What Would You Take With You?

Originally written in Traditional Chinese: AI 時代最該問的：換一家公司，你帶得走什麼

This week Microsoft sent roughly 60,000 employees an offer. The question inside it: would you like to leave now?

On October 26, Microsoft's Chief People Officer, Amy Coleman, announced a Voluntary Exit Offer on the company's official blog. According to the Associated Press, Microsoft offered it to about 60,000 employees, roughly 27% of the global workforce. It covers employees at level 70 and below in participating teams in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. Those who leave receive financial support and career planning resources; the amounts are not public. Coleman called the approach "new for us."

One detail made me read twice. Microsoft's post does not mention AI at all. The AP headline frames it as happening "as AI spending accelerates." The company gave no such reason; the coverage supplied the context. I won't draw the conclusion Microsoft didn't.

What I keep thinking about is the 60,000 people reading that email. To me, the real question is not "do you want to leave?" It is "if you had to leave tomorrow, what would you take with you?"

My take: the most useful question in the AI era is not "will my job be replaced?" It is "what do I carry that would still work at a different company?"

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 says employers expect about 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030. My reading: much of what changes is how the work gets done. What changes less is where you are heading.

A line I often use in my course: AI is speed; people are direction. Internal systems, processes, and company-only tools are speed; you relearn them at the next job. Judging whether something is worth doing, turning a mess into something clear, getting a person to listen to the end: that is direction, and it goes wherever you go.

To be clear, I am not telling anyone to quit, or predicting your employer will send this email next month. This exercise works best when you feel secure. If you only start thinking when the letter arrives, all that's left is panic.

Try a "take-with-you list." Draw a line down a page. Left: skills that only matter inside your current company. Right: skills that would still work anywhere. See which side is longer. Then pick one item on the right and ask: in the next 90 days, what will I make to prove I can really do this? A piece of work, a talk, teaching a new colleague. Any of these counts.

Educators can ask students: "What did you learn this term that you could take out of this classroom?" Parents can look at a child's week the same way: which of it would still be theirs with a different teacher or school?

Sixty thousand people are probably weighing this question this week. The rest of us can write our answers before any email arrives.

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