Brooke Masters on Career Growth and Adaptability in Journalism

A great reminder that careers don’t have to follow a straight line. Really enjoyed reading the blog from Brooke Masters, our US Managing Editor, and her journey from local reporting to global leadership. Her perspective on staying open to opportunities and focusing on meaningful work really resonates. Read the full blog: bit.ly/49jaPqn below #LifeAtFT #BuildANewsworthyCareer #Newsroom #Journalism #Editorial #Reporting

A great reminder that careers don’t always follow a straight path ✨ I really enjoyed reading Brooke Masters’ reflections on her journey from local reporting to becoming the FT’s US Managing Editor. What really resonated with me was her perspective on staying open to opportunities, continuing to learn and focusing on work that feels meaningful. It’s such an honest reflection on how careers can evolve over time. Read the full blog here: bit.ly/49jaPqn #LifeAtFT #BuildANewsworthyCareer #Newsroom #Journalism #Editorial #Reporting

Flexibility can make all the difference in building a lasting and meaningful career. As a full-time working mum with two young kids, flexibility has been incredibly important to me. It allows me to be present for school activities and important family moments, while still being able to grow professionally and contribute fully at work. Having that balance makes a huge difference, not just for productivity, but for wellbeing and sustainability in the long run. Brooke Masters shares a powerful reflection on how flexible working supported her career growth while raising a family — something that resonates strongly with me. It’s a great reminder that when organisations create the right support and trust, people can truly thrive. Read the full blog: bit.ly/49jaPqn #LifeAtFT #BuildANewsworthyCareer #Newsroom #Journalism #Editorial #Reporting #WorkLifeBalance #WorkingParents

Really enjoyed reading this. Brooke’s career journey is a strong reminder that growth often comes from stepping outside your comfort zone — whether that’s learning a new subject area, taking on leadership responsibilities or navigating change across the industry. The best careers are rarely linear, and this is a great example of how curiosity and adaptability can shape meaningful long-term work. Read the full blog: bit.ly/49jaPqn #LifeAtFT #BuildANewsworthyCareer #Newsroom #Journalism #Editorial #Reporting

Flexibility can make all the difference in building a lasting career. Brooke Masters shares how being able to work four days a week for many years helped her continue to grow while raising a family - something that’s still core to how we think about careers at the FT. It’s a powerful example of how the right support can unlock potential. Read the full blog: bit.ly/49jaPqn #LifeAtFT #BuildANewsworthyCareer #Newsroom #Journalism #Editorial #Reporting

Rewarding an organisations 'Rising Stars' can AND SHOULD go beyond just promotions. At WildWorks, we work with businesses to ensure leaders of the future are invested in and supported, beyond a new title or 'band'. Read on for one perspective from HBR around 'star employees'. --- https://lnkd.in/g6nMbiZA

Polaris is the North Star. The North Star is not the destination itself, rather it is a fixed point people - coming from any direction, community, language, and mode of transportation could use to orient themselves when the path ahead was uncertain, dangerous, or difficult to navigate. It offered direction, not control. Alignment, not uniformity. I have been thinking a lot about that lately. A North Star does not erase the complexity of the terrain or disagreements on the best path. It helps people navigate regardless by remaining a constant when nothing else feels certain. Trafficking has always thrived in isolation, instability, economic vulnerability, and systems failure. Addressing it requires infrastructure. Trusted relationships. Ethical stewardship of information. Survivor-informed strategy. Coordination across sectors that do not always agree politically, ideologically, or operationally. Real work is often quieter than people expect or want. It is built through trust, credibility, repair, consistency, and the difficult work of staying in relationship across differences and over time. Not every important conversation happens publicly. Not every form of leadership is loud. Not every act of systems change is immediately visible. Polaris will continue to serve as navigational infrastructure for the field: helping connect people, data and insights, and strategy in ways that strengthen collective capacity without demanding ideological uniformity. Right now, this field needs healthier approaches to conflict, accountability, and repair. It also needs support in learning how to disagree without destroying shared purpose - and each other. We must recognize that trust is not built through branding, it is built through repeated behavior over time. As the North Star, Polaris cannot simply be about dominating visibility on platforms, battling for institutional preservation, or winning short-sighted arguments. I am committed to ensuring Polaris continues to help us navigate towards a world where people are safer, freer, economically secure, connected to community, and able to fully exercise agency over their lives. #humantrafficking #survivorleadership #northstar

Quotations 📚 “The biggest question that leaders need to ask themselves is: what am I offering in the age of uncertainty?” 📚 “If I can’t offer stability, if I can’t offer you that life script, what is it that leaders are offering their people?” 📚 “Young people will come into your office and be like, give me a raise and you’ll see what I can do.” 📚 “If you’re offering me no loyalty, I offer you no loyalty.” 📚 “Your employees are more likely to get on the housing ladder by being loyal to their parents than being loyal to you.” 📚 “AI is exposing the lack of human interaction at work.” 📚 “Trust is built on human connection.” 📚 “Organizations need to encourage the things that can’t be counted.” Key Points 📚 Younger workers are not less ambitious—they are responding rationally to an economy of layoffs, instability, and broken corporate loyalty. 📚 The traditional “life script” (study hard → stable career → home ownership → retirement security) has collapsed for Millennials and Gen Z. 📚 The “Bank of Mom and Dad” has replaced corporations as the main source of stability, housing access, and financial security. 📚 Solopreneurship and “squiggly careers” are rising because people trust multiple income streams more than one employer. 📚 What older leaders call “entitlement” is often a rational response to organizational behavior: no loyalty from employers creates no loyalty from employees. 📚 Work has become increasingly transactional and dehumanized through layoffs, over-digitization, and the erosion of mentorship and belonging. 📚 AI should remove dehumanizing work—not replace human connection. Its highest value is freeing people for care, wisdom-sharing, and better communication. 📚 The future of leadership is not productivity management—it is trust, belonging, clarity, and intergenerational learning. Headlines 📚 “Young Workers Don’t Lack Hunger—They Lack Reasons to Trust Employers” 📚 “The Bank of Mom and Dad Has Replaced Corporate Loyalty” 📚 “AI Won’t Replace Leadership—It Will Expose How Bad Leadership Already Is” #Leadership #FutureOfWork #GenZ #Millennials #WorkplaceCulture #AILeadership #TalentStrategy #EmployeeExperience #OrganizationalDevelopment #ExecutiveLeadership #LearningAndDevelopment #LearningDispatch https://lnkd.in/gZ8NFGqg

I have talked about this on national television and I am still talking about it because nothing has changed. Professionals in their forties, fifties and beyond, people with deep sector knowledge, commercial judgement built over decades, the ability to read a room, manage complexity and deliver under pressure - are being screened out before they get anywhere near a conversation. Not because they can't do the job, but because someone has decided they are overqualified, set in their ways or too expensive. All three assumptions are usually wrong. The businesses that are getting this right are the ones hiring for what a role actually needs. Judgement, delivery and the ability to handle ambiguity - rather than filtering by age, recency of experience or how someone looks on a slide. Some of the most impactful hires I have made in the last five years have been people who brought exactly the kind of experience the business said it did not need. Experience is not a risk, but ignoring it is.