Prepare
Being paid is the cheap time to move.
Everything here is easier while you still have an income, which is exactly why men do none of it.
Being paid is the cheap time
Everything on this page is easier, cheaper and less frightening while you still have an income. That is obvious, and it is the reason men do none of it: nothing hurts yet, so there is no forcing function.
The men who come out of this well are almost always the ones who did unglamorous preparation during a period when they did not have to. Not the ones who reacted fastest afterwards.
Become specific, not general
There is a lot of encouragement about becoming a generalist who is good with these tools. Be careful with it. A man who is broadly fluent with AI and has no domain is competing with everybody. A man who knows exactly how this applies inside his own trade, with his own clients, and can say where it fails, is competing with almost nobody.
Your twenty years are the asset. The tools are the multiplier. It does not work the other way round.
Own something that is not your employer
Relationships held in your firm's system belong to your firm. Relationships held by you, because people trust you personally, come with you. The same goes for anything you have written, published or built in your own name.
This does not mean taking anything that is not yours, and it does not mean moonlighting against your contract. It means noticing how much of your professional standing exists only inside one company's walls, and starting to build a version of it that does not.
Put your judgement somewhere it can be seen
The hardest thing to prove in eighteen months will be the thing you are actually best at: judgement. It does not show up in a CV and it cannot be demonstrated in an interview by claiming it.
Writing is the cheapest proof there is. A page a week about what you genuinely think is happening in your own trade, published anywhere, is worth more than a certificate, because nobody can generate twenty years of being right about your industry.
Get the money position clean, with somebody qualified
Not investments. The boring shape: what you spend, how long you could go without income, what is on a fixed rate and until when, whether your pension is where you think it is.
This site will not tell you what to do with money, will not give you figures, and will not estimate your position. That is a qualified financial adviser looking at your actual numbers, and it is far cheaper to get right while you are still earning than afterwards.
Two years is not a deadline
It is the heading on this page because it is roughly the horizon men can plan against without inventing a forecast. Nobody knows whether your particular work changes in eight months or eight years.
Everything above is worth doing regardless. That is the test for anything on this subject: if it is only worth doing when a prediction comes true, it is a bet. If it is worth doing either way, it is preparation.