
Building an empowering and fulfilling career - no matter what your role, no matter where you are in the world and no matter where you are in your career journey is more important than ever. Because doing something that has purpose and is satisfying impacts every area of your life. And 2025 is the year to be highly focused about your choices. Let me show you how.
It’s not easy, building your career. I think we can all agree on that. There are highs and, sometimes, there are lows and good days and less good days. Every single job has elements that we enjoy more than others. That is a fact of life. Success can give you such a huge boost it can feel like a new lease of life. A misstep or prolonged career inactivity can feel like it drains all of your energy. It can start to affect not just work, but your wellbeing and other aspects of your life.
The main issue we face is that there are several variables in building our careers. Some are within our control like our portfolio of skills, some less so like timing and some not at all like suitable vacancies arising. Understanding the extent to which we have control is a central theme of my philosophy and so you will hear me talk about it throughout this article. As is breaking down the factors that determine career progression into manageable chunks, so we can deal with one thing at a time.
My hope, by the time you have finished reading this article, is that I have outlined a meaningful and usable structure to help you think about your own career. Whether that be within your area of RELX, across other parts of RELX or even moving on from RELX entirely.
My life experiences tell me there are three fundamental facets to career success - motivation, skills and opportunity.
Motivation: A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way
Skills: The ability to do something well
Opportunity: A time or set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something
Motivation
What drives you is 100 percent individual to each of us. Motivations depend on a great many factors and there are, as a consequence, an endless and unique variety. Your motivations can fluctuate over time, depending on what’s happening in your life, the context in which you find yourself and what is most important to you at any given time.
For example, what you may have seen as a terrific opportunity at one time, is not the same at another time. Accepting a role in another location might be exciting at one point in your career, but the same opportunity perhaps it is not right when you have other things going on in your life such as children sitting exams, or poorly parents. Same opportunity, but your motivations are different.
Perhaps your motivation is making money, and less about what you do to make money, or less about the culture of where you do it. There are industries that pay better than others, but they are also commonly known for burn-out and poor culture. Depending on your motivations, you might accept that trade-off.
Thinking about your motivations is an important first step in thinking about career success. It’s about understanding and being honest with yourself about your motivations and not ignoring them. You own your career so it’s up to you to make change happen at the time it needs to happen for you.
Inactivity and settling for what you have, when your motivation is calling for something different, may well lead to resentment, unhappiness, poor performance and maybe even ill-health.
SKILLS
The skills that you have and new ones you decide to acquire are also firmly within your control. RELX provides an array or resources to help you build new skills. How you engage with these resources to learn, develop and grow, and then deploy these skills is entirely up to you and no-one else.
There are technical skills which cover the ‘what’ in your career. It is these skills that keep you relevant and able to do your job well. Our roles evolve over time, so learning has to be a process that never ends even when doing the same job. This is continuous improvement. Those who keep sharpening their technical skills will excel. Those who do not, may well become frustrated and see their performance fall away.
Then there are behavioural skills, or the ‘how’ we do our jobs. It has often been said that what you do at work is not the challenge, it’s how you do it. This is about collaborating with people. It’s about building rapport, managing relationships, influencing without authority and including others. And this is just the start. But, in essence, it’s about who you are, your attitude and your energy.
For the next step in your career journey, you must understand your current skills and the ones you need for your next move. Then get busy filling the gaps. You may remember in previous articles I have referred to gaining as many skills and experiences as you can, and thinking about these, and your career, as a climbing wall, not a vertical, greasy pole. It is the accumulation of skills and experiences that keeps you relevant, keeps you fresh and keeps you growing.
You’ll notice that I am assuming you will take a next step. If you are not thinking about your next step I am bound to ask why? Staying in the same job for longer than you should isn’t good for anyone and planning ahead is important.
At every stage of my working life people have said that the challenges we face ‘now’ at work are the most daunting. It seems to be a universal truth that the more humanity achieves the harder we have to strive. This year will be no different. Attending to our skills should be a top priority for everyone in 2025.
Opportunity
Going back to our definition, this is the set of circumstances that enable you to make your career move.
In many ways, opportunity is not within your direct control. You may feel your next move is into a role where there are currently no vacancies. You can’t control other people vacating their roles, or new roles being created. Waiting for that ideal opportunity can be hard, but we do have ways of helping you watch out for it, such as setting up a job alert.
This third ingredient in career success is critical and while waiting for the right opportunity to come your way, you might also want to think about what opportunities you may be able to create for yourself. I also encourage you to keep an open mind. New opportunities can come from anywhere and be totally unexpected.
Think about it. Imagine you have an unclouded vision for your next step, you have the necessary skills and your motivation is sound. Are you going to sit and wait? And if so, for how long? Are you waiting for your manager to drive your career? Don’t do that - you need to own your path.
What could you do, whom could you influence and when, to encourage others to think about identifying opportunities that work for you? Maybe it’s time to create your own luck.
A colleague told me a story the other day that they had been blown away by someone they met at work and while they did not know exactly how to deploy them, they were going to see how they could find a way to bring them into their team anyway. Clearly this person was making their own opportunities and it was going to lead to something positive.
Understanding these three components of a meaningful career is important. It helps to break it down into more manageable chunks - helping you think about those things you directly control and those things you do not.
Career progression is like rock-climbing - the path is not always linear. Sometimes it is far from obvious. Sometimes we need to take sideways moves. Sometimes we need to move back to move on, with each handhold and foothold like a new skill or experience.
You will also remember that I am assuming that you are all thinking about your next career step. Every job has a lifecycle - a learning phase, a consolidation phase and a legacy phase. Understanding where you are in that cycle matters. Again, prolonged periods of inactivity in your career pathing or failing to even think about it can stifle personal achievement and a sense of fulfilment.
Do you need all three elements to come together in a happy coincidence for you to take your next career step? Ideally yes, but in practice no. If you see an opportunity and have a powerful motivation, then perhaps you can learn some of the necessary skills on the job. If there is no opportunity, then think about how you might create one.
But you will come to appreciate, as I have, if you are not clear about what your own motivation is then no amount of skill and opportunity will make up for it.

Rose Thomson, Chief Human Resources Officer, RELX
Rose Thomson, Chief Human Resources Officer, RELX
