Diagram of the O-shaped identity framework. A central circle labeled "You" sits inside a ring labeled "Throughline," surrounded by seven equal wedges representing dimensions of contribution: Writer, Advisor, Coach, Parent, Caregiver, Builder, and Board Member.
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The O-Shaped Identity Framework.

ByBrian Kostantin

SBX JOURNAL  |  AUTHENTIC PRESENCE SERIES  |  O-Shaped Identity

Why T-Shaped Careers Are No Longer Enough

The CEOs of Zoom, Microsoft, Nvidia, and JPMorgan Chase have all said, in their own words, the same thing over the last twelve months. AI will compress the workweek to three or four days. Eric Yuan of Zoom told the New York Times last fall that he expected most companies to support a shorter work week. Bill Gates put a ten-year horizon on the moment when he said humans will not be needed for most things. Jensen Huang of Nvidia warned that the days that remain will not be lighter. Speed, in his framing, does not translate into less work.

There is a part underneath it all that not been fully address. While there is consensus that labor hours are coming down, the topic of compensation is not part of the core conversation. PIMCO’s economists, analyzing the most recent U.S. productivity and labor cost data, found that workers have not captured the real income gains generated by their own AI-related productivity.  Labor’s share of output has fallen, and wages have not kept pace with productivity plus inflation.

There are economists who read the trajectory more optimistically.  Morgan Stanley expects real wages to rise as AI matures, and MIT’s David Autor argues that falling labor share can, under certain conditions, raise wages rather than depress them.    

What is not contested is the structural shift itself.  If it arrives, the career many professionals built their adult lives around — the forty-hour, five-day, single-employer one — does not survive intact. The shape of a working life is going to change. The question this article is about is what shape replaces it, and what that means for the way you frame and build your professional identity today, for tomorrow’s reality.

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The labor data is already moving

If a structural shift were under way, you would expect to see it first in the behavior of the people closest to the edge

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many Americans work more than one job at a time. In November 2025, that number reached 9.3 million. In percentage terms, that is 5.7% of employed Americans representing the highest share in 25 years (Statista, citing BLS, December 2025).  Two details in that data are worth calling-out.

  • It is the highest share since 2000. The trend line is not pandemic noise. It has been climbing steadily since 2021 and has held above 5% for more than two years running.
  • About half of multiple jobholders today hold a college degree. In the mid-1990s, when this rate was last comparable, two-thirds of the people working multiple jobs did not have one. The composition has changed. Multiple jobholding is no longer a story about workers in low-wage occupations stitching shifts together. It is increasingly a story about credentialed professionals whose primary income is no longer covering the life they have.

What PIMCO is observing in the macro data is what the BLS is measuring in worker behavior. The shortfall between what one job pays and what one life requires is being filled, in real time, by the people experiencing it. Nine million of them, at the most recent reading.

The shorter workweek is arriving. The single-employer career is leaving with it.

The productivity gains are real. Who captures them is not yet decided.

It is worth saying out loud that the productivity gains leaders are forecasting are not speculative.

The Anthropic Economic Index, which samples actual usage of the Claude AI system, has tracked task-level speedups in the range of nine to twelve times for tasks that historically required a college-level education. Their most recent estimate, adjusted for whether the AI completes the task successfully, places the productivity contribution at roughly one percentage point of annual labor productivity growth. That is the kind of figure that, if it holds, returns U.S. productivity growth to its late-1990s peak.

Advancements in technology are genuinely accelerating work. What remains open is who captures the gain. The historical pattern, going back through the introduction of every general-purpose technology, is that the gain accrues unevenly, and the workers absorbing the disruption rarely set the terms of how the surplus is divided. The BLS data suggests that pattern is already repeating.

Why the T-shape was built for a world that is leaving

The T-shaped career has been the default leadership-development model for thirty years. The vertical bar of the T is your specialty (the deep stack of skill in a single domain). The horizontal bar is the breadth that demonstrates your ability to collaborate and connect that work across disciplines. Engineer who can hold budget conversations. Marketer who can read P&L. Lawyer who can structure a commercial negotiation.

It was a strong conceptual model. I have hired T-shaped professionals, and I have been one. The geometry made sense for the environment it was built in.

But, notice the assumption underneath it. The T-shape assumes a single, coherent career represented by the depth of the vertical bar. One or several employers, usually one industry, over a long enough horizon for a deep specialty to compound. The horizontal bar is usually built in service of that vertical. The whole geometry is anchored to a single line of professional identity. You are an engineer who collaborates well, or a marketer who collaborates well, or a lawyer who collaborates well. The connective tissue is the ability to connect and align your deep expertise across other functions.

That geometry was built for an environment in which one role could carry the weight of a working life. It assumed an income that scaled with tenure, a company that stayed solvent across decades, an industry that did not get reorganized by a general-purpose technology in the middle of a five-year planning cycle.

None of those assumptions are intact in 2026.

The O-shaped identity, and why it fits the next decade

The shape that better fits the environment people are navigating is not a T. It is an O.

Picture it the way the SBX framework draws it. You sit at the center. Around you, in a circle, are the dimensions of how you contribute in the world. These are the dimensions of who you already are. A writer. An advisor. A coach. A parent. A caregiver. A board member of a small nonprofit you care about.

Perhaps one of those dimensions lies in the vertical in the T, however the idea of an O-shaped identity rises in this new environment where we are building portfolios of work, not just careers.

That is the line I keep returning to in the workshops I run, and it is the line that the labor data and the productivity data are both pointing toward. The portfolio is not a side hustle. It is not the gig economy rebranded. It is the recognition that a single role no longer carries the weight of a working life, and that a life of many contributions has to be deliberately constructed, not stitched together.

Why personal brand strategy cannot be borrowed from corporate brand strategy

The word channel is borrowed from marketing for a reason. In conventional brand strategy, each channel — a website, a social platform, a stage, an earnings call — has its own conventions, its own signal expectations, its own audience. Companies like Procter & Gamble have built entire organizations around this. P&G runs dozens of distinct brands, each with its own audience, its own positioning, its own creative system. The architecture that holds those brands together is enormous: brand managers, agencies, research budgets, distribution strategy, decades of accumulated category expertise. That infrastructure is what makes the segmentation work.

An individual building a portfolio of contribution does not have that infrastructure. The mistake I see most often in the personal branding advice market is the assumption that they should try to behave as if they did. Different tone for LinkedIn. Different voice for the newsletter. A separate persona for the speaking work. The result is a person trying to run a brand portfolio out of one head, on weekends, alongside a working life. It collapses. Or worse, it does not collapse, and the person inside it loses the thread of who they are.

The honest answer at human scale is the opposite of what P&G does. The dimensions of an O-shaped identity are not sub-brands. They are facets of the same person, made legible to different audiences without being fractured into different selves. That is what the SBX Authentic Presence framework is built to deliver — not a segmentation strategy, but a coherence strategy. The output is not a content calendar. It is a signal operating system (Signal OS™), a repeatable way for one person to show up at scale, in the channels that matter, in service of the objectives they have set.

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A portfolio is not a hustle

The multiple-jobholder data and the portfolio-career idea can be read two ways. One reading is hustle culture: you are behind, you should be doing more, monetize every interest, build seven income streams before bed. That reading uses the same numbers I am using and arrives somewhere corrosive. The reading this framework is built on is different.

People have always contributed across more than one dimension of their lives. The change is that the economic structure no longer hides the gap between what one job can pay for and what one life requires. The portfolio approach is not a recommendation that you start hustling. It is a recommendation that you stop pretending, and start treating the rest of who you are with the same intentionality you have been applying to the vertical bar of your T.

Why coherence is the asset the signal economy rewards

In the previous article in this series, I described the signal economy — the environment in which human signals are interpreted by machines, mediated by other machines, and routed to the humans who make decisions. The currency of that economy is coherence. A signal that holds together across time, channels, and the distance between what you say and what you do.

An O-shaped identity is harder to make coherent than a T-shaped one. That is the honest tradeoff. A specialist with one area to communicate has an easier signal to maintain than a portfolio practitioner with many dimensions to hold together.

That is exactly why the work matters. In the signal economy, multiple dimensions without a throughline read as scatter. With one clear, consistent throughline, multiple dimensions read as range. The difference determines what a recruiter or former colleague recognizes when they encounter you — and, more consequentially, what the systems mediating between you and them choose to surface in the first place.

How to begin the work

Building an O-shaped identity is not a content exercise. It is the work of naming what is already true about how you contribute, finding the throughline that holds those contributions together, and learning to surface the right facets in the right channels without fracturing into different selves.

Start with the inventory. Most professionals already have an O-shaped identity in the sense that there are already many dimensions to how they contribute. They just have not named them. Write them down without editing: the specialty work, the advisory work, the teaching, the caregiving, the thing on the side, the role you play in your family, the thing you are known for in your industry. Don’t rank them. Don’t curate them for a resume. The picture you end up with is rarely a person in need of a side hustle. It is usually a person in need of an honest accounting of what is already true.

Then look for the throughline. This is the move most people skip, and it is harder than the inventory. Ask what shows up in all of those dimensions.  What is genuinely repeating?  You will find some throughlines are professional, and some are personal. The strongest ones are both. The discipline is knowing which dimensions belong in your digital signal and which ones are simply true but beside the point. Your throughline should be descriptive, not aspirational. It surfaces from your inventory; be careful not to impose it on your inventory. Without a throughline you have a list. With one, you have a person.

Then calibrate, one channel at a time. Calibration is work, but many people make it harder than it needs to be by trying to be everywhere, all the time, all at once. Pick one channel where the people who matter to your throughline are likely to encounter you. Pick one audience inside that channel whose attention is worth earning. The CFO audience on LinkedIn does not need to read about your coaching life. The community of operators you mentor does not need a deck of your turnaround case studies. The throughline is constant. The expression is calibrated. That is not flattening yourself into a single public version.  It is bringing the whole of yourself to the work and learning, deliberately, which pieces to pull forward. It is also what gives the systems mediating between you and the people who matter enough coherence to pull you forward in the first place. You can expand only after the first pairing is working.

This is the work the SBX Authentic Presence framework is built to support. It is the practice that turns an O-shaped identity from an idea into a signal that holds together under the pressure of a working life — and a presence the signal economy can recognize, surface, and route to the people you want to find.

The shape of a working life is not a T anymore. It is an O. The work of making it readable, in the signal economy that is already reading you, is the work that decides whether your contributions are recognized as range or purely dismissed.

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The SBX Authentic Presence Workshop and SBX Signal OS™ are a practice and a product suite for building presence that holds together in the signal economy. The Authentic Presence Lab is a free one-hour entry. To learn more about the framework, the toolkit, and how the SBX Prompt Package supports aligned use of AI, visit the SBX Signal OS landing page.

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