The career, as most people have understood it, is dead. Not the working life – that endures – but the old architecture of it: the single long arc, the carefully chosen specialism, the thirty-year ascent through a recognised hierarchy. Sanjay Menon, executive VP and MD of Publicis Sapient India, wants professionals – particularly young ones – to bury that model and stop mourning it. “In the past, people have thought about careers as one long loop that lasts 25 or 30 years,” he says.