Future of Work
Adeline Tiah on Reinvention, Skills Stacking and Staying Hard to Replace
The executive coach and author explains why careers rarely follow a straight line and how small experiments build skills that last.
144 - Reinvent Yourself for the Future of Work with Adeline Tiah
Video from Adrian Tan.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
How can professionals reinvent their careers as AI changes work?
Adeline Tiah says reinvention starts with small, low-cost experiments rather than big leaps. Stack skills from different fields, keep learning in bite-sized steps, and look for problems your combined experience can solve. As AI becomes something everyone uses, the advantage shifts to people who create value with it, so aim to be hard to replace rather than simply hard-working.
Adeline Tiah spent more than 25 years in corporate roles across telco, big tech, retail and banking before taking a career break she expected to last two years. Speaking with host Adrian Tan, she described how that pause led to a coaching certification, a role helping long-term unemployed Singaporeans back into work, and eventually a book about reinvention.
Her story is not a neat plan. She went back to banking, ran an internal coaching role alongside a startup marketing job, and only later left to write. Each move, she said, was less an intentional pivot than a willingness to try something new and see where it led. That willingness now sits at the core of her advice.
Today Tiah coaches senior leaders, facilitates team engagement programmes, lectures at a business school and advises startups. The conversation covered what she learned from coaching more than 200 people, why AI will reward those who create value with it, and the practical habits that help a solo professional avoid burnout while building a portfolio career.
Key takeaways
- Reinvention rarely follows a straight line, and sideways or even backward moves can open the next step up.
- People are paid for how hard they are to replace, so build skills that set you apart.
- Test new directions with small, low-cost experiments before committing money and years to one big plunge.
- As AI becomes universal, the gap will grow between people who use it and people who create value.
1. What coaching 200 people taught her about reinvention
During roughly 15 months as a coach, Tiah worked with more than 200 clients who were trying to get back into work. She noticed that the people who succeeded shared a set of common traits. Those traits became the foundation of her book and, later, a coaching framework built around the word REINVENT, with each letter standing for a mindset.
R stands for a risk-taking mindset, which she frames as calculated rather than reckless. E is entrepreneurial thinking, I is inclusiveness, N is being noticeable, V is vulnerability, the second E is empathy, the second N is networking and T is transdisciplinary learning. Nobody needs all eight, she said, but risk, entrepreneurial thinking, networking and cross-domain learning matter most.
Of the eight, she sees vulnerability and entrepreneurial thinking as the hardest to develop, especially for people raised in highly structured education systems. Her book, Reinvent 4.0: Your Keys to Unlock Success and Thrive in Uncertainty, grew directly out of these coaching observations. In it she wrote that people are not paid for how hard they work but for how hard they are to replace.
2. Why skills stacking beats a single big leap
Tiah tells clients to focus on skills stacking. Her own stack started with marketing, then added coaching, then technology from her startup years, and later AI. With those skills gathered, she asks a simple question: what problems can I solve? That lens explains how she now teaches marketing students, advises startup founders and coaches senior executives without treating each role as separate.
For anyone overwhelmed by the thousands of courses on offer, her advice is to start from where you want to be and what you want to contribute. That clarity narrows the choices quickly. She also warns against taking a big plunge while unsure, because it can cost a great deal of money and time before you discover the path is wrong.
Instead she recommends low-cost probes: test, learn and build on what works. She took a certification in human-centred design thinking simply because she enjoys learning, and it later became a facilitation tool for leadership conversations. Even small courses help, she said, because the real value is getting used to learning. Once you take the first step, the second one follows.
3. Creating value with AI and managing a portfolio career
On AI, Tiah pushes back on the familiar line that people who use AI will replace people who do not. Once everyone uses AI the way everyone uses spreadsheets or mobile phones, simply using it stops being an edge. She expects the real divide, for individuals and organisations alike, to open between people who use the tools and people who build value with them.
For graduates entering a tighter job market, she advises embracing AI as a first step and then developing the critical thinking to judge whether its output is relevant. Asking the right questions is the first level. Beyond that, organisations are moving their employment models toward fractional work, and leaders need to be bold enough to drive new business models.
A portfolio career brings its own risks, including burnout, which she experienced when she tried to do too much at once. Her fixes are practical: a clear positioning around the future of work that helps her decline poor-fit roles, time-boxed art and exercise sessions, and a weekday she declares a do-nothing day with no laptop. Her closing advice was simple: take intelligent risks.
