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Aneesh Raman and I launched Open to Work this week. The response has been overwhelming, and almost every message I've received comes back to the same thing, which, actually, is thething we were really trying to address with this book.

Uncertainty.

That's the word I keep hearing from people in the search right now. Not fear, exactly. Not despair. Uncertainty. Which in some ways is harder, because you can't solve it. You can only sit inside it.

You apply and hear nothing. Not a rejection. Nothing. You update your resume based on advice that made sense a year ago and you're not sure it still does. You network with people who want to help but don't know what to tell you. You read about AI changing everything and you can't quite figure out what that means for the specific job you're trying to get, in the specific field you've spent years building.

The silence isn't new. The job search has always had silence. But the silence used to have a logic you could work with. Apply to enough places. Make your resume stronger. Get a referral. The inputs and outputs mostly connected.

What's different right now is that the logic itself feels less reliable. And when the logic breaks down, uncertainty isn't just a feeling. It becomes the weather. It's just there, every day, regardless of what you do.

I want to say something honest about that before I say anything else.

That uncertainty is not a sign that you're doing it wrong. It's a sign that the ground underneath the search is shifting, and you're feeling it accurately. The people who aren't feeling it aren't navigating better. They just haven't looked down yet.

Here's what I think is actually happening.

For most of the last few decades, a job search was fundamentally a matching problem. You had skills. Someone needed skills. The process was about finding each other. It was hard and often demoralizing, but the frame was stable. Your value existed, and the search was about making it visible.

What's changed is not the search. It's the definition of value itself.

Jensen Huang said something recently that I keep coming back to. The purpose of your job and the tools you use to do it are related, but they are not the same thing. That distinction matters more right now than most people realize. Because what AI is disrupting isn't your purpose. It's the tools - and when the tools change fast enough, people start confusing the two. They think because how they did the work is shifting, who they are at work is shifting. Those aren't the same thing either.

The work is reorganizing underneath the roles. Skills that were central are becoming baseline. Skills that were secondary are becoming the job. And new things are becoming valuable faster than most hiring processes have figured out how to see them, which means you can have exactly what a role needs and still struggle to make that legible.

That's a different problem than the one most career advice is built for.

Most advice assumes the frame is stable and helps you perform better within it. Get more certifications. Optimize your LinkedIn. Practice your interview answers. None of that is wrong. But it's not the problem a lot of people are actually stuck on right now.

The real problem is: how do you find your place in a market that's still figuring out what it needs?

Here's what I've come to believe, and what Aneesh and I spent a long time wrestling with in Open to Work.

The people getting through this period well are not the ones who found the perfect formula. They're the ones who got close enough to the actual change to understand it from the inside, not just read about it.

That sounds abstract, so let me make it concrete.

Getting close looks like taking on a project, even unpaid or small scale, that puts you directly in contact with how work in your field is actually changing. Not theoretically. Concretely. What's getting automated. What's getting elevated. Where the decisions are moving. You cannot fully learn that from the outside. You have to be in it.

Getting close looks like having direct conversations with people doing the roles you want, not to network in the transactional sense, but to genuinely understand what their day looks like now versus two years ago. What's harder. What's easier. What they wish they had more of on their team. That information is available to anyone willing to ask for it, and most people aren't asking.

Getting close looks like being honest with yourself about where your actual skills are, not where you wish they were or where they used to be. The search has a way of making that harder to see clearly, because the stakes make objectivity difficult. But the people who are moving through this fastest are the ones who can look clearly at what they genuinely bring, and build from there rather than from who they used to be.

None of that makes the uncertainty go away.

I want to be clear about that, because too much career advice promises a path to certainty and that promise is not honest right now. The market is unsettled. Some of that is AI. Some of it is broader economic shifts. Some of it is that hiring itself is changing in ways that haven't fully shaken out. You can do everything right and still have this take longer than it should.

And I want to be honest that not everyone is navigating this from the same starting point. Financial runway matters. Access to networks matters. The sector you're in matters. This period will not be fair, and saying otherwise doesn't help anyone.

But even within those constraints, there is a difference between waiting for the uncertainty to lift and moving closer to where things are actually going.

Because here's what I've seen in every period of significant change in how work gets organized: the people who came through it best weren't the ones who had the most credentials or the most years of experience. They were the ones who stayed curious when it would have been easier to disengage. Who got close enough to the change to understand it. Who kept building, even quietly, even in ways that didn't immediately look like progress.

The uncertainty you're feeling right now is real. The ground is genuinely moving. But the fact that you can feel it means you're paying attention. And paying attention, right now, is the most valuable thing you can do.

You're not off track.

The track is being rebuilt. And the people who show up to understand how are the ones who will help shape where it goes.

If someone you know is in the search right now, share this with them. And if you want to go deeper into how to navigate this moment, Open to Work is there for exactly that.

Read original Open to Work Newsletter here.