You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. I'm also someone who has followed what today's speakers call a squiggly career. In their 2021 talk from TEDx London women, career development advocates, Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis, lay out how traditional linear career ladders are limiting.

They'll explain what a squiggly career could offer and why squiggles should be the norm for today's

world. For more, check out their podcast, also called Squiggly Careers.

When we met at university 20 years ago, we made for unlikely friends.

I'm an extrovert who gets involved in everything and talks to anyone.

And I'm an introverted ideas person who finds extroverts energising, but a bit intimidating.

Despite our differences, we both had an ambition to climb the ladder

and have a successful career. We were motivated by how far and how fast we could progress.

And in those first few years of work, we were all about promotions and pay rises.

We were preoccupied by the positions that we held and how senior our job titles sounded.

And on the surface, everything seemed to be on track.

But we started to get this sense that the ladder might actually be holding us back.

The obvious next step wasn't always the most appealing,

and we were both excited about exploring opportunities that weren't necessarily based on what we'd done before.

It wasn't what we'd anticipated, but our careers had started to look and feel much more like squiggly.

A squiggly career is both full of uncertainty and full of possibility.

Change is happening all of the time. Some of it is in our

control and some of it's not. Success isn't one size fits all. Our squiggles are as individual as we are.

And for me, that's meant a career where I've moved from working on foldable credit cards in one

company, they didn't catch on, to building and launching a loyalty app for another.

And that one is still going.

And I've moved from making magazines to working on food waste,

...