: informal exchanges, spontaneous knowledge-sharing and the non-verbal signals that no video call can fully replicate.
Yet many experienced professionals continue to treat in-person time the way they always have, filling it with meetings that could have been emails. Staying relevant means understanding that presence is no longer a default; it is a choice that requires preparation and awareness. Professionals over 40 know what good in-person collaboration feels like. That experience, consciously reframed, becomes both an asset and a responsibility.