Getting a job is easier than keeping it. This mantra has perhaps been there ever since business organisations came into being. Yet very few pay heed to this timeless, classic advice - be flexible and adapt themselves to changes in the workplace.

How many times have we witnessed employees getting frustrated after seeing a peer getting promoted! The person getting bypassed sulks without even trying to understand why it happened. Look at the turmoil in workplaces that has been caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Work from home, downsizing, pay cuts – one of them or all three of them together. None of this has any precedence in living memory.

The challenge of adaptability is now more intense, testing our nimbleness, our willingness and capability of fitting in with the changes, more than ever before. Who will survive? If you are a person who, instead of sulking or blaming others for the change, usually goes searching for the reason behind, you will have a better chance of survival than others in the team. This is a trait that will help you understand the ground reality better.

Once you start realising the 'whys', you will also know or anticipate the impending changes. It may so happen that the line of work that you are involved in may vanish – either due to changes in technology or due to an organisation’s strategy to merge roles. For example, in the not-so-distant past, in every newspaper there used to be a very important function called proof-reading. The proof-reader’s job was to check spellings and punctuation and tally the copy with what had been sent by the editors. The proof-reader was the last line of defence before the news got printed. Now, following computerisation, proof-reading is no longer a separate job profile. Those who could anticipate the change upgraded their skill and shifted to other lines of work. Those who failed fell by the wayside. The same thing is happening in the information technology business as artificial intelligence automates many tasks.

So try to anticipate change and upgrade yourself or learn new skills.

But employees often do not understand their job role and the expectation of the organisation about that role. Before everything else, one needs to understand this and deliver. And then will come the change realisation. Then, of course, is the issue of understanding the change and its implication for your job. As in IT or in the newspaper industry, the lines that vanished left some survivors too. And the survivors were the ones who had kept upgrading themselves for a higher, or a different level of fit.

So, it’s important to relentlessly keep building on your skill. Staying updated is staying one step ahead of change. And, of course, you need to be flexible enough to accept the change. Nothing is permanent; nor is your job. And to meet this challenge of uncertainty one needs to have an entrepreneurial mind-set to ride over these ups and downs. In short, this is what adaptability is all about – ability to analyse your job role, to anticipate change and be ready to float with that through continuous skill upgradation.

As in Nature, adaptability is the only survival mantra in the job market.