By Katherine Fung

Copyright newsweek

Fran Katsoudas has worked at the same company for her entire life.When she tells young people how long she’s been at Cisco, they gasp. She laughs just thinking about it, between sips of coffee at The Plaza Hotel. “I could see how foreign of a concept it is for them,” she told Newsweek one late-September morning.Katsoudas’ career at the San Jose-based tech giant began 29 years ago, when she showed up to the wrong interview. At the time, the California native thought she was applying for a business development position—not the tech support role that Cisco was looking to fill. But during the interview, Katsoudas decided that it was a good thing that she showed up. Through that job, she realized, she could learn something entirely different from what she knew. So, she convinced them to give her a shot.Today, Katsoudas serves as the Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer at Cisco. For decades, she bounced around, changing roles about every two years. She worked her way up from project manager to senior manager and later to vice president. For the last seven years, she has also held the title of executive vice president.In 2025, Katsoudas’ lifelong employment with Cisco feels like a rarity. Yet, up until the ’90s, it had been common to spend your whole career at the same organization. Employers used to recognize loyalty with splashy retirement parties, with some “lifers” even receiving gold watches as a sendoff gift: a symbolic exchange of time.For today’s workforce though, those days seem like a far-off dream.In the early ’90s, as employees began making lateral moves from company to company more often, employers began valuing flexibility over loyalty. A few years later, more and more workers began to leave their 9-to-5 office jobs in favor of remote freelancing. And by the late-2000s, the gig economy was booming. Freelancing apps like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, TaskRabbit, Upwork and Rover all came onto the scene.Even if today’s college graduates wanted to take a desk job, it seems like fewer and fewer companies are hiring for those kinds of roles. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) most recent report, the unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in August, while wages grew at just 3.7 percent over the past year—the lowest growth since July 2024. A report released by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas earlier in October also found hiring to be at its lowest since 2009.And yet, Katsoudas is optimistic that lifelong careers could make a comeback, thanks to an unlikely accomplice.While everyone else is anxiously worrying about AI replacing jobs, Katsoudas—who leads the AI Workforce Consortium—thinks that AI could be the thing that gives workers the chance to have a longer career within a single organization.This year the consortium, which is made up of 10 global corporations and includes Cisco, Accenture, Cornerstone, Eightfold, Google, IBM, Indeed, Intel, Microsoft and SAP, released its second “ICT in Motion: The Next Wave of AI Integration” report. Katsoudas said the report aimed to analyze last year to understand what the pace of AI in the workforce could look like and to provide tools that workers can leverage for upcoming transitions.In the most recent report, tech leaders emphasized the growing importance of human-centric skills, like communication, collaboration, critical thinking and ethical reasoning. With nearly 80 percent of tech jobs now requiring AI skills, the report said employers should prioritize human skills that will be essential in responsible technology adoption.”The biggest worry is that there are workers who will be left behind,” Katsoudas said. “What the report shows is that there are new jobs emerging that will become amazing careers for people. There are a lot of opportunities to start pivoting your own skills to prepare. We just have to lean in.”At Cisco—where leaders have been evaluating every role within the company, and the key tasks of each—executives have discovered that there could be “even more movement across the company” than currently exists. “I don’t think we realized that some of the skills in this finance role are actually so applicable in this HR role or this sales role,” Katsoudas said.”The type of career that I’ve had at Cisco is actually more likely now—and again—in the era of AI,” she said.Katsoudas isn’t entirely alone in her thinking. Alberto Rossi, the director of Georgetown University’s AI, Analytics and Future of Work Initiative, told Newsweek he could “certainly see a future where AI enables longer and more flexible careers within a single organization by allowing workers to fluidly shift across roles.””Within organizations, employees are taking on broader roles—rotating across teams, wearing multiple hats, and adapting as traditional job descriptions dissolve,” Rossi said. “Across organizations, more professionals are embracing independent or portfolio-style careers, providing the same expertise to multiple clients.”But Rossi said that some of these technological forces also have pushed workers in the opposite direction.”There’s a second, often overlooked shift,” Rossi said. “AI and automation are democratizing access to professional services. By dramatically lowering the cost of delivery, technology is enabling small businesses that previously couldn’t afford marketing, HR or financial advice to tap into those capabilities.”Now that small businesses can afford what was once costly, additional labor, a new kind of professional is emerging: “Individuals running lean, tech-enabled practices, serving dozens of small clients efficiently.””Picture a marketing consultant managing campaigns for 20 neighborhood businesses, or an HR advisor handling compliance for a dozen early-stage companies,” he explained. “This model is taking hold across marketing, finance, legal, HR and customer service—anywhere specialized knowledge was once tied to full-time employment.”Katsoudas laughs when she thinks back on the past three decades.”Sometimes, it felt like a new company because the roles were so different,” she reflected. “I loved all of it.””There was one point where I was like, ‘Oh, I get it. Learning is my currency. That’s how I’m going to make decisions about what I do and where I go,'” she recalled. “Cisco was really open and supportive to all of the crazy moves and different experiences.”In the early days, Katsoudas was not deliberate with the moves she was making. The child of a grocery store manager and a stay-at-home mom, she said she didn’t really understand what a career was. But at work, she found herself surrounded by mentors eager to coach her.At a table in the Champagne Bar that overlooks Fifth Avenue, Katsoudas recalled working under a leader who routinely made a point to ask her what she thought, despite her status as the most junior member on the team. That experience taught Katsoudas that no matter what her role would be in her career, she would always have to think about how she could contribute. It pushed her to approach leaders at Cisco whenever she observed them doing something admirable or particularly effective.Eventually, there came a point where the role she wanted came into focus.”Up until that point, because the learning [I was doing] was so powerful, I was comfortable with, ‘Let’s see where this goes,'” she said. “And then there was a moment where I told our CEO that my goal was to become the head of people and that I would work hard to do everything I could to be the best candidate for that.”A few months later, the head of people left the company. Katsoudas was tapped to replace that person.”Had I not said that, I wouldn’t have been considered for the role,” she told Newsweek.Even though it all worked out in her favor, for a long time, Katsoudas didn’t know whether all the roles she was taking would ever come together in a meaningful way.”I was worried that I did a couple roles here, a role here. What I ended up learning was that those experiences build off one another,” she said. “Today, I feel like I use every single one of them, even the ones I didn’t really enjoy.”Today, she thinks of her career in terms of a metaphor that one of her mentors taught her. “She viewed ‘career’ as a pyramid,” Katsoudas said. “When you fill out the layers of the pyramid, you have more of a chance of getting to the top. She said that there are some people who had more of a ladder up to the top, but that ladder could fall over easily.”She urged new grads to change their mentality around work and to look at careers from a learning perspective. She said that it’s through experiencing both the enjoyable roles and the disappointing ones that people can find clarity about where they want to be.When she talks to young people today, she explains that staying at one organization for decades is possible “when you find a place where you feel seen, where the culture is unique, where you feel connected to the purpose, where there’s opportunity for career growth and opportunity to accelerate.””It’s funny,” she smiled. “They kind of come around and say, ‘Well, yeah, I would do it.'”