Not to do work. To describe work.

By the time she came to me, she estimated she was spending six to eight hours a week writing updates, answering “quick question, where are we on…” pings, and re-explaining things she had already explained in a different channel to a different person.

When your manager asks for constant updates on your work, you end up with two jobs: the job itself, and the full-time project of proving the job is happening.

This article covers why managers do this, what the constant reporting is costing you, the system I give my clients to make most of it stop, and how to tell the difference between an anxious manager and something more serious. It pairs closely with my article on how to deal with a micromanaging boss.

What Constant Update Requests Are Doing to Your Week

Start by taking the cost seriously, because most people underestimate it.

Every update request carries three costs.

The time to write the update. The interruption cost from the ping arriving mid-thought and the thought does not come back for free.

And there is the anticipation tax: once you know the question is coming, you start pre-drafting answers in your head all day. It is exhausting.

The numbers on how much of our work has become talking about what we are working on are bleak.

Microsoft analyzed activity across its own apps and found the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating and only 43% creating, and 68% of people say they do not get enough uninterrupted focus time in the workday.

In one survey of US employees, 43% admitted spending more than ten hours a week on performative work.

Performative work is activity whose main purpose is to look busy and responsive rather than to produce. The researchers called it “productivity theater”.

Ten hours a week is more than a full workday spent performing that could be actually spent doing the work itself.

If you are losing hours every week to proving your work instead of doing it, it is worth talking it through with someone who has untangled this before.

Book a Clarity Call

Why Does Your Manager Keep Asking for Updates?

Is it because your manager doubts your work? Sometimes that is true.

More often, in my experience coaching senior women through exactly this, the updates are about your manager’s own anxiety as opposed to your individual performance.

The most common one is pressure from above. Your manager has a boss too, and that boss asks questions.

If your manager cannot answer “where are we on X” in their own staff meeting, they feel exposed, so they harvest answers from you in advance, sometimes several times a day.

The second is what Microsoft’s researchers named productivity paranoia.

In their survey of 20,000 workers, 85% of leaders said hybrid work made it hard to feel confident employees are productive, while 87% of employees said they are in fact productive.

Only 12% of leaders said they had full confidence in their team’s productivity. Managers who could previously gauge progress by walking past your desk lost their visual cues and replaced them with unending questions.

The third is scattered communication. If your progress lives in five places, a comment here, a standup remark there, a thread somewhere else, then from your manager’s seat there is no coherent picture.

Every gap gets filled with a new request. This is easy to fix and I’ll go over it below.

And the fourth, less common but real, is that the updates are needed documentation with a purpose, which I cover near the end of this article.

The Trap of Defensive Documentation

Before the fix, one warning, because I watch my clients fall into this trap constantly.

When the update requests start, the mistake capable people often make is to respond by documenting harder.

Longer status reports. Receipts for every decision. It feels like protection.

For women there is a real instinct behind it: research on workplace bias shows women are often required to provide more evidence of competence than men to be judged equally capable. Over-documenting feels like the rational response.

But defensive documentation backfires double.

It eats the hours that would have gone into the work itself, which means the next update has less progress to report, which invites more scrutiny.

And it trains your manager to expect ever more detail, ratcheting the reporting burden up instead of down.

The Visier survey found a third of employees prioritize tasks based on what makes them look most visible rather than what creates value. That is the treadmill.

Once you are writing updates to manage perception instead of to transfer information, the updates own you.

The goal is not more reporting. It is less reporting that does more.

Build One Canonical Update

Here is the system I give clients, and it usually cuts the ad-hoc requests dramatically within a few weeks.

Create a single, predictable update that answers your manager’s questions before they ask. Once a week is right for most senior roles.

Keep it short and keep the structure identical every time: what moved forward, what comes next, where the risks are, and what decisions I need from you (your manager).

Four sections, a few lines each. It should take twenty minutes to write, not an entire evening.

Three rules make it work.

Put it where your manager already looks, whether that is email, a pinned doc, or your one-on-one agenda, and send it at the same time every week so it becomes a rhythm they know they can rely on.

Include the risks honestly, because the entire trust-building power of the update comes from your manager learning that bad news arrives from you before it happens. No one wants surprises that need to be solved asap.

And then route everything back to it. Do not skip this part. This is the most important part.

When the ad-hoc ping arrives on Tuesday, answer briefly and anchor back: “Covered in Friday’s update, third bullet. Happy to go deeper in our one-on-one.”

You aren’t being evasive. You are teaching every stakeholder that there is one main place where your status lives, and it is current.

The canonical update works because it gives your manager what they actually need which is a feeling of coverage. And it comes at a fraction of what the constant requests were costing you.

Building the update is the easy half. Getting your manager to actually let go of the daily check-ins is where I can help.

Reset Your Cadence With Me

Scripts To Talk To Your Manager

Open with their need, not your frustration: “I want to make sure you always have what you need when leadership asks about my projects. Can we agree on what an ideal update looks like and how often you need it?”

Often the manager reveals the upward pressure driving everything, and you can shape the update to answer their boss’s questions directly.

That turns you into the person who makes your manager look prepared, which is the exact opposite of the person they need to frequently check on.

Then name the trade: “If I get you that every Friday, can we let go of the daily check-ins? The focused time will show up in more productive work.”

If they hesitate, propose it as a one-month experiment. Anxious managers say yes to reversible things.

If you have this conversation, run the system faithfully for two months, and the daily interrogation continues anyway, then the updates were never really about information.

That tells you something important, and it moves the situation into the territory I cover next.

For the fuller playbook on that dynamic, see my guide to dealing with a micromanaging boss.

Normal Oversight or Are You Being Managed Out?

I would be doing you a disservice if I skipped this part. Sometimes a sudden demand for written updates is not managerial anxiety but is documentation for PIP.

Here is how I help clients read the difference.

Context matters first: a new manager, a new project, or a company in turmoil resets reporting norms for everyone, and heavier check-ins in those moments are usually benign and temporary.

Reorgs in particular make scrutiny cascade through every layer, something I wrote about in what to do after a tough reorg.

The questions to ask are: Is this happening to my peers too, or only to me? Did it start after a specific conflict, a missed target, or a performance conversation?

Has the tone shifted from “keep me posted” to “confirm in writing”? Is the scrutiny arriving alongside other signals, like shrinking scope, exclusion from meetings you used to attend, or feedback that has suddenly turned vague and cold?

Selective scrutiny, a paper-trail tone, and shrinking scope together are a different situation than an anxious manager who pings too much.

If that cluster describes your situation, protect yourself calmly: keep your own dated record of what you deliver and what is said about it, get your accomplishments documented somewhere you control, and start thinking about your options before you are forced to.

Deciding What This Job Gets From You Next

Whether your situation turns out to be a fixable visibility problem or a genuine warning sign, the weeks you spend inside it are clarifying. Pay attention to what they tell you.

Some of my clients run the canonical update, reset the cadence, get their focus time back, and remember why they liked the job. Others fix the reporting problem and discover the resentment does not leave, because the scrutiny was a symptom of the culture.

If you suspect you are in the second group, my article on how to know it’s time for a career change will help you test that honestly.

And if you want help thinking it through with someone who has seen this pattern from the inside of big tech and from across hundreds of coaching conversations, that is exactly what I do.

You can read about how we can work together or book a complimentary clarity call.

You do not need to have it figured out first. Most women book the call precisely because they do not.

FAQ

How often should I actually be updating my manager?

For most senior individual contributors and managers, one structured weekly update plus a real-time flag for anything urgent is the healthy baseline.

Daily written updates are appropriate only in narrow cases: a launch week, an incident, a brand-new working relationship, or an explicitly agreed short-term arrangement.

If daily reporting has become permanent and you are senior, the cadence is serving someone’s anxiety rather than the work.

My manager suddenly wants everything in writing. Should I be worried?

First check for innocent explanations: new leadership above your manager, an audit or compliance push, or a team-wide process change.

If the shift applies only to you, started after a conflict or critical feedback, and arrives with other cooling signals like shrinking scope or vaguer feedback, treat it as possible documentation and respond in kind: keep your own dated records, deliver cleanly, and quietly widen your options.

You do not need a tidy answer before you reach out. Bring me the messy version and we will work out what this job is really telling you.

Talk It Through With Me

You open the application, read the job description, and somewhere around the fourth bullet point a voice says: who are you kidding?

If that voice gets loud enough to make you close the tab, this article is for you.

I work with mid-to-senior women, most of them 15 or more years into their careers, and imposter syndrome shows up in almost every career transition I coach through.

They have enough experience to know exactly what they don’t know yet, and that awareness makes them feel as if they are not enough.

Here’s how I help my clients deal with it.

Why Imposter Syndrome Hits Harder When the Job Isn’t Familiar

Imposter syndrome is the persistent feeling that you’ve somehow fooled people and that you’re one probing question away from being found out.

It was first described in research on high-achieving women back in 1978, and it remains remarkably common: depending on how it’s measured, it affects anywhere from 9% to 82% of people, across every career stage, right up to late-stage professionals.

In a normal job search, you at least have familiarity on your side. You know the vocabulary, the tools, the unwritten rules of your field.

Self-doubt has less to grab onto.

Applying into unfamiliar territory removes that cushion.

When you enter a new field, your self-doubt weaponizes every unfamiliar acronym, tool, and task.

It’s especially brutal for seasoned experts who unfairly compare their day-one beginner skills in a new field to fifteen years of mastery in their old one.

You don’t have to untangle this on your own — the fastest way through is getting clear on where you’re actually headed.

Get Clarity On Your Next Move

What I See with Mid-Career Women Applying Into New Territory

On clarity calls, I hear versions of the same story again and again.

A woman with 20 years of real achievement reads a job description in a new area and mentally deletes her entire track record because the title is different.

The program she rescued, the team she built, the stakeholders she managed through a brutal reorg: none of it “counts” because it happened in a different job.

You may have heard the statistic that men apply for jobs when they meet about 60% of the qualifications while women wait until they meet 100%. What’s less quoted is the follow-up research.

When more than a thousand professionals who had held back were surveyed, the main barrier wasn’t a lack of confidence, it was a mistaken belief about how hiring works.

Many women hold back because they mistakenly treat flexible wish lists as rigid requirements. It’s an outdated rule-following strategy and belief ingrained in you early in your school and career life.

It doesn’t apply in the modern hiring process where job posts require 10 years of experience on a technology that has been out for 7 years.

The current job market makes this heavier.

Many of the women I work with are in or around tech, and right now they’re watching layoffs and rtificial intelligence reshuffling job descriptions and roles as they are searching.

This is also why imposter syndrome during a transition tangles so tightly with self-worth.

If your sense of being good enough has been anchored to mastery, stepping into territory where you’re not yet the expert can feel like losing yourself.

I’ve written more about decoupling your self-worth from your success during a career change, and I’d genuinely recommend reading that alongside this piece.

Unfamiliar =/= Unqualified

Here’s the reframe I walk clients through.

When a role feels out of reach, sit down and sort what’s intimidating you into two lists:

The vocabulary gap. Things that are new in name but not in substance.

You’ve never “owned a P&L,” but you’ve managed a budget and been accountable for its outcomes. You’ve never done “GTM strategy,” but you’ve launched programs to skeptical audiences.

You haven’t used their exact toolstack, but you’ve learned plenty of toolstacks in your career already. A large part of transition work is simply learning to translate what you already know.

The actual skill gap. Things that are actually new: a technical capability, or a new technical domain. These are real.

But look at how short this list usually is once the vocabulary items are removed. For most women I work with, the real skill gap is two or three items, not the fifteen the job description looked like.

Write down this exercise on paper. Imposter syndrome stays in your head when its vague.

Getting specific and down to the details will make you realize whether you are qualified or not. Your achievements are facts. Your doubt is a feeling.

If sorting those two lists feels harder on your own than it should, we can work through it together in one conversation.

Book Your Free Clarity Call

How to Deal with Imposter Syndrome While You’re Applying

Once the audit is done, a few practices help my clients keep moving while the discomfort is still present.

Because that’s the honest goal here: not to overcome imposter syndrome completely before you apply, but to apply while it mutters in the background.

View the job description as a wish list. It’s not a hard cut off.

Hiring managers write descriptions for an imaginary perfect candidate who rarely exists. Especially recently where they have AI write the job description.

Your job is to apply. Screening is their job, not yours.

Continue building an evidence file before you need it. Keep a running document of your strengths and concrete accomplishments. Any outcomes, numbers where you have them.

List the hard problems you solved and anything your colleagues have thanked you for.

Read it before you write a cover letter or update your LinkedIn profile, and read it again before any interview.

You’re not hyping yourself up. You’re correcting your memory bias, because imposter syndrome is selectively terrible at recalling your wins.

Translate before you apply. Take your two lists from the audit and rewrite three or four of your strongest achievements in the new field’s language.

This is the single most practical thing career changers skip, and it’s why strong candidates get overlooked.

If tech is your target, I’ve shared more on standing out in tech job applications without a traditional background.

Set a decision deadline, not a readiness deadline. “I’ll apply when I feel ready” is a trap, because the feeling of readiness arrives after the doing, not before.

If overthinking is your pattern, decide in advance: I will submit this application by Friday.

I’ve written about how to stop overthinking and act, and applying into unfamiliar territory is exactly where that muscle gets tested.

Expect the feeling to spike, then fade. Imposter syndrome doesn’t end when you get the offer.

It usually flares in the first months of a new job and then quiets down once familiarity increases. An adjustment period at the beginning is normal.

When It’s a Clarity Problem, Not a Confidence Problem

Doubt during a job search often stems from a lack of clear direction rather than a lack of confidence.

Applying to random roles due to panic creates unease. It’s because you cannot build a convincing case for a position you have not deliberately chosen.

Two different problems.

If your confidence is shaky, you can build it by looking at the evidence.

But if you’re unclear about what you actually want, you need to step back and figure that out first.

That thinking is exactly what I help women work through.

I help women like you get the strategic clarity they need so they feel honest instead of fraudulent during the interviews.

FAQ

Why is applying for jobs giving me anxiety?

Applying puts you in a position of being evaluated with no control over the outcome, which is uncomfortable for anyone.

For high-achieving women a rejection can feel like a verdict on your worth rather than a mismatch of fit. Your mind often treats “new to me” as “beyond me”.

How do I confidently present my skills when I feel like I’m not good enough?

Separate the presentation from the feeling. Remember, you don’t need to feel confident to communicate clearly.

Write down your strongest achievements, restate them in the target field’s language, and let the facts do the talking.

And remember that the feeling of not being good enough is a symptom of caring about doing the work well, which is exactly what a good employer is hiring for.

Ready to think strategically about what comes next instead of white-knuckling through applications? Schedule a complimentary clarity call and let’s find out what’s actually holding you back.

You don’t have to feel ready before you begin — you just have to decide where you’re going next.

Start Your Career Transition

The situation had usually gone on for a year or more by then. The employee wasn’t sleeping well and was wondering if she was bad at her job.

She was wondering if she suddenly got really bad or maybe the promotion was not deserved. Most of the time, it was the situation that was toxic.

Quick note: A toxic boss is not the same as a micromanaging one. Even though a toxic boss can be micromanaging.

Micromanagement usually comes from the manager’s own anxiety and there are different ways to deal with it.

This article is about the boss who is damaging you and/or subtly limiting your career.

Is Your Boss Toxic, or “Just” Career-Limiting?

There are the obvious toxic bosses which are the yeller and the credit-taker. They like to yell and humiliate you in a meeting.

In my years of HR experience, the bosses that do the most damage to women’s careers were often the perfectly pleasant ones on the surface.

A toxic boss can be perfectly pleasant and polite. The toxicity comes from repeated patterns of harmful behavior like belittling, blame-shifting, and subtle or obvious retaliation when you speak up.

Other times also include moving the goal post or taking your work as their own. Pattern is the key here, any boss can have a bad week or do any of those things.

Its toxic when it’s not a one-off but is consistent. It constantly degrades your work and your mental health. It weighs on you when you come in to your work.

The career-limiting boss may never raise their voice at all, but they’ll never put your name forward and they never want to see you succeed. You just so happen to somehow never be in the room for visible projects. Your reviews say “great execution” and nothing else.

I sat in a lot of calibration meetings at Google, and I’ll tell you what I saw there: the difference between the woman who got promoted and the one who didn’t was rarely the quality of the work. It was whether her manager stood up and made the case.

Some managers fought hard for their people. Others said a sentence and moved on.

The women on the receiving end of that second kind of manager typically had no idea it was happening. You may not notice until you look back and wonder why people you once outperformed are now two levels above you.

Book a Free Clarity Call

Toxic Boss Signs I Learned to Spot From Inside HR

These are the red flags I’d tell a friend to watch for. They’re also, not coincidentally, the signs that showed up in the complaints:

• They take credit for your work. Your idea resurfaces in their email to leadership, reworded and not attributed to you.
• They undermine you in front of others. Negative feedback delivered publicly, “jokes” at your expense, your expertise second-guessed in exactly the meetings where your credibility matters most.
• They punish honesty. You raise a concern and suddenly you’re “not a team player.” Retaliation after speaking up is one of the clearest markers of a truly toxic boss. HR takes it most seriously because it’s often legally relevant.
• The rules keep changing. Priorities shift without warning, and somehow not hitting moving goal post is always your fault.
• They’re a completely different person around their own leadership. Charming upward, cutting downward. Trust what you see downward when they interact with their subordinates because that is who that are.
• You feel it in your instincts, you feel it in your body. Dread comes around every Sunday night. Your stomach drop when their name pops up on Slack. Take that gut feeling seriously. The link between a bad boss and your mental and physical health is well documented. The Surgeon General’s workplace wellbeing framework deems it a critical foundation.

And one sign that points specifically at the career-limiting version: vague feedback.

If every review boils down to “keep doing what you’re doing” but your male peers get specific input tied to business outcomes, watch out. That isn’t a compliment, you are most likely being held back.

Research has shown vague feedback disproportionately holds women back from executive roles.

Why This Often Hits Women 15+ Years Into Their Careers

You’ve spent fifteen or twenty years building a reputation. You might be the primary earner.

And you’ve likely already absorbed a career’s worth of feedback about being less direct, less ambitious, less “abrasive.”

Women are held back by less sponsorship and less manager advocacy which happen to be exactly the things that protect you when a boss turns “yelling” toxic or indifferent. Employees with sponsors get promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without.

I see this happen often: a talented woman gets a toxic manager and her performance dips. Because fear hurts her performance. Then she takes the dip as proof that the criticism was right all along. It wasn’t. That’s reversing cause-and-effect.

How to Deal With a Toxic Boss Day to Day

You’ll need a longer-term plan, and we’ll get to it. In the meantime, protect your energy and your record.

Document everything. Toxic situations make you doubt your own memory. Keep a private log: dates, what was said, who was there.

And after verbal instructions, send a short recap email. “Confirming what we discussed: I’ll prioritize X and move Y to next week.”. Get everything in writing and document and reiterate every goalpost move.

Put boundaries in business terms. You may not be able to boundary-set your boss out of being toxic, I’m sorry to say. But you can stop absorbing unlimited demands.

“I can take this on if we push the report to Thursday. Which should come first?”. Have them think and deal with the tradeoff where it belongs (on them).

Otherwise you get caught in no win scenarios where you have to do both A and B when it’s impossible to do both at the same time.

Keep one trusted colleague, carefully. You need a reality check, because a toxic boss is gifted at making you doubt your own perception. See how your boss deals with other colleagues.

But keep your conversation factual and off the company chats. Don’t put your venting to your colleague in writing at work because it can resurface at the worse times.

Don’t shrink. The instinct under a toxic boss is to go quiet and small. Resist it.

Keep your relationships with other leaders warm, keep your work visible beyond your boss, and yes, update your LinkedIn. Networking and increasing your visibility outside of your boss’s shadow protects you now and doubles as an exit strategy later.

Want a plan for protecting your career and your sanity while you figure out your next move?

Get Your Strategy Session

Should You Go to HR? What Happens When You Go To HR

I can actually tell you from the inside, so let me be honest about it. HR isn’t your therapist.

HR also isn’t your enemy. HR manages risk for the company. Once you really absorb that, you can use the system well.

What it means in actuality: a complaint that arrives as “my boss is mean to me” gives HR very little to formally act on. A complaint filed to us with dates, specifics, witnesses, impact on the work becomes a risk the company has to manage, and things start moving.

And if the behavior touches anything legally protected, like discrimination, harassment, or retaliation after you raised a concern, it upgrades the category. Those complaints trigger obligations on HR.

A few rules I’d give a friend before she walked into that meeting:

• Go in with a goal, not just a grievance. Do you want intervention? A transfer? A record on file? HR responds much better when you name the outcome you’re asking for.
• Assume your boss will eventually find out. In most investigations they do. That doesn’t mean you should stay silent though, just go in prepared with tons of documentation and lined up options.

And if your situation is strained rather than abusive, sometimes the smarter first move is a structured conversation about your growth, not a complaint. I’ve shared scripts for that in my guide on talking to your manager about career growth.

Stay, Transfer, or Leave: Decide From Strategy, Not Survival

The worse career decisions from what I’ve seen are the people who let the toxic boss decide where their career would go. They either grabbed the first offer they got and left and jumped into a worse situation. Or they stayed too long and career completely stalled.

The worst career decisions I’ve watched didn’t come from women who stayed too long or left too fast. Make a plan and run your decision the way you’d run any other senior-level decision:

Stay

• if the boss’s runway is short (reorgs happen). See if your equity timing depend on it. Also if you can protect your mental health while you wait. Staying is only a strategy when you set yourself an end date.

Transfer

• May be the most underused option I know. If you like the company and the toxicity is local to one person, an internal move preserves your tenure and the internal network you’ve spent years building. There’s a right way to do it without burning the relationship. Here’s how to speak to your manager about an internal transfer.

Leave

• If your health is eroding, the behavior is escalating, or the company has shown you it will protect the toxic leader. Plan out the exit timeline, map out your finances, warm up your network and plan a clear story for your interview at the next company. And if you keep hesitating and circling back to the question of whether to leave or not, my decision framework for “should I quit my job?” walks you through it step by step.

If you want a thinking partner for that decision and someone who has seen these situations from the HR side of the table, that’s what my coaching is for. You can schedule a complimentary clarity call here.

FAQ

Is my boss toxic or am I overreacting?

Look for the pattern and the impact. A tense meeting isn’t toxicity but a repeated cycle of blame, goal post moving, and retaliation is.

A test I give clients is to write down the last five incidents with dates. If the list fills up fast and your health or confidence has been sliding, you’re probably not overreacting.

Then get a reality check from someone outside the situation like a trusted colleague, a therapist, a coach.

Can HR be trusted with a toxic boss complaint?

HR can be used effectively once you understand its job. Its job is protecting the company from risk.

Bring a documented pattern and a specific requested outcome. Complaints involving discrimination, harassment, or retaliation carry legal weight and get taken most seriously.

And if the company has a history of protecting your boss despite complaints, treat that as your answer about the culture. It’s a sign to plan your exit.

When should you quit because of a toxic boss?

If your health is suffering, your career progress feels stuck or goes backwards, it’s time to take a serious look and weigh the cost of staying. When the cost of staying exceed the cost of leaving, it’s time to leave.

Leave on your own timeline if you can, with finances and network in place. Plan an exit rather than getting pushed to the breaking point and quitting that very moment.

You don’t have to make the stay-or-leave decision alone. I’ve seen these situations from the HR side of the table.

Schedule Your Clarity Call Today

A lot of senior women in tech get bumped off the technical track and into people management. Because it’s a complement of “you are so good with the team”, so you should do this.

It’s a right fit some of the times. At other times, it’s the org changing your value because you are a woman.

The data shows women get promoted into management at lower rates than men.

And it compounds over time according to report by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company and is “the single biggest structural obstacle women face on the path to senior leadership”.

Highest Performers Advocate the Least Which Is Troublesome (What I See in Coaching)

Unfortunately, the best performers are often the women that struggle and have a hard time instinctively advocating for themselves. They have deep expertise and are known around the office for getting it done. You’d think confidence to advocate for themselves would come with it. It doesn’t in my experience.

High performers often build their entire identity around the work being enough to prove it. And in an ideal world of meritocracy, they would not have to do any self-advocating.

We don’t live in an ideal world.

It’s how the highest performers often get overlooked for years where others who perform worse, make more errors, get promoted before them.

There’s a hidden fear, which is “If I have to point to my own work, doesn’t that mean it wasn’t good enough?”.

And “if I have to point out what I’m doing, doesn’t that mean people will nitpick it for errors?”… I have a error-free reputation to uphold.

No. It means you work in an organization run by busy, distracted humans who aren’t tracking your contributions as closely as you are.

In fact, you may be contributing so much that you don’t even realize how much you are contributing. So you don’t feel as confident as you should.

You’ve probably forgotten more than you realize. You need to realize that getting credit for your work is part of your job requirement.

Let’s talk about what’s really holding you back.

Book a Free Clarity Call

Build the Case Before You Need It: Visibility, Not Volume

You don’t have to work on a whole new personality, I’m going to go over how to increase your visibility.

Record everything that you do. You can voice dictate it at the middle of each day or at the end of each day to make it easier for yourself.

Every thing you shipped, every fire you put out, every fire you prevented from happening before it even happened. Do it now because you are not going to remember in four months as more work gets piled on.

One of the most common mistakes is putting this off. You get more work in the future which means you’ll forget more of what you’ve accomplished.

Even pro-athletes and olympians keep a journal of what they’ve accomplished to remind themselves. They also fall in confidence and looking back at what they’ve done helps.

In your one-on-ones with your manager, that is the chance to make sure what you are doing is understood. That is the chance to control the narrative.

Besides just updates on the latest roadblock, bring up a decision you’re proud of, a goal you’re aiming at, a problem you took the lead on.

Work on two-sentence version of what you’re working on and why it matters. Call it a personal brand, call it an elevator pitch, call it whatever.

The point is that when someone asks, you have an answer that they can pitch to their managers instead of “oh, you know, the usual.”

Call it self-promotion, call it whatever you want, because that is the way to get your promotion.

Want help turning years of wins into a pitch your manager can’t ignore?

Let's Build Your Case Together

Advocating in the Age of AI: Argue for Meaningful Work

This has come up in a lot of conversations I’ve had this year.

A lot of women in tech tell me they’re worried about becoming, in their words, “glorified AI prompters,” pushed to churn out code on top of a tool while the interesting, judgment-heavy work quietly moves elsewhere.

This is actually a self-advocacy issue. If you say nothing, the default is that you get handed whatever’s fastest to hand off.

Advocating means specifying exactly the work you’ll like to be doing. Whether it’s the architecture, the strategy, or the decisions that need a human who actually understands the system. Presenting yourself and making the pitch that you’re the person who can do it.

Not “please don’t automate me.” More like “here’s where I create value the tool can’t, and here’s the role I want to grow into.”

What To Do When Self-Advocacy Isn’t Working

I’m going to be honest because a lot of guides you see here just present it like it can only possibly go well.

Self-advocacy doesn’t always pay off. Sometimes you do everything right but you are still stuck.

It’s tempting to think that you are doing things wrong and you should self-advocate less when nothing changes.

If you’ve advocated repeatedly and nothing happens, that’s a sign of your workplace. Women often make the mistake of thinking it’s a 100% reflection of their work when they are not being seen.

Treat persistent stuckness as a signal to leave.

Here is the checklist:

• Have I asked, directly, more than once?
• Do I have a mentor or a support system who can tell me whether I’m the problem or the place is?
• Do I want to stick with this place that’s been holding me back for years or start looking?

Some of the most freeing moments I’ve seen come when a woman stops trying to be heard by a room that decided not to listen. The woman then can redirect that energy to more productive tasks like job search and interviewing which can actually move their career forward.

Don’t get stuck in indecision. If you’re feeling stuck, I’m here to help.

Ready for a plan to move your career forward? I’m one call away.

Schedule Your Complimentary Call

A client asked me this question last year and then apologized for asking it. She was a director, 49 years old, and eighteen years into a career she’d built deliberately.

For about a year she’d been waking up dreading work she used to be good at. She couldn’t tell if she was hating her job because of what her job had become or if it was perimenopause.

Why This Question Is So Hard to Answer

The timing is almost cruel. Menopause arrives at a mean age of about 52. Perimenopause often starts years before that.

It drops the whole transition right into the stretch of life when your career is worth the most. When you’re the most senior and the most visible you’ve ever been and the compensation finally reflects it.

So when work starts feeling wrong in your late 40s, two large and plausible suspects are standing in the same room.

From the inside, brain fog just feels like incompetence. Is it broken sleep or burnout?

Irritability in meetings becomes proof that you’ve outgrown these people. The dip in confidence gets interpreted as finally seeing your situation clearly.

Every symptom has a career-shaped explanation available, and every career problem seems like it could be because of symptom.

Smart, self-aware women stay stuck on this question for years, partly because they’re smart. They can argue both sides convincingly.

You don’t have to keep arguing both sides with yourself for another year.

Book a Free Clarity Call

What Perimenopause Can Do to a Working Week

The difficulties women most commonly report at work during this transition are:

• Poor concentration
• Tiredness
• Poor memory
• Feeling low
• Lowered confidence

It’s nearly identical, almost word for word, to what clients say to me when they believe they’re failing at their jobs.

Up to a third of women experience symptoms severe enough to affect their quality of life, and problematic symptoms at work have been linked to a higher intention to leave the workforce entirely.

These symptoms don’t only make work harder, they apparently make women want to leave work altogether, which means the feeling of “I want to quit” is not, by itself, reliable evidence about your job.

It might be about the job. It might not be about anything.

Signs It Might Be the Job, Not Your Hormones

Here’s what I listen for when the answer is probably the job.

• The dread is on a particular thing. A certain micro-managing new manager. Those sudden meetings with upper management. A reorg that gutted your team. Hormones tend to be more indiscriminate whereas job problems are usually specific.
• The timeline matches an event. If you can name the quarter it started, and that quarter contains a new boss or a merger or a promotion that changed what you do all day. That’s a directional indicator that it’s your job.
• You feel like yourself everywhere else. On weekends, on vacation, in side projects, in long conversations about other people’s careers, your memory and energy and sense of humor all mysteriously work fine. If everything collapses only inside the office, that may be your job.
• The problem predates the symptoms. This is the one I check first. When we walk backward through the years together, plenty of clients discover the disenchantment actually started at 43, well before anything physical changed. Perimenopause didn’t create that feeling out of nowhere. The feelings were already there, perimenopause just took away your energy that has been spending years to suppressing it.

Signs It Might Be Perimenopause (or Both)

The picture is different when the body is driving.

• It’s diffuse rather than targeted. No specific meeting or manager is the villain. Everything flattened at once, hobbies included, patience at home included. If you’re bored by things you loved in the spring and snapping at people who have nothing to do with your job, the job remains a suspect but stops being the only one.
• The physical symptoms travel with the mood ones. Sleep disruption, temperature swings, changes to your cycle, aches that weren’t there before. When the cognitive and emotional stuff arrives with the physical symptoms.
• Good days still exist, and on them you like your work. This is the one that surprises people. A rested, clear-headed Tuesday where the job is engaging and you’re glad to be in it tells you the career probably isn’t dead, because careers that have actually died don’t revive for a day at a time.

Quick Reference: Is It the Job or Is It Perimenopause?

I’ll say the uncomfortable part too. It’s often both, a body in transition and a role that no longer fits, each amplifying the other.

Untangle them so that each problem gets its own solution. A resignation isn’t going to treat perimenopause symptoms. And no amount of hormone therapy has ever fixed a values mismatch with someone’s workplace.

If your signals are pointing in both directions, let’s figure out which problem is actually yours.

Let's Untangle It Together

Saying Something at Work (or Not) When You’re Senior

Most menopause-at-work advice assumes you can pop over to HR and request a desk fan. It reads very differently when you’re the one running the org.

The researchers noted that women often fear bias, discrimination and stigmatization, and stay quiet about symptoms at work as a result, and at senior levels I’d add a sharper version of that fear, the worry that a single disclosure rewrites your reputation from “executive” to “struggling.”

From my HR years, my honest read: you’re not obligated to explain your health to anyone, and strategic silence at senior levels is sometimes exactly the right call.

The quiet logistical moves don’t require any disclosure at all:

• Renegotiate your meeting load before touching anything else. Meetings are where the symptoms cost the most.
• Shift the deep work into your best hours, whenever those turn out to be right now.
• Take the flexibility you’d approve in a heartbeat for anyone on your own team, and skip the explanation.

Book a complimentary clarity call and we’ll start untangling which problem is actually yours.

FAQ

Can perimenopause make you hate your job?

It can make you feel like you hate your job. The most common workplace symptoms, poor concentration, fatigue, low mood, and lowered confidence, look almost identical to ordinary career misery from the inside, and research links symptoms at work to a higher intention to leave the workforce.

Which is exactly why the feeling deserves untangling before you act on it.

Should I quit my job during perimenopause?

Not as a first move. Get a medical evaluation, then gather a few months of evidence about which days are bad and why.

If the job signals hold up once symptoms are addressed, treat it as a real career decision and run it properly. Quitting is close to permanent. The transition isn’t.

Can menopause affect your ability to work?

Yes, and it’s well documented. In research on over 4,400 employed women, 13 percent reported an adverse work outcome tied to menopause symptoms, and about 11 percent had missed work because of them.

If symptoms are affecting your work, that’s a reason to see a menopause-informed clinician. It isn’t a verdict on your competence.

One honest conversation can save you months of second-guessing yourself.

Schedule Your Complimentary Call

Often, it comes out sideways, as a story about a Sunday evening or a meeting that went badly, and then, “…am I crazy for thinking about leaving?”

If you’ve typed the question into Google, you’re probably somewhere similar. You already know something’s wrong, and you want help deciding what to do about it.

So that’s what this is. Not another list of signs it’s time to go.

I’ve already written about how to know it’s time for a career change if you’re still at the recognition stage.

This is about the decision itself. Whether quitting actually fixes what’s wrong, how the math works if you leave without a job lined up, and what resignations look like from the other side, because I spent years in HR at Google watching them happen.

Start Here: Figure Out What’s Actually Broken

Four different problems get filed under “I should quit,” and they need four different responses. So before anything else, work out which one you actually have.

Start with the work itself, the actual substance of your days. If the projects and the meetings are the problem, be careful, because a new employer handing you the same role will feel identical within a year, maybe sooner.

That one’s a career question rather than a quitting question, and it deserves a slower process than a resignation letter.

The manager is a different story. I’d isolate this one early, because managers change all the time, teams reorganize, and you have options short of resigning, moving internally being the obvious one.

It doesn’t cost you your tenure, your vesting schedule, or your reputation inside the company. I’ve watched people give up eighteen good years over one bad boss who was gone within a year anyway.

Then there’s the company. Culture, direction, a values gap that widened until you stopped recognizing the place.

Same craft at a different employer often fixes this completely. It’s the cleanest case for simply leaving.

The career one is the hardest to admit and the easiest to misdiagnose. If some version of this dread has followed you through two or three employers already, the problem probably isn’t this job.

Quitting will buy you a honeymoon and not much else.

The expensive mistakes are almost always mix-ups between buckets. Treating a manager problem like a career problem.

Or hopping to a competitor to escape what was actually career-level dread, feeling it come back six months in, and concluding something must be wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. The diagnosis was wrong.

Not sure which of the four problems you’re actually dealing with? That’s exactly what we’ll figure out together on a clarity call.

Book Your Free Clarity Call

The Questions I Ask Clients Before They Resign

Once we’ve got a working diagnosis, I ask a few questions. Not trick questions, they just surface things a pros-and-cons list tends to miss.

The first one: what specifically would be different in six months if you stayed? Not what could be different.

What’s actually in motion, planned, on somebody’s calendar. People often realize mid-sentence that the honest answer is nothing.

I also ask whether they’d still want out if their manager left tomorrow. You’d be surprised how long the pause gets.

Then, what are you moving toward? People who quit with only an escape route tend to grab the first thing that comes along, and the first thing that comes along is usually a slightly different version of what they just left.

And, who have you told? If the answer is nobody, that worries me more than anything else, because decisions made entirely inside your own head at midnight are rarely your best work.

You’ll notice “do you hate your job” isn’t in there. You wouldn’t be reading this otherwise.

The question is whether quitting is the move that fixes it.

Should I Quit My Job Without Another One Lined Up?

Sometimes, yes. The official advice says never, and I know plenty of people, clients included, for whom leaving without a next role was the right call.

But it was right because the conditions were right, and the conditions are mostly about money and story, not about how fed up you are on a given Tuesday.

Money first. The standard guidance is three to six months of living expenses set aside before you walk.

For my clients I push toward the high end and past it, because searches at the senior level run long.

Older, more experienced candidates consistently face longer unemployment durations than younger ones, and in the most recent BLS data, 38.4 percent of unemployed jobseekers 55 and older had been searching long term, versus 26.6 percent for everyone under 55.

I’d rather you budget for a runway that turns out to be too long.

Two more things before you pick a last day. Check your vesting dates.

I’ve seen people resign five weeks before a cliff because they’d emotionally checked out and couldn’t stand five more weeks, and I understand the feeling, but it’s a very expensive feeling.

Decide, roughly, how you’ll talk about the gap later. Example: “I left so I could run a real search instead of interviewing at 11pm” is a complete sentence.

Quitting in This Economy: The Senior-Level Reality

I’d rather be straight with you here. Senior roles are fewer than they were, processes drag, and the data above says experienced candidates wait longer.

Quitting into this market with thin savings creates exactly the kind of pressure that makes people take the wrong next job, and the wrong next job is how you end up back at this same question in eighteen months.

That said, I’ve also watched “this economy” harden into a permanent reason to stay somewhere corrosive. There’s always in “this economy”.

Before you make a move in this market, it helps to pressure-test your plan with someone who has watched hundreds of resignations play out.

Get a Second Opinion on Your Plan

What HR Sees When You Resign

A few quick things from the other side of the desk.

Resignations are less dramatic than the person resigning imagines. You’ve rehearsed the conversation for months.

On the company side, a process kicks in, a requisition gets opened, your work gets covered, and things move on faster than is flattering. I found that oddly comforting to watch, and I offer it to you the same way: the catastrophe is mostly in your head.

Counteroffers. You’ll read everywhere that 80 percent of people who accept one leave within a year.

I’ve looked for the source of that number and never found it, so I’m not going to quote it to you as research. The pattern behind it did match what I saw, though.

A counteroffer fixes compensation, and compensation is rarely the real reason people resign.

If money really was the whole problem, taking the counter can work out. If it was anything else, the raise buys a few months of relief before the original problem comes back.

Also, resign well. Full notice, clean handover, nothing scorched in the exit interview.

Senior-level worlds are small. I kept seeing the same names come back around over the years, as references, hiring managers, clients, and the people who’d left gracefully had no idea how much that was still paying them.

When Staying Is the Right Call

Staying isn’t a loss, as long as it’s a decision and not a drift. If the diagnosis points at manager or scope, the cheapest fix is usually internal, with none of the resetting an external move involves.

What I usually suggest is a review date. “I’m staying until March, and these two things need to be different by then.”

It sounds small. It isn’t, because it converts an open loop into a commitment.

Two years of “I guess I’ll see how it goes” is how clients end up on my calendar using the word stuck.

One more thing about the date: notice your reaction when you set it. Some people feel relief, which usually means part of them wanted permission to stay and fix things.

Some feel a drop in their stomach.

If what’s actually keeping you in place is money, and for my clients it sometimes is, I wrote separately about wanting to change careers when you can’t afford a pay cut. Most of it applies to quitting decisions too.

The Mental Health Line

Everything above assumes an ordinarily bad job. Some situations aren’t that.

If work is making you unwell, weeks of broken sleep, panic on the commute, symptoms your doctor can’t otherwise explain, then this stops being a framework exercise.

A resignation is recoverable but burnout can take far longer to come back from than any gap on resume ever will.

If that’s where you are, talk to your doctor and the people close to you first, and let the career strategy come second. I say that as someone whose entire business is career strategy.

One practical note. If harassment or discrimination is what’s driving you out, talk to an employment attorney before you resign, not after.

Leaving first can limit your options, and a thirty-minute consultation is worth far more while you still have leverage.

How to Decide Without Spiraling

The worst version of this decision is the one that runs in your head on a loop for a year.

If you recognize that loop, give the decision a container: a small set of questions like the ones above, a date by which you’ll answer them, and at least one person outside your own head.

I wrote about the spiral itself in career transition anxiety: how to decide without panicking, and if you’re not even sure what you’d want instead of this job, my career clarity quiz is a five-minute way to start.

And if you’d rather work through it with someone who has sat on both sides of the resignation conversation, here’s how we can work together.

Book a complimentary clarity call and we’ll figure out which of the four problems you actually have.

You don’t have to run this decision on a loop in your head for another year.

Talk It Through With Me

FAQ

Is it OK to quit my job without another one lined up?

Sometimes. It works when you have real runway (three to six months of expenses minimum, more at senior levels), when staying is costing you more than leaving would, and when you can describe the gap in one deliberate sentence.

Without those three, line something up first.

How much money should I have saved before quitting?

The standard advice is three to six months of essential expenses. I push senior clients toward six to twelve, because experienced candidates face longer searches and the recent data bears that out.

Count rising health insurance cost in your monthly number.

Should I accept a counteroffer?

Only if money was truly the whole problem. In my HR years, counteroffers fixed compensation and very little else, and the person who accepted one was often back in the same conversation within months.

I read this advice a lot, mostly because my clients arrive quoting it, and I’ve come to think it does real damage.

I spent years in HR at Google watching how careers actually get built, and the women I coach are usually 15 or 20 years into their career. They’re senior people in roles that stopped fitting, and the start-from-zero playbook doesn’t solve it.

So this is the article I wish they’d found instead: how to change careers at 40 when you have real experience worth protecting, and why the usual advice about making a mid-career change needs adjusting when you’re a woman doing it.

What Hiring Panels Actually Think About Candidates Over 40

This is the part I can speak to that the other articles can’t, because I sat in those hiring discussions at Google for years.

Nobody ever said “she’s too old.” What I heard instead, many times, was some version of “I’m not sure why she wants this role.” That sentence kills experienced candidates.

An unexplained move makes people nervous. Maybe she’s running from something. What if she’ll want to leave in a year. The concern is rarely age but whether the story “makes sense” to the company hiring.

The experienced candidates who did well had thought about that story:

• There was a through-line from their old work to this role, stated plainly enough that panelists could repeat it to each other later.
• They knew how the field works now, not how it worked in 2015.
• They’d priced themselves for the level they were applying at, rather than the title they used to hold.

None of that requires being younger, and a new degree doesn’t appear anywhere on the list. The most damaging thing I watched candidates do was apologize for their own experience. Panels take you at your own valuation, so if you present 18 years as baggage, they’ll believe you.

Is 40 Too Late for a Career Change?

No. And I don’t say that just as reassurance. Here are the numbers: people born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 12.7 jobs between ages 18 and 56, and the women in that data averaged 12.5. Moving is normal at every age.

The outcomes are decent too. The American Institute for Economic Research surveyed people who’d attempted a career transition after 45:

• 82% had managed it
• Of the successful ones, 87% said they were happy with the change
• 65% said they were less stressed than before

What I actually spend sessions on is a different question: why does this change feel so much harder than the job changes you made at 28?

It is never because of the job market. It’s often identity piece, the money, and the status you spent two decades earning. You can suddenly imagine losing it all.

It’s not just the market,  the identity, money, and status pieces are all things I map out with clients.

Make a Real Plan With Me

Why a Career Change at 40 Hits Women Differently

Career change is not the same experience for women.

The research here matches what I hear on calls almost word for word. In a global survey of over 1,250 professional women, 77.8% had run into age-related discrimination somewhere in their careers, and 55.9% hit it after the 21-year mark, which is exactly where my clients sit.

One respondent’s answer has stayed with me because I’ve heard versions of it so many times: “Women are either too young, too old, or may be in the age range of having children. All are viewed as negative.”

Researchers call this gendered ageism.

For our purposes, what matters is that it punishes restarts harder. Nearly 58% of the women in that survey said age bias had already slowed their career progression, and that’s while staying on their existing path.

Now imagine resetting to entry level at 40. You aren’t starting where the 25-year-olds start. You’re starting behind them.

That sounds bleak, but the conclusion I draw from it is fairly hopeful. Seniority is the counterweight. A hiring panel treats a woman repositioning 18 years of program leadership very differently from one asking to begin again. So don’t begin again.

The Retraining Trap: Why Starting Over Is Usually the Wrong Move

Search this keyword yourself and you’ll see what I mean about the standard advice: list after list telling you to retrain into cybersecurity or project management or data analytics, certification in four to eight months, new career by summer.

Here’s the problem. In that same AIER research, the people who failed at career change tended to be the ones leaping into an entirely different line of work. The successful ones built on skills they already had.

I saw the same thing at Google, over and over. The strong 40+ hires weren’t retrained beginners. They were experienced people who’d figured out how to repackage what they knew.

Retraining from scratch also costs more than the course fee. You give up:

• Your salary band
• Your title
• Most of your network’s relevance

Then you enter the entry-level market at a particularly bad moment, because AI is currently thinning out those junior openings faster than anything else in hiring, and a certificate doesn’t protect you from that.

I’m not saying never retrain. If your field is disappearing, or the new one is licensed (nursing, law), some schooling is the price of admission. But those cases are rarer than the listicles suggest. For most of the women I work with, the right move keeps most of their existing skills in play, because that’s what employers are actually paying for.

Three Ways to Pivot at 40 Without Starting Over

When I map options with a client, nearly every workable move lands in one of three buckets.

On that middle option, I wrote more in my guide to career paths beyond HR program management, since it comes up constantly with HR clients.

The fourth option, new role and new industry and new format all at once, is the one that fails. That’s the leap the research warns about, and it’s also, not coincidentally, the one the retraining industry sells.

How to Test a Career Change Before You Leap

You don’t need to resign to test any of this. I’d go further: resigning first is usually how people get it wrong, because clarity comes from contact with the work, not from thinking more about it.

Testing can be small:

• A project in the target area at your current company.
• Advising a startup a few hours a month.
• Coffee with three women who already hold the role, where you ask what a bad Tuesday looks like rather than what they love about the job.

One client of mine was sure she wanted to move from product management into UX research. Two weeks of shadowing a researcher showed her that the parts of PM she loved were exactly what she’d be giving up. A resignation would have cost her a year.

If you’re a step earlier than that, still unsure which direction is even worth testing, my career clarity quiz is a structured place to start.

You don’t have to guess which pivot is yours. We can map it together in one conversation.

Map Your Pivot With Me

The Money Question: Pay Cuts, Runway, and Golden Handcuffs

Money is usually the loudest fear, so numbers first. In the AIER survey, nearly 70 percent of successful changers kept the same pay or improved it. About a third took a cut, and many of those worked their way back up over time. Plan for a cut. Don’t assume one.

• Work out your real monthly number, which is lower than your current-lifestyle number. Get six to twelve months of runway in place before anything irreversible.
• Decide in advance what temporary pay band you’d accept in exchange for a role that fixes what’s broken. This way you’re not making that call mid-negotiation.

If the real anchor is compensation you can’t imagine walking away from, RSUs especially. I wrote about it in what to do when you want to change careers but can’t afford a pay cut, because for senior women in tech the comfort is very often the trap.

What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like at 40

6 to 18 months is a realistic timeline from first serious thought to settled into the new thing. That’s what a well-run change at this level usually takes in my experience.

Slower than the certification ads claim. Much faster than the endless version your fear is picturing.

• Early on it’s clarity work: which of the three patterns fits, what your small experiments tell you.
• The middle is positioning: you make your experience legible to people in the new context and tell your network specifically what you want.
• The search at the end turns out to be the quick part when the first two phases were done properly.

The multi-year sagas I’ve seen almost all skipped clarity and went straight to applying. Support shortens all of this.

If you want to see what working with me looks like, here’s how we can work together. If you’re shopping for coaches more generally, I wrote a frank guide to choosing a career coach as a woman over 40, including what to avoid, and I’d stand by it even if you never book with me.

One last thing. If you’re 40-something, 15-plus years in, and sure that what you’re doing now isn’t what you want to be doing at 50, take that seriously. The happiest changers I know started testing before they had to.

Book a complimentary clarity call and we’ll look at your situation together.

Book Your Clarity Call

I understand why. I spent years at Google, and I coach many clients who are still inside these companies today.

And despite the layoffs, restructures, and uncertainty across the tech industry over the last few years, that aspiration has not changed much. Tech layoffs have continued well into 2026, yet for many, the opportunity to work in these fast-paced, high-performance environments still outweighs the risks.

It is still true that once you have worked at one of these companies, doors open. Your market value goes up almost immediately.

What is discussed far less often is the psychological cost of operating in these environments over long periods of time. If you are already wrestling with that cost, I wrote a companion piece on leaving big tech companies that picks up where this article ends.

What follows is the good, the bad, and the ugly, and how to decide whether it is worth it for you.

Why FAANG and Big Tech Jobs Still Top Everyone’s List

Part of it is the brand name on your resume. Recruiters respond differently, hiring managers assume a baseline of capability, and compensation conversations start from a higher anchor.

There is also the pull of working on products used by millions or billions of people. Very few places on earth let you see your work ship at that scale. For ambitious people, especially those 10 or 15 years into a career who want to know what they are capable of, the pull is hard to ignore.

So I am not going to tell you these companies are traps to avoid. I grew more during my years inside one than at any other point in my career. But I want you to walk in, or stay in, with clear eyes.

The Good: Why a Few Years in Big Tech Feels Like a Mini MBA

The pace of learning is phenomenal. I would honestly compare a few years at one of these companies to doing a mini MBA. The complexity of the work, the calibre of the people around you, and the sheer pace of execution push your thinking and problem-solving skills to another level.

Much of what you work on is being built for the first time. You often have to build the plane as you fly it. You rarely have perfect information, and sometimes you do not even fully understand the problem yet. Over time, you become incredibly comfortable operating in ambiguity. Your ability to assess situations, diagnose problems, and think critically accelerates quickly.

In my experience, many managers in these environments are supportive and emotionally intelligent. They understand the ambiguity you are being asked to handle because they are handling it too, just one or two levels above you.

You are also surrounded by exceptionally smart people, and that raises your own standards. You absorb far more than technical knowledge. You pick up communication skills, stakeholder management, strategic thinking, and how to use data to influence decisions. Those skills keep paying off long after you leave.

The Compensation Is Life-Changing (and That Is the Trap)

The financial upside can be significant. Salary, bonus, and equity together can be genuinely life-changing over time, and these companies pay extremely well for a simple reason: the bar is high.

The longer you stay, though, the harder it becomes to walk away. Vesting schedules, refreshers, and lifestyle creep raise the cost of leaving a little more each year. This is what people mean by golden handcuffs, and I see them constantly in my coaching practice.

Handcuffs only become a problem when the compensation is the main reason you are staying. A big number makes it easy to avoid asking whether the environment is still good for you, and many of my clients realize they have not asked in years. If you suspect that might be you, my article on signs you need a career change is a useful gut check.

Not sure whether it is the work you love or just the paycheck holding you in place?

Book a Free Clarity Call

The Bad: When the Pressure Never Switches Off

The challenge with high performance culture is that the pressure rarely switches off. You are constantly being pushed to deliver more, move faster, think bigger, and operate at a consistently high level. For many people, that challenge is energising, at least initially.

But often there is very little relief. Not for a week or two. Sometimes for months at a time.

Quarterly check-ins, performance reviews, calibration discussions, promotion packets, impact metrics. You are operating in a culture where your performance is being assessed more or less continuously. And while a “meets expectations” rating should theoretically feel perfectly positive and safe, in reality it often does not, particularly in environments where everyone around you is also exceptionally capable.

What this produces, for many employees, is a low-level but constant background stress and anxiety that never fully disappears. It shows up on Sunday evenings, or when a meeting invite lands on your calendar with no agenda attached.

I work with a lot of women who have carried that background anxiety for years before they ever say it out loud. If that sounds familiar, I wrote about it directly in my piece on coaching for the high-anxiety, high-achieving woman.

How Visibility Becomes Currency

Over time, constant assessment changes how people choose their work. Visibility becomes currency.

People begin prioritising high-profile projects, positioning work, and stakeholder visibility because they know it improves promotion prospects, even when it is not the most important work for the team overall. The maintenance work that keeps a team running rarely makes it into a promotion packet. The splashy launch does.

To be fair, people are not being cynical when they do this. They are responding rationally to how the system measures impact. But it has two costs. First, the team’s real priorities slowly drift away from what matters most. Second, the people doing the unglamorous essential work, and in my experience this is disproportionately the glue work, start to feel invisible in a system that claims to be a meritocracy.

If you have ever felt like you are working harder than ever while your performance narrative gets harder to write, this is usually why.

The Ugly: When “Do a Good Job” Becomes “Can You Keep Giving More?”

At some point, many people realise the expectation is rarely “do a good job.” The expectation slowly becomes “can you continue giving more?”

And once you are operating beyond capacity, an uncomfortable question starts to surface: if you cannot keep operating at this level indefinitely, how valuable are you to the company compared to someone who can? That pressure is rarely said out loud directly. But many people feel it.

One more pattern I saw up close. These companies often develop a small number of internally powerful figures, highly influential leaders who joined early, built large organisations, and drive enormous impact. Some people only half-jokingly call them the company’s “gods.” Many are brilliant. But brilliance and healthy leadership do not always go hand in hand, and when power concentrates around a few individuals, the day-to-day experience of working near them can vary enormously. Two people in the same company can have completely different careers depending on whose orbit they land in.

These environments are not toxic by definition. But your experience inside one can depend far more on the leaders around you than the org chart suggests.

If the pressure has stopped feeling temporary, talking it through with someone outside the building helps.

Talk It Through With Me

So Is Working at FAANG Worth It?

I honestly think this is deeply personal.

For some people, the pace, ambiguity, and intensity are intellectually exciting and deeply fulfilling. They would be bored anywhere else, and for them, the trade is worth making for a long time. For others, the sustained pressure eventually becomes too high a price to pay, and no amount of compensation closes that gap.

I do not think the goal is avoiding high-performance environments altogether. The growth, the compensation, and the open doors are all real.

I think the key is understanding your own limits, recognizing what season of life you are in, and knowing when it may be time to leave before the cost becomes too high. The clearest warning sign I know is this one: your exhaustion is no longer solvable by a vacation or a long weekend. That is the textbook definition of burnout, a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and “chronic” is the operative word. Being tired after a brutal week is normal. Being tired for a year straight is telling you something.

Because while these environments can accelerate your career enormously, they can also slowly normalize levels of stress and over-functioning that become very difficult to sustain, and even harder to see from the inside. Many of my clients only recognize how much they were carrying after they put it down. If your sense of self has become tangled up with your rating and your level, my article on decoupling self-worth from success goes deeper on that knot.

Deciding Whether to Stay or Go

If you are weighing this decision right now, here are the three questions I walk clients through. None of them are resume questions.

First, are you staying for reasons you would say out loud? “I love the work” and “I am building skills I will use for decades” are reasons. “I am afraid of what leaving would say about me” is not.

Second, what season of life are you in? The same role can be right at 32 and wrong at 45, or the reverse. Capacity is not fixed, and neither are your priorities. Pretending otherwise is how people end up over-functioning for years.

Third, is your recovery working? If weekends, vacations, and quiet weeks genuinely restore you, the intensity is probably sustainable for now. If they no longer do, more discipline will not fix it. Take it seriously while you still have options.

These questions are hard to answer alone, because high performance culture trains you to override your own signals. This is the work I do with mid-career and senior women every day, and you can read more about how we can work together if you want a structured way to think it through.

And if you are unsure rather than ready, that is a perfectly good time to talk. Many women book a call with me at exactly that stage. You can book a complimentary clarity call here.

Unsure rather than ready? That is exactly when a conversation helps most.

Reserve Your Complimentary Call

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should you stay at a FAANG or big tech company?

There is no universal number, but I encourage clients to think in terms of learning curves rather than years. Most people experience steep growth for the first two to four years in a role or company. When the learning flattens and the main thing keeping you there is compensation or fear of the unknown, it is time to reassess. Staying can still be the right call. Staying because you never stopped to ask the question is a different thing.

What are the signs that high performance culture is burning you out?

The pattern I see most often: rest stops working. Vacations no longer restore you, Sunday-evening dread becomes routine, and you feel a constant low-grade anxiety even when nothing is actively wrong. You may also notice cynicism creeping into how you talk about your job, or a growing distance from work you used to care about. When stress stops being episodic and becomes chronic, take it seriously.

Does leaving a FAANG company hurt your career?

In my experience, no. The brand, skills, and network you built do not expire when you hand in your badge. What matters is leaving toward something, not just away from something. The people who struggle after big tech are usually the ones who never paused to define what they actually wanted next, not the ones who left.

My original linkedin post on here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-high-performance-culture-good-bad-ugly-claire-campion-aluoc/

I hear some version of it almost every week, usually from a woman 15 or 20 years into a career that looks great from the outside. She gets on a call with me and finally says out loud what she’s been carrying for months. Sometimes years.

I spent 25 years in HR at companies like Google and Grammarly before I left to coach full time, so I know this feeling from both sides of the table. I’ve supported thousands of engineers through reorgs and layoffs, and I’ve also been the person staring at her own calendar wondering how much longer she could keep going.

If that’s where you are, this article is what I would tell you if you were sitting across from me. And if you’re already further along and wondering what life after tech could look like, I’ve written about that separately.

Why Tech Feels So Exhausting Right Now

First, you’re not imagining it. Tech in 2026 is a different employer than the one you signed up for.

The layoff cycle has been relentless. Around 127,000 tech workers in the US lost their jobs in 2025, and the cuts have continued into 2026. Even if your name has never been on a list, working under that constant threat changes how you operate. Nobody plans a career three years out while quietly wondering whether their org survives the next quarter.

Then there’s AI. Many of the women I work with didn’t get into tech to babysit machine output. Engineers tell me they spend their days reviewing generated code instead of building things, and they’re not wrong: 45% of developers say debugging AI-generated code is time-consuming, and nearly half don’t trust the accuracy of AI output they’re expected to use anyway. The women I work with put it bluntly: they didn’t spend two decades becoming good engineers to end up as glorified AI prompters. I see the same sentiment all over forums like Hacker News and r/womenintech.

And the load has never been distributed evenly. Almost half of women working in tech report experiencing burnout, and women are 1.6 times more likely to lose their jobs when tech layoffs hit.

If this sounds like your last six months, you don’t have to untangle it alone.

Book a Free Strategy Call

Is It Burnout, Your Job, or the Industry?

This is the first question I work through with every client who tells me she’s done with tech, because “I’m tired of tech” can mean three very different things, and each one has a different fix.

When it’s burnout

The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, marked by energy depletion, cynicism toward your job, and reduced effectiveness. Read those three again. If they describe you, there’s a real chance you’re not tired of tech so much as depleted, and right now any industry would feel unbearable.

When it’s the job

Sometimes the industry is fine and the role is the problem. A manager who took the joy out of work you used to love. A team gutted by three rounds of cuts, where you now do the work of two people. A product you stopped believing in. If you light up talking about earlier roles in tech but go flat describing your current one, that contrast is information.

When it’s actually the industry

And sometimes, yes, it really is tech. The values shifted under your feet. What gets rewarded now isn’t what you’re good at or what you care about. If the exhaustion follows you across companies, across managers, and across rested seasons, then it may be time to look at the industry itself. I wrote about the signs you need a career change if you want to pressure-test this.

What Is Your Exhaustion Actually Telling You?

I encourage my clients to treat tiredness as data rather than something to push through or feel guilty about.

When a client tells me she’s tired, I ask her to get specific. Tired of what, exactly? The on-call rotations? The performance theater of stack ranking? Pretending to be excited about a roadmap she’d quietly delete? Defending her seat at tables she earned years ago? Each answer points somewhere different.

There’s a pattern I keep running into with women at the 15-plus-year mark. When we dig, the fatigue rarely has much to do with the technology. It comes from two decades of proving themselves in rooms where they were often the only woman, and from the slow realization that the proving never seems to end. Leaving tech doesn’t fix that. What fixes it is getting deliberate about what you’re willing to carry going forward, which often starts with decoupling your self-worth from your output first.

Why bother with all this digging? Because “I’m tired of tech” is a conclusion, and you can’t act on a conclusion. Underneath it sits a more precise sentence, and that one you can do something about.

Why You Shouldn’t Make Big Decisions While You’re Running on Empty

If you take one thing from this article, take this: do not make a major career decision from the bottom of your energy reserves.

There’s neuroscience behind this. MIT research on chronic stress found that it skews decision-making toward high-risk, high-payoff choices and disrupts the brain circuitry that weighs costs against benefits. In practice, I see this show up as the dramatic exit: quitting with nothing lined up, accepting the first offer that appears, or swearing off an entire 20-year career in a single weekend.

A depleted brain picks whatever ends the pain fastest. A rested one can actually steer. Five years out, those two decisions land you in very different places.

So before any big move, I work with clients on recovery first. Real boundaries around hours. Using the vacation days that have been quietly accumulating. Sometimes a planned career break. The big questions wait until some capacity comes back. Ask them too early and every answer is just escape wearing a different outfit.

Before you make a decision you can’t take back, let’s get you clear on what’s actually draining you.

Let's Talk It Through

The Questions I Ask Clients Who Want Out of Tech

When a client comes to me certain she’s leaving, I don’t start with job boards. I’m not a job-search tactician and I don’t pretend to be. We start with clarity, because a transition built on a fuzzy diagnosis usually recreates the same problem in a new setting.

These are some of the questions we sit with:

What parts of your work, in any role you’ve ever had, made you lose track of time? Not what you’re good at. Plenty of my clients are excellent at things that drain them. What energized you?

If your job title disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss? What would you feel relieved about? The relief list is usually more revealing than the missing list.

What does “enough” look like for you now? The compensation question is real, and I don’t dismiss it. But many women discover their number is lower than the golden handcuffs suggested, once they price in what the current pace is costing them.

Who are you when you’re not being impressive? This one tends to make the call go quiet. But the next chapter has to fit the actual person, and a lot of my clients haven’t checked in with her in years.

In my coaching practice I use my VITAL framework for this work: Career Values, Identity, Trust, Abilities, and Legacy. The order is deliberate. Values come first, job titles come last.

Can You Stay in Tech Without It Draining You?

Some of the women who arrive at my practice saying “I’m done with tech” end up staying in tech. That surprises people. They just stop working the way they were working.

Staying is a real outcome, and it doesn’t mean you chickened out. Moving from a frontline delivery role into advisory, enablement, or strategy work. Changing companies to one whose pace matches the life you actually want. Negotiating scope honestly instead of absorbing every reorg’s leftovers. Or leaving big tech for a smaller company where your experience makes you the adult in the room rather than one of ten thousand.

One pattern I’ll name directly: many senior women have been promoted into the most meeting-heavy, most politically exhausting version of their job. What they’re tired of is that version, not the field. Redesigning the role, or finding its better-shaped twin elsewhere, can give you back a startling amount of energy.

If 2026’s market has you assuming you’re trapped where you are, you have more room than you think. I wrote more about what’s actually moving in career change in 2026.

If You Do Decide to Leave Tech

Sometimes the diagnosis is clear and the answer really is out. When that’s the case, I want you to hear this: you are not starting over.

Twenty years in tech builds skills that transfer almost anywhere. You’ve shipped complicated projects under pressure and explained them to executives, engineers, and customers who each needed a different version. You’ve made calls with half the information you wanted. You’ve survived more reorgs than most industries see in a generation. Healthcare, education, climate, government, consulting, and founder paths all hire for exactly that.

The transition needs structure, money math, and a story that connects your past to your next chapter. I’ve laid out the full approach in my guide to life after tech without starting over, so I won’t repeat it here. The short version: leaving tech is a project, and you already know how to run projects.

What Leaving Corporate After 25 Years Taught Me

I’ll close with my own story, because I didn’t learn this framework in a certification course.

I spent 25 years in HR, with senior roles at Google and Grammarly. On paper, everything worked. In reality, I was working 12 to 15 hour days, my calendar was back-to-back until 4 pm with my real work starting after, and I spent weekends recovering just enough to do it again. It took a personal loss to make me stop and ask the questions I now ask my clients.

When I finally paused, I realized I wasn’t actually tired of working with people in tech. I was tired of the version of the work that left no room for the part I loved. So I left corporate and built a practice doing the part I loved full time: helping women get clear on what comes next.

That’s the distinction I want for you. Instead of asking whether to leave tech, ask which version of your work is worth keeping, and what structure would protect it.

You don’t need to have it figured out before we talk. Most women book a call with me precisely because they don’t. If you want a thinking partner for this, you can book a free career strategy call, or read more about how we can work together.

Your next chapter is too important to figure out alone.

Schedule Your Free Career Call

I want to start with something I see on almost every clarity call. A woman mid-career tells me she has been thinking about leaving her role for six months, a year, sometimes three years. She has a spreadsheet of options. She has read everything. She can argue both sides of every path fluently.

And she has not taken a single step toward any of them.

She usually opens with some version of “I just need to think it through a bit more.”

She does not.

She needs a way to stop thinking it through, because the thinking stopped producing new information a long time ago.

If that sounds familiar, and especially if the anxiety around the career decision itself has become its own problem, this article is for you. That earlier piece covers what the fear is doing in your body and brain. This one is about the mechanics: how to decide, how to move fast once you have, and how to be at peace with whatever happens next.

Why Smart Women Overthink Career Changes

Here is the uncomfortable part. The women I work with do not overthink because something is wrong with them. They overthink because analysis is the skill that built their careers.

You got promoted for seeing risks other people missed, for stress-testing plans, for never walking into a meeting underprepared. Fifteen years of being rewarded for rigor trains your brain to treat every open question as something to be researched until it is airtight.

A career change cannot be made airtight. There is no version of this decision where you eliminate the uncertainty in advance.

So the skill that made you excellent at your job quietly becomes the thing keeping you stuck in it. You are not failing to decide. You are applying a due-diligence process to a question that will never pass due diligence.

There is also a quieter layer underneath, and I name it because almost no one else will.

For many accomplished women, the deliberation itself feels safe. As long as you are still deciding, you have not risked anything. You cannot have chosen wrong.

The overthinking is doing a job for you, and the job is protecting you from the possibility of public failure. Recognizing that is uncomfortable, but it is also the beginning of getting unstuck.

If you recognize yourself in this and the deliberating has gone on long enough, I can help you turn it into an actual decision.

Book a Clarity Call

Are You Actually Deciding, or Just in Motion?

There is a distinction I share with nearly every client, borrowed from James Clear’s writing on habits: the difference between motion and action.

Motion is planning, researching, and strategizing. It feels productive and produces nothing.

Action is the behavior that delivers an actual outcome. Reading about UX certifications is motion.

Emailing one UX lead and asking what her week actually looks like is action, because it produces something real: an answer, or a no.

Motion is seductive for exactly the reason Clear identifies: it lets you feel like you are making progress without risking failure. Nobody ever got rejected by a spreadsheet.

Run this test on your last month:

Look at everything you did related to your career decision. How much of it could fail? If the honest answer is none of it, you have been in motion, not in action.

A useful weekly rule: one thing that could be declined, ignored, or judged.

One real conversation, one application to a fellowship, one pitch for an internal move.

Motion has no failure exposure. Action does.

That is how you tell them apart.

How Much Information Is Enough to Make a Career Decision?

You will never have all the information, so the real question is how much is enough.

I like the threshold Colin Powell used for military decisions: act once you have somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of the information you wish you had.

Below 40 percent you are guessing. Above 70 percent you have waited too long, and the decision starts being made for you by circumstances, by a reorg, by burnout, by another year passing.

Most of the women I coach are sitting at 85 or 90 percent and still gathering. They could teach a seminar on their target industry. What they are waiting for is not information. It is certainty, and certainty is not coming.

This waiting also carries a measurable cost.

People who approach decisions as maximizers, determined to find the single best possible option, report less happiness, less life satisfaction, and more regret than people who look for an option that is good enough and commit to it.

The exhaustive search does not just slow you down. It makes you feel worse about whatever you eventually choose, because some imagined better option always survives in your head.

So set the bar in advance. Write down what you actually need to know to choose: roughly what the path pays, whether the day-to-day work suits you, what the realistic entry point looks like.

When those boxes are filled, you are at enough. Further research past that point is not diligence. It is avoidance with a spreadsheet.

Is This a One-Way Door or a Two-Way Door?

The single most useful reframe I give clients comes from Jeff Bezos’s 2015 shareholder letter.

Some decisions are one-way doors: consequential and nearly irreversible, deserving slow, careful deliberation.

Most decisions are two-way doors: if you walk through and dislike what you find, you can walk back.

His observation about large companies applies perfectly to careers.

We tend to run the heavyweight one-way-door process on decisions that are actually two-way doors, and the result is slowness everywhere.

Map your actual options against this.

Taking an internal transfer is a two-way door.

Having coffee with someone in your target field is barely a door at all. Taking a contract role to test a new function, enrolling in a course, telling your manager you want different scope: two-way doors, all of them.

Even leaving your company, which feels like the most irreversible move on the list, is more reversible than it appears. Boomerang hires happen constantly, and your network does not evaporate the day you resign.

Genuine one-way doors in a career transition are rarer than your anxiety says they are.

Spending your savings to fund two years of retraining is one.

Signing a non-compete that locks you out of your industry is another.

Those deserve the full deliberation.

The rest do not, and treating every choice like a one-way door is precisely the habit that has kept you in the same spot for a year.

If part of what keeps every door feeling irreversible is that your sense of who you are is welded to your current title, that is its own piece of work, and I wrote about it in decoupling your self-worth from your professional success.

Decide by a Date, Not by a Feeling

Waiting to feel ready is the most common decision strategy I see, and it is not a strategy. Readiness follows action; it almost never precedes it. So replace the feeling with a date.

Here is the structure I use with clients. First, narrow the field to two or three real options, including “stay, but renegotiate what staying looks like” if that is a real option for you. If you are comparing seven paths, you are not comparing anything, and if the problem is that you cannot even name the options yet, start with the clarity work in what to do when you don’t know what you want to do before you come back to this step.

Second, write down your three to five non-negotiables. Not the twenty things that would be nice. The handful that, if missing, make the option a no. Income floor, flexibility, the kind of problems you want to spend your day on. Score each option against only those.

Third, put a decision date on your calendar, two to four weeks out for most career-direction decisions, and tell one person you respect what the date is. The deadline does the work your willpower has been failing to do. When the date arrives, you choose the option that best clears your non-negotiables, with whatever information you have. Not the perfect option. The one that clears the bar. You are allowed to feel unsure while you do this. Unsure is the normal operating condition of every meaningful decision you have ever made.

Setting a real deadline is far easier when someone is holding you to it, and holding that line is exactly what I do with my clients.

Schedule Your Session

How to Act Fast Once You Have Decided

A decision without a next action dissolves. I have watched clients make a clear, well-reasoned choice on a Friday and re-open it by the following Thursday, purely because nothing happened in between. The deliberation habit grows back fast in empty space.

So within 48 hours of deciding, take one action that creates external reality. Send the message to the person in your target field. Tell your manager you want to discuss your role. Register for the program. Put the resignation conversation on a calendar. The size of the action matters less than its direction: it has to exist outside your own head, where you cannot quietly delete it.

Then stack a second commitment behind it before momentum fades, ideally one involving another human being, because appointments with other people survive your 2 a.m. doubts far better than promises to yourself do. This is also where a coach earns her keep, frankly. Not because you cannot decide alone, but because a standing appointment with someone who knows your decision date has a way of keeping the door you chose from swinging shut.

One warning for my fellow over-preparers: do not let “acting fast” turn into building the perfect 12-month transition plan. That is motion wearing action’s clothes. The plan can be three steps long. You only ever need to see the next step clearly.

Overthinking When the Ground Itself Is Moving

I want to speak directly to something I hear constantly from women in tech right now, because it adds a loop that the standard decision advice ignores.

Many of you are not just deciding whether to leave a role. You are deciding while the role itself transforms underneath you.

Engineers and product leaders tell me they fear becoming, in the phrase I keep hearing, “glorified AI prompters”, supervising machine output instead of doing the craft they spent two decades mastering.

That worry is widespread and rational: about half of U.S. workers say they are worried about the future impact of AI in the workplace, and a third expect it to mean fewer opportunities for them long-term.

Here is the trap. When the industry is shifting, “wait until things settle” feels prudent.

But there is no settling coming on a timeline that helps you.

Waiting for the dust to clear means making your decision at someone else’s pace, usually after a layoff, a reorg, or two more years of erosion.

Uncertainty about the industry is not a reason to postpone your decision. It is a reason to make it deliberately, while you still hold the advantage: your network is warm, your savings are intact, and you are choosing rather than reacting.

Practically, this changes the question you should be asking. Not “which job title is safe for the next 20 years,” because no honest person can answer that.

Ask instead which problems you want to work on and which of your capabilities travel well across tools, judgment, domain depth, the ability to lead people through change. Those are the assets that survive whatever the technology does next.

If you are still unsure whether what you are feeling is a real signal to move or just ambient industry dread, my piece on how to know it’s time for a career change walks through how to tell them apart.

How to Live With the Outcome

This is the part most career advice skips, and it is the reason people stay stuck. You are not really afraid of deciding. You are afraid of how you will feel afterward if it goes badly.

Two things help. The first is the regret math, because it runs opposite to instinct. Acting feels like the risky move, but the long-run pattern is the reverse: actions generate more regret in the short term, while inactions produce more regret in the long run.

The mistake you can name stings for a season. The path you never tried compounds for decades. When my clients in their late 40s and 50s talk about regret, it is almost never “I tried something and it didn’t work.”

It is “I knew at 42 and I stayed eight more years.”

The second is a rule I hold clients to after every big decision: judge the decision by the process, not the outcome.

If you defined your non-negotiables, gathered enough information, chose by your deadline, and acted, you made a good decision, full stop, even if the new role turns out to have problems the old one did not.

Outcomes are partly luck. Process is yours.

This standard matters because it is what lets you make the next decision quickly too, instead of treating one rough landing as proof that you cannot trust yourself.

And remember what you learned at the door. If you walk through and it is wrong, most of the time you can walk back, sideways, or forward to a third thing you could not see from where you started.

You do not have to feel ready to begin. Most of the women I work with reach out before they feel certain, not after.

Start the Conversation

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if I’m overthinking a career decision or doing real due diligence?

Check whether new inputs are changing anything. Due diligence surfaces information that updates your view. Overthinking revisits the same considerations on a loop, and you could write today’s pros and cons list from memory because it is identical to the one from two months ago. If your last several “research” sessions produced nothing that shifted your leaning, the research phase is over and the avoidance phase has begun.

How long should it take to decide on a career change?

Naming the decision and choosing a direction should take weeks, not years. Two to four weeks of focused work is enough for most direction-level decisions once your options are narrowed, which is why I have clients set a decision date inside that window.

Executing the transition can then take months, and that is fine. The damage comes from letting the deciding itself sprawl, because every month of open-loop deliberation drains energy you will want for the actual move.

What if I use all of this and still can’t choose?

Then the blocker is usually not information, it is that some part of you does not feel safe choosing, and more frameworks will not fix that. This is exactly the situation where a structured outside partner changes things. Take a look at how we can work together, and know that many women book a call precisely because they cannot choose yet, not because they are ready. That is allowed. It describes most of my callers, and often the ones I most enjoy working with.

She was not new to her career.

She had fifteen-plus years of shipped products, promotions, and performance reviews behind her.

And she was spending her best hours each week explaining work instead of doing it.

If that sounds familiar, this article is for you. This is the playbook I use with senior women on how to deal with a micromanaging boss.

I spent years at Google before becoming a career coach, and I have sat on both sides of this dynamic.

Micromanagement is fixable more often than people think.

How to Deal With a Micromanaging Boss: the Short Version

1. Diagnose. Spend a week figuring out whether you are dealing with an anxious manager, a visibility gap, or an organization under pressure.
2. Stop working harder. Micromanagement is a trust problem, not a quality problem, so extra polish does not touch it.
3. Push updates before they get pulled. A short weekly update, sent on a predictable rhythm, removes the uncertainty that fuels the hovering.
4. Name the dynamic without saying “micromanaged.” Describe the pattern, ask what would make them comfortable, and propose a pilot project with defined check-ins.
5. Set a deadline. If nothing changes after three months of honest effort, treat it as an exit signal and start planning your move.

The rest of this article walks through each step, including the scripts I give clients and the signs that tell you the situation is not going to improve.

Why Micromanagement Stings More 15 Years Into Your Career

Being micromanaged at any stage is unpleasant. Being micromanaged after a decade and a half of proven delivery feels like a personal insult.

Most advice on this topic assumes the reader is early in their career and the manager has a plausible reason to check the work. That assumption breaks down completely for most of the women I coach. They are senior.

Their track record is public. When a manager starts reviewing their slide decks line by line or asking who approved a routine decision, the message they receive is not “I am helping you grow.” It is “I do not trust you,” directed at someone who has spent years earning exactly that trust.

And it’s not uncommon. In one widely cited survey:

• 79% of people said they had experienced micromanagement
• 85% of those working under a micromanager said it hurt their morale
• 71% said it interfered with their actual job performance

The extra oversight degrades the quality of work rather than improve your quality of work

There is an extra layer for experienced women:

Researchers who study gender bias at work have documented a pattern where women have to provide more evidence of competence than men to be judged equally competent, and where women’s mistakes are noticed more and remembered longer. If you have ever felt like your work gets double-checked while a male peer’s gets waved through, that is not oversensitivity.

It is a documented pattern called “prove it again,” and it means the standard advice to simply “build trust over time” can take longer to work for you, through no fault of yours.

If you are tired of proving yourself to someone who should already trust you, I can help you change the dynamic.

Book a Complimentary Clarity Call

What Is Actually Driving Your Manager’s Behavior?

Before you can change the dynamic, you need an accurate diagnosis. In my coaching practice, micromanagement almost always traces back to one of three sources, and each one calls for a different response.

An anxious manager

Most micromanagers aren’t power-hungry villains. They are anxious people passing their anxiety downward. Some never learned to delegate. Some are insecure about their own standing. Many are under pressure from their own boss and convert that pressure into control.

Remote and hybrid work has made this worse. Microsoft’s research on hybrid work found that 85% of leaders say hybrid work makes it hard to feel confident that employees are productive, and hybrid managers are notably more likely than in-person managers to say they struggle to trust their team to do their best work. Microsoft calls this “productivity paranoia.” Your manager cannot see you working, so their nervous system fills the gap with worry, and the worry arrives in your inbox as another check-in request.

A visibility gap

Sometimes the problem is not your work or their character. It is that your work is invisible to them between milestones. You go quiet for two weeks because you are heads-down doing the job. This is the most fixable version of micromanagement.

An organization under pressure

When companies go through layoffs, reorgs, or leadership changes, scrutiny cascades. Your manager gets grilled in their staff meeting, so they grill you. If the micromanagement started around the same time as a restructuring, it may have very little to do with you at all. I wrote separately about what to do after a tough reorg, because that situation has its own playbook.

• Does your manager hover over everyone, or just you?
• Did this start recently, or has it always been this way?
• Does it spike before their leadership reviews?

Why Working Harder Does Not Fix It

The high achievers I work with all reach for the same first move: do more. Produce more, polish more, respond faster…

It almost never works. Micromanagement is not a quality problem, so doing more does not cure it. Micromanagement is a trust and anxiety problem.

Your manager’s behavior is driven by what they feel, not by what you produce. You can hand a nervous manager flawless work every week and they will stay nervous, because the flaw was never in the work.

Working harder also costs you the thing that actually builds careers at the senior level: judgment, strategy, and visible leadership.

Every hour you spend pre-empting nitpicks is an hour not spent on the work that gets people promoted. Gallup’s research found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Your relationship with this one person shapes most of your experience of work. That is exactly why the fix has to target the relationship, not your output.

Push Information Before It Gets Pulled

Here is the move that changes the dynamic more reliably than anything else I have seen: stop letting your manager pull information from you, and start pushing it to them first.

A micromanager’s check-ins are their coping mechanism for uncertainty. If you get ahead of the uncertainty, the check-ins lose their purpose. Send a short, structured update before they ask.

Building the right update rhythm for your manager is easier with a thinking partner. Let’s design yours together.

Talk It Through With Me

How Do You Ask a Micromanaging Boss for More Autonomy?

At some point, the dynamic needs to be named out loud. Done well, this conversation resets the relationship. Done badly, it puts your manager on the defensive and makes everything worse. A few rules I give my clients:

1. Do not open with “I feel micromanaged.” The word is an accusation, and accused people defend themselves instead of listening. Describe the pattern instead, with one or two specific examples, and frame it around outcomes: “I have noticed we are reviewing the weekly report three times before it goes out. I would like to find a way to give you confidence in it with one review, because the extra cycles are costing us a day each week.”
2. Ask what would make them comfortable. A question like “What would you need to see from me to feel good about me running this piece end to end?” does two things. It surfaces their actual worry, which is often something you can address directly, and it converts the conversation from a complaint into a plan.
3. Propose a pilot. Pick one project and ask to run it with a defined check-in structure: “Let me take this one start to finish. You will get an update every Friday, and I will flag anything that threatens the deadline the day I see it. If it goes well, we extend the same model to the rest of my work.” A pilot is easy for an anxious manager to say yes to, because it is small and reversible.

Your job after that is simple: deliver, keep the update promise, and let the evidence accumulate.

If the relationship between you is sound and the source of pressure is structural, you may find your manager relieved to have this conversation. More than once I have watched a client discover their manager hated the dynamic too and did not know how to exit it.

When Micromanagement Is a Signal to Leave

I want to be honest about the cases where none of this works, because they are real.

Some managers do not change. Control is their identity, not their coping mechanism. And in the same survey I mentioned earlier, 69% of people said they had considered changing jobs because of micromanagement, and 36% actually did.

Here is how I help clients tell a fixable situation from an exit signal:

Sustained micromanagement teaches capable people to second-guess themselves, and I have watched it erode the confidence of women who had every reason to be sure of their abilities.

Protecting Your Confidence While You Decide

Whatever you choose, guard your sense of yourself while you work it out. Three habits I ask every client in this situation to keep:

• Keep a private record of what you ship, who it helped, and what it earned, partly as a paper trail and mostly as an antidote.
• Stay connected to colleagues and mentors who knew your work before this manager. Their view of you is data too, and right now it is more accurate than your manager’s.
• Give yourself a deadline. “I will run the update system and have the autonomy conversation, and if nothing changes in three months, I start planning my move.”

FAQ

Is micromanagement a sign my boss doesn’t trust me?

Usually yes, but the distrust is rarely about you specifically. Most micromanagement is displaced anxiety: a manager under pressure, insecure in their role, or unable to see your work between milestones. That distinction matters because anxiety responds to proactive communication, while genuine distrust of a specific person tends to show up as selective scrutiny that no amount of updating cures. Watch whether the behavior is aimed at everyone or only at you.

Should I go to HR about a micromanaging boss?

Not as a first move. HR is the right path when the behavior crosses into something targeted or discriminatory, when it continues after a direct conversation and a documented good-faith effort on your side, or when it is harming your health. Before that, the update system and the autonomy conversation give you better odds of actually improving your daily experience. If you do go to HR, bring specifics: dates, examples, and the steps you already took.

Can a micromanaging boss actually change?

Some can, and I have seen it happen, almost always when the employee changed the information flow first and then named the dynamic without accusation. Managers whose control comes from situational anxiety often relax once the uncertainty is managed for them. Managers whose control is a fixed personality trait, who micromanage every team they have ever led, rarely change for any individual report. Six months of honest effort is enough to know which kind you have.

Whether you decide to stay and reset the relationship or start planning your exit, you do not have to figure it out alone.

Schedule Your Free Call Today

In the clip above, you’ll hear our guest Amy ask Greta and me exactly this question: “how do you introduce yourself when you don’t have a clean title to point at?” What follows in this article is the fuller answer, expanded into the practical toolkit I wish every woman had before she walked into her next event.

Why “What Do You Do?” Hits Different When You’re in Transition

The question itself is almost always asked innocently. It’s a social shorthand, especially in the U.S., and especially on the West Coast. In the US, especially in the Bay Area, work is woven so tightly into identity that “Who do you work for?” is often the very first thing someone asks at a party. I moved to Silicon Valley after years in Europe, and the directness of it took me a long time to get used to.
But when you’re between jobs, or in the middle of a long, uncertain pivot, that little question stops being small talk. It activates a much bigger one: who am I if I’m not what I used to be?
Greta, who spent 13 years at McKinsey before moving to the U.S. and finding herself unexpectedly unemployed two days after her relocation, described the experience as her whole identity-building collapsing overnight. The next day, no one was calling. There was no title to lean on.
Two points I want to make. First, you don’t feel like you have to justify yourself and summarize everything in one elevator pitch line, it’s just the start of the conversation. Second, with just a small amount of preparation, you can walk into any room with an answer you actually feel good about, and you don’t have to wait until you have a new job to do it.

If your inner monologue has been spinning on this for weeks, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Coaching gives you a structured space to find an answer that feels both honest and confident.

Find Your Confident Answer

The Mistake Most People Make at Networking Events

When we don’t know how to answer “what do you do?”, most of us reach for one of two scripts, and neither one works well.
The first is the apology script: “Oh, well, I was at [Big Company] for ten years, but I left a few months ago, and I’m sort of figuring out what’s next, and…” The energy of the apology lands before the words do. The person across from you receives the message that this is an uncomfortable topic and they should change the subject. They usually do.
The second is the over-explanation script: a two-minute monologue covering every project, side hustle, freelance gig, and “I’m also exploring…” you can fit into one breath. It’s the opposite problem. You’re trying so hard to prove you’re not just sitting at home that you lose the thread of who you actually are. The listener will lose the thread too.
The good news is there’s a third option, and it has nothing to do with having a perfect title. It’s about leading with what you’re building, not what you’ve lost.

Five Ways to Answer “What Do You Do?” Without Flinching

These are the reframes I use with clients, and several of them came directly from the conversation with Greta. Try them out loud before your next event.

1. Lead with what you’re building, not what you used to be

Instead of “I used to be at Google,” try “I’m building my next chapter, currently exploring [the space you’re curious about].” The word building is doing real work here. It signals momentum, choice, and direction without requiring a title. It also invites a follow-up question that you control.
Formula: “I’m building my next chapter — currently exploring [the space you’re curious about].”

2. Borrow the courage reframe

Greta said something in our conversation that stuck with me. When she first moved to LA and felt stuck introducing herself as “an immigrant,” she eventually realized that being an immigrant actually means courage and curiosity — and she didn’t have to stop at the label. The same is true for “between jobs” or “in transition.” Those phrases carry hidden strengths: clarity, intention, the willingness to choose something better instead of staying in something that no longer fit. You’re allowed to lead with the strength, not the gap.
Formula: “I’m in transition — choosing what comes next instead of staying in something that no longer fit.”

3. Use a value or an impact, not a title

If your job for ten years was “Senior HR Business Partner,” your title was the container. Your contribution was the thing inside the container. The contribution travels with you. Try “I help leaders build healthier teams,” or “I work with companies on people strategy,” or “I help senior women navigate big career decisions.” A value-based or impact-based answer doesn’t require a current employer, and it tends to be far more memorable than any title would have been anyway. It’s also a lot easier to understand for people who aren’t directly in the space.
Formula: “I help [who you serve] with [the meaningful thing you do for them].”

4. Turn the question back with genuine curiosity

This is one of my favorites and it works beautifully. “What about you, what brings you to this event?” Two things happen. You release yourself from the spotlight, and you collect information about the person across from you that helps you tailor whatever you choose to share next.

5. Give yourself permission to say “It’s not really one thing” – most people will follow where you lead them

If you don’t want to explain your whole life to a stranger at a party, you don’t have to. Greta put it bluntly in our conversation: it’s actually none of their business. You can wrap that boundary in a warm tone: “Right now it’s a mix of personal and professional things I’m working on, none of which fit neatly on a business card” and then move the conversation along. Most people will respect the boundary and follow where you lead them.

What to Say in Three Real-World Scenarios

The reframes above are flexible, but it helps to see what they sound like in actual conversations. Here are three of the most common settings my clients find themselves in.
At a casual networking event: “I’m in a transition right now, I left [industry or company] a few months ago and I’m exploring [the next space]. What about you?”
At a school event, kids’ birthday party, or social gathering: “Honestly, I’m in the middle of figuring out my next chapter. It’s been a really interesting season. What about your work?”
When a former colleague or industry peer asks: “I left [company] in [month]. I’m taking some time to be intentional about what comes next, instead of jumping straight into the first thing. I’d actually love your perspective, what are you seeing in the market?”
Notice what’s true across all three: a short, calm sentence about where you are, no apology, and a redirect that opens up the conversation. You’re not hiding anything. You’re just refusing to let one question put you on the defensive when there is no need to be.

What Not to Say (and What to Say Instead)

A few specific phrases come up over and over in client sessions, and almost all of them quietly diminish the person saying them. Here’s a quick reference of the most common ones, the swap I’d reach for, and why the second version lands better in the room.

If you’d like a thought partner to help you refine your own version of these scripts — and the deeper confidence underneath them — that’s exactly the work we do together in coaching.

Let's Work Together

What to Do When the Question Still Throws You

Even with a rehearsed answer, the freeze can come back. Here’s a small set of practices that help.
Practice out loud before the event. Reading your answer in your head is not the same as saying it. Stand in front of a mirror, in the car, or to a partner, and say your line a few times. The mouth needs to know the shape of the words before the pressure of the room is on you.
Let your body lead. Stand a little taller, soften your shoulders, smile slightly before the words come. The other person’s brain reads your body language before they process the sentence. Calm body, calm question.
Have a self-compassionate fallback. If you fumble the answer entirely, that’s fine. “Honestly? I’m still finding the right one-liner for this season of my life.” lands as honest and human. Most people will appreciate it more than a polished pitch. You might also get some great ideas.

The Inner Work Required

Here’s the part I want to be honest about. You can rehearse all the right phrases, and they will still feel a little hollow if underneath them you don’t actually believe your worth lives somewhere other than your old job title.
That deeper work, separating your sense of self from your resume, is its own piece. And I’ve written about it in much more depth over here: Decoupling Self-Worth from Job Success During Career Change. If “what do you do?” keeps catching you off guard, the surface answer is a script. The lasting answer is rebuilding the part of you that knows it doesn’t need the script to be okay.
In the meantime, every time you practice one of the reframes above and notice the freeze loosening a little, that’s the work happening in real time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I say at networking events when I don’t have a job title?

Lead with what you’re building, not what you’ve lost. A short, calm answer lands far better than an apology or an over-explanation.

How do I answer “What do you do?” when I was laid off and I’m still emotional about it?

Give yourself permission not to share the layoff at all in casual settings. “I left [company] earlier this year, and I’m taking time to be intentional about my next move” is honest and complete. The fuller story is for people you trust, not for someone who just asked a small-talk question. If the grief is still close to the surface, our piece on career transition anxiety may help, too.

Should I have a different answer for different settings?

Yes, and most people do this naturally for every other topic in their lives. Your answer at an industry conference can be a little more detailed than your answer at a neighbor’s barbecue. Practice two or three versions so you’re not improvising under pressure.

How long will it take before “what do you do?” stops feeling stressful?

It usually gets easier within a few weeks of consistent practice, partly because you’ve rehearsed the answer, and partly because each conversation that goes well builds evidence that you’re more than your last title. The shift is gradual, but it’s real, and almost every client I’ve worked with describes the relief on the other side.

Final Thoughts

“What do you do?” is going to keep coming up. There’s no avoiding it. But the question doesn’t have to keep catching you off guard.
The women I work with who navigate this best aren’t the ones with the cleverest scripts. They’re the ones who have done a little preparation, who have made peace with the fact that they’re in a chapter that doesn’t fit on a business card, and who lead with curiosity about the person in front of them. You can get there too, and probably sooner than you think.
If you want help building the version of this that’s specifically yours, I’d love to be part of the conversation.

You don’t have to figure out the perfect answer on your own. Let’s talk it through together on a free, no-pressure call.

Start The Conversation

Full Transcript of “Who Are You Beyond Your Title?”
A conversation between Claire Campion, Greta Petrushka, and an audience member, Amy
Speakers:
– Claire Campion — Career transition coach; formerly HR at Google and Grammarly; originally from Ireland
– Greta Petrushka — Leadership coach and people strategist; formerly McKinsey (13 years); moved from Europe to LA
– Amy — Audience member (former business owner, PR director, and nonprofit fundraiser)

CLAIRE: Hi everybody. Welcome to our discussion today on the topic of “Who are you beyond your title?” and thank you for joining. It’s great to see some of you here today. So before we jump into the discussion, let me introduce myself. My name is Claire Campion, I’m a career transition coach and I also worked in human resources for many years at companies like Google and Grammarly. And Greta, would you like to introduce yourself?

GRETA: Yes, absolutely. It’s nice to be here with you again, Claire. My name is Greta Petrushka. I’m a leadership coach and a people strategist, which means that I support companies to build human-centered workplaces. And before this, I worked for McKinsey for 13 years where I was leading the people function in Central Europe, and I was also supporting two tech companies also in the people space. So that’s me.

CLAIRE: Great. So I think between us — between our coaching backgrounds, our international backgrounds, and our backgrounds in human resources — that’s why this topic feels very relevant today for us to discuss.

GRETA: Yes, absolutely. And you know, you are reading the news as much as I do, and the question keeps on popping up in my mind like how people going through the transitions they are, you know, put through — and it’s sometimes it’s not by choice. And also, we went through quite a bit of transitions ourselves, so I guess this is the topic we are often discussing, so we thought that, you know, it might be helpful to share our perspective on this topic.

CLAIRE: Yeah, definitely. I would say as you mentioned, you know, every day I open my phone and I see the news, there is talk of companies doing layoffs, unfortunately, and it seems to be the new norm, I would say. And then, you know, in my business as a coach, when I’m talking to people, the big thing that many people are talking about is like adapting to change in the workplace. Because I think a number of years ago, the workplace was more stable. People had a job for as kind of as long as they wanted it, and you decided when you want to leave. And now things have changed very much, and companies are proactively restructuring on a regular basis. Unfortunately, people are losing their jobs, and then with the advent of AI, it’s just like a very turbulent time, I would say, at the moment.

GRETA: Yeah. And I would actually also add that, yeah, the current situation in workplaces is not great from this perspective, but I also believe that, you know, “who are you beyond the title” also comes to situations around being an immigrant, or choosing to become a mother and going back to work, or choosing a new career path, or even aging, you know? So there are so many life situations when this question might pop up in our head. So it’s kind of like, I feel like a universal question and can be applied to many different life circumstances.

CLAIRE: Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, we’re both living in the US now. Definitely part of the US culture, and something that was very obvious to me when I moved here, is that part of your whole identity — like work is a huge part of your identity, definitely here on the West Coast of America. And maybe it’s because like Silicon Valley here, we have the big entertainment hubs in Los Angeles, but work makes up a huge part of someone’s identity. Yeah. What were your observations around that when you moved to the US? Was it a surprise for you, or was it something you were already kind of aware of before you moved over?

GRETA: I was definitely not aware of it. I actually found myself in a situation when everything I knew was kind of like stripped away from me. And again, it was by choice. I chose to move to the US. But I didn’t realize how difficult it is going to be for me without like — I don’t want to say like a significant title, but like when I worked for McKinsey, you know, it was a name and it was a brand and it was a prestige, and when I said that, everybody was kind of like recognized it, and it was a huge part of my identity. And so when I moved to the US, actually two days before, I was let go of my startup job. So suddenly I was unemployed and, you know, I was this immigrant lady and I didn’t really know how to deal with that and how to introduce myself. And of course, I pushed myself to go to all sorts of networking events because I had to build my community here and I also had to find a job. And when you only have like 90 seconds to introduce yourself and it has to be very impactful, and you don’t have a job, you don’t have a title — like how do you do that? It was actually very hard for me and I obviously found a way around it, but this is definitely not something I was prepared for. How did you manage this? How did you manage the West Coast culture from this regard?

CLAIRE: Yeah, I would say, you know, when I moved from Europe to the West Coast, I was already working with Google. So one of my first observations when I started socializing in Silicon Valley after-work drinks, you know, doing things at the weekends, the first question people would ask me in any kind of social circle was always “Who do you work for?” It was the very first question. And I definitely was taken aback in the beginning that this was always the first question people asked me, because coming from Europe, that’s not something I was used to. In Europe, when you would be out on a night out, that would come like maybe two or three hours into the conversation, if at all. So yes, when I responded, “Oh, I work for Google,” etc., because it was a prestigious company and still is very much, you know, you had that instant acceptance and instant gratification, and you were automatically part of like the tech club or the “in” club. So it did feel really nice, honestly. You didn’t have to explain who were Google and what did they do, people just instantly knew.

GRETA: Yeah. And there is — how should I say — it’s just nice and easy and smooth, right? You don’t need to explain yourself and you are part of the gang in a way. And you know, I was wondering, you spent like 11 years at Google and also you decided to leave Google, so it was on your own terms. Like what happened afterwards? Like how did you deal with the situation when your title and this whole package just disappeared from your life?

CLAIRE: Yes. One thing I would say is, you know, when you work at a company for that long, it’s not just, you know, your work. It becomes like your whole ecosystem because you travel a lot, you become friendly with people at work, you know, all of your benefits are done through the company — it’s almost like they look after 95% of your life. You also, because Google specifically is like a high-performance company and you work long hours, but you get to work on interesting stuff, but it does mean that you don’t have huge amounts of free time for hobbies or maybe spending as much time as you would like with your family. So when you offboard and you come out the other side from a company where you’ve given like so much of your time, your life, your friendships, there is a feeling of just like being disoriented because you’re like, “Okay, you know, I have to kind of build my whole ecosystem again.” Even — it may sound silly, but really basic things like, “I have to go and find a dentist, I have to go and find a doctor, I have to get a new phone.” Like, I almost felt like I was a child again doing all these things.

But for me, actually, by the time I left Google, I had made peace with it. I’d been there for 11 years, I’d done all the roles that I wanted to do, and I was ready for something new. But in the 18 months to two years before I left, I would say that’s when I had like the most turbulence internally because I was giving more of myself to the role than I wanted to give. But when you’re in a high-performance culture, you’re constantly being asked for more and more. And it’s very hard to say no because in these companies, you know, you’re rewarded by doing well, promotion, output, and all of your colleagues are doing the same. And you definitely feel like, you know, we’re all working towards this vision or this mission together. And so by not giving your all, it wasn’t something that sat comfortably with me. But then there was this constant tension between, “Okay, is this job aligned with where I am now in my life?” because my priorities are starting to change after eight, nine years.

GRETA: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for sharing. And you know, I was just thinking that when I left McKinsey, it was almost like 100% of my identity was associated with work and everything I’ve done for work. And so again, it was my decision to leave the company, but it felt like the whole huge building I was building throughout many, many, many years by layers and layers and layers, it just collapsed over time. And, you know, the next day nobody is calling, you don’t feel you are creating impact. Okay, how to stay productive? You know, I was like, “Oh my god, I have time to just like watch a movie or like just like sleep properly,” which are very basic things.

But when this whole building collapsed, I’m like, “How am I going to rebuild everything?” And as you were saying, it’s not just work — it’s your community, it’s your friends, it’s your self-worth, it’s prestige, and everything, you know, your whole life. And actually, when I moved to LA and became an immigrant, I realized — and I went through a very similar pattern — like, okay, so how will I again rebuild from scratch? And I was devastated and this time I was even isolated from my family, my friends, everything I’ve known before. And during this isolation, I had to realize that I am not rebuilding from scratch. I didn’t have to start from zero because I have so much life experience. And, you know, I’m still learning and I’m still building my life, but there is so much I learned throughout the years that I can capitalize on that knowledge. And now when I’m talking about this, it’s so obvious, but when I was in this situation and in this mindset, it didn’t seem like that.

And I think the good news is when something collapses, you actually — or when you believe that something collapsed completely — you have the freedom to pick the building blocks which you will use to — and I don’t even want to say rebuild, but actually use to continue your life. And you know, that building might look completely different than the previous one, and that’s actually, I feel like that’s a luxury, that’s a great opportunity. And of course, you need to take the time to reflect and realize what are the elements which you like, which you want to build on and continue. But being in this situation is actually a great opportunity. And you know, after two years now, obviously I see it from a different lens, but that was the biggest learning for me in the past couple of transitions I went through.

CLAIRE: I definitely resonate with what you said. Like when I think about the different jobs I’ve had over my career, I kind of now think of them as like chapters in my life. So my life is a book, and then these are the different chapters. And when I leave a company, I’m like closing that chapter and moving on to the next one — sometimes with some sadness or some grief, but also on the other hand, you’re like excited for the future and for new things. I was going to ask you, when you look back on your long stint that you had at McKinsey and you think about like your identity, as we talked about, like being wrapped up in the job and you know, our whole lives, what would you say is like your biggest learning looking back on that now?

GRETA: Um, I would say that every situation is a learning opportunity. And you know, I had like a long run at McKinsey and I just grew so much, and I took all kinds of opportunities to improve myself and meet new people and actually just like learn and consume as much as I could to become a better version of myself, and McKinsey was a great place for that. Maybe one additional thing which I would highlight is that if I think about like how ambition kind of like brought me closer to myself versus kind of like drifted me away from myself — and I have to say that at the beginning, I was very much aligned with what I was doing and how things were going. And as I grew, as I became like more and more experienced, I realized that my value system also shifted. So what I was doing would not necessarily 100% align with who I am anymore. And I think you were also explaining this tension in yourself.

And I believe that when this happens, you have to give yourself space to reflect and realize that, “Okay, this situation is not serving me anymore, and how can I change it? Can I change it?” It’s always a question if you have power over it. Sometimes when you are working in huge companies and big corporations, usually you don’t have influence over how things are set up. So the question remains like, can you accept that or can you change yourself? And it might be that you cannot change yourself, so the way is the way out. But again, like giving yourself the space to think about it, reflect on it, it’s extremely important. And having the self-awareness that what is happening is not serving you anymore, it’s just extremely important and the catalyst to making the decisions which are best for you.

CLAIRE: Mhm. And I know we started this conversation today saying, you know, this topic is very topical right now. And one of the reasons is obviously because of all the layoffs that are happening. And so in those situations, people are not being given the choice. They’re not voluntarily leaving their company, they’re being told — they walk into work one day and they’re being told, “You know, unfortunately, we don’t need you anymore” or “We’re downsizing.” I was reading last night, in Meta, they’ve already announced they’re going to cut 8,000 people in the next few weeks, and there’s already kind of this panic amongst the workforce that is like, “Who’s staying? Who’s going?” and you know, the turmoil that goes with that. But for anybody watching this today, in terms of if you’ve been let go from a company and you have been in that situation where, you know, you were in the bubble of your company for the last number of years, what advice or things worked for you when you left McKinsey that helped you like almost shed that identity and then like move forward onto your next chapter?

GRETA: Honestly, I’m not sure I could fully shed it. It’s still part of my story and I’m — still when I’m introducing myself, I don’t start with work-related stuff, but at some point, it comes to the picture that I worked for McKinsey. So I don’t think I will be ever able to shed that. But what I would say, on one hand, process — like give yourself time to process because it’s not going to happen overnight. And probably the second would be ask for help, because if your work is so much part of your identity, the chances that you can pass through that alone is not super high, from my perspective. And, you know, I always valued — extremely valued — people’s opinion and advice and perspective who had longer life experiences or work experiences than mine. And I also believe that shifting perspectives are the most difficult. So you can say, “Oh my god, I worked for this company for 10 years. What am I going to do now?” and maybe someone comes in and helps you, you know, like put light on your strengths, your opportunities, and maybe if you start talking to people, you realize that there are, I don’t know, five other opportunities you can apply for. So obviously, like bringing in like outside-in perspective, that was very helpful for me and still is. And maybe the third one is really like reflect on your values and your strengths. I believe that going back to your values as the North Star is really, really critical, especially if you were part of an organization for 10 years. You just, you know, you just go with the flow and sometimes you don’t even know, “Is it still aligned with me?” because you are so much in survival mode and just pushing through and just focusing on performance, then you forget. And just like having an understanding of like your values as the base and the foundation, it was very helpful for me as well. How about you?

CLAIRE: Yeah, those are really good tips. You know, I was thinking about this last night when I was thinking about preparing for this call, and it took me some time to go through my brain and figure out like what were the things that intentionally worked when I left the company and what were kind of like nice-to-haves. So I would say, yeah, a few things. I think, you know, when you’re at a company for a long time, as we mentioned, a lot of your friends and colleagues are from that world, and so when you’re outside the company, you feel like, “Oh, I’m quite disconnected from like let’s say recruiters and people in other industries,” naturally so, because you’ve been busy with your job for a number of years. So I would say it’s like engaging with people from other industries, other companies, just to gain perspective. Because I think if you’re in a company for a long time, your perspective becomes very like — you may have the company view or you’re just like, you’re in a different seat. And so then when you’re like on the market looking for a new job, it’s engaging with people from different industries and not automatically dismissing some by saying like, “You know, oh, I used to work in tech so I’m only going to work in tech again” or “My background was in finance and I will only consider a finance company,” because the workforce is just changing so rapidly. I think that’s how jobs used to work, but now there’s a lot more like fungibility. And I think also if your title was like, I don’t know, Financial Analyst or Human Resources Business Partner, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can only look for that job again in the future. Like, you have to — sometimes we self-impose these rules on ourselves and you’re like, “I can only search for a job based on X because that’s my experience.” But also this is like a good time to like, as you said, re-evaluate. Look at what are your strengths, what are your interests, what are the things that motivate you — can you get a job that’s maybe more aligned with that?

I would say not — you mentioned this — not being afraid to ask for help, because sometimes when you leave these high-performance companies, like your ego is a little bit bruised or your pride, and you don’t want to ask for help. And I think some cultures, I would say, that’s ingrained more. I would say like being from Ireland, we are not necessarily the most support-coming and saying “I need help.” We’re usually brought up along the lines of, you know, “You’ll figure it out yourself” and “Just ask for help like if you really, really need it,” but otherwise kind of just take it in your stride and figure it out because everybody else is doing that networking and coffee chats and so on. And if you don’t start doing that, I feel like you may be a little bit behind.

GRETA: Yeah, I definitely, you know, double down on that. Like you never know like who you meet and what that meeting will trigger. So yes, and you know, when you are still in the phase of processing, especially when you were let go after many years, it’s hard to like put on a smiley face and go and network and share what you went through. I really understand that, but isolating ourselves is definitely not helpful. And also, I would say that trying to maintain a positive mindset — and I’m saying it with hesitation because I don’t want to signal like, you know, this toxic positivity or anything like that — but trust the process. And really like when you are ready, after you process the situation, go and meet with people and gain energy — and positive energy — from your surroundings. And what you were saying that especially when we work at jobs for many, many years, our friends and our community is part of our working relationships — so like shifting that and going to places which energizes us. So for example, I love painting, I love flowers, I love cooking. So just like thinking through like what energizes you and selecting different locations and communities which actually help you to meet people in the area which gives you positive energy. It helps mentally so much to go through the difficult period, or at least for me it was very, very helpful.

CLAIRE: Yes. And I think, you know, we talked about maybe at our last conversation that we did a few weeks ago that when you lose your job, typically you do go through like that cycle of grief — you’re angry and then you move into ultimately acceptance. But I do think you need to give yourself the time to move through that. And if you have lost your job, even if you have financial pressure or you are the main breadwinner, giving yourself at least a little bit of time to just process things and, as you said, like get to a place where that if you’re going for interviews, like you’re going to show up well and that you don’t want to show up like, you know, still carrying the baggage maybe from the last job or from the layoff. So it may sound counterintuitive because you think, “I have to get a job quickly, there’s lots of people on the job market. Go, go, go.” But taking that space to just reflect a little bit and figure out like, “What do I want to do? How can I find the silver lining in this situation?” Because while these things are unfortunate when they happen at the time — and I’ve also been laid off once in my life, so I’ve been there and I know it does feel really crappy, for want of a better word — a silver lining usually comes from it. And it may be like a few months later, but ultimately something good will come out of it or an opportunity that you’d never thought of — potentially a relocation to another country, like it could be anything, but if you keep your mind open, I think that’s when these opportunities just rise to the surface.

GRETA: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe here, Amy, do you have any questions? We didn’t say at the beginning, but obviously we would be very happy to address anything which you are interested in specifically.

AMY: So I really appreciate bringing in things that are creative, cuz I think when you have the scaffolding of your identity and a routine, it can be really hard to adjust to a transition. And so the way that both of you have brought in kind of like interesting, feel-good ways of just being in the world so you’re not like at home or isolated. And I love the way that both you, Claire, and you, Greta, have brought in just some really adaptable things also for any career change, you know? It could be for a mom, or for a politician, or for a business owner, whatever. Like, I just think it’s adaptable for all, so I just really appreciate the ways you’ve given some tactical things that someone can actually start doing today.

Um, so I want to say that I have one question and that is something that’s really hard. Like, having been a business owner, having been a political wife and doing a lot of political work, having done a lot of nonprofit and fundraising and all of that, when I became a mom — so then I shifted, you know, all my PR stuff, Director of PR of a major development and all of that, to nonprofit galas, hosting, you know, fundraising things at my house, things like that. Now I’m in LA and I don’t have the scaffolding of my social connections to be a part of all these galas and all that. People — here’s the question: People ask “What do you do?” And I literally in my mind, I’m like, “I don’t know yet.” But that’s not really necessarily the best response. And anyway, that’s my question. It’s hard to say. It’s like, well, what don’t I do on one hand, because I manage my finances, I manage my properties, I am looking for things, I’ve done so much. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard to find something that represents the entirety of who I am. You know, to your point, Claire, about like all the wisdom that you’ve acquired, and you, Greta, too — like all the things you’ve done make you who you are. And so you meet someone interesting, how do you encapsulate and represent that without it just being like “I don’t know”? I mean, I could be a bum on the beach like here to get a tan, but I’m not. So yeah, that’s the question. Thanks for fielding it.

GRETA: Yeah, absolutely. And Claire, do you mind if I take this one? Because at the beginning when I moved to LA, I always started that, “Well, I’m an immigrant, I’m new to LA,” and you know, for me it was — and I’m still struggling with that to be honest, this part of my identity. But then I had to think about it, “Okay, what does it mean to be an immigrant?” And then I realized that it means courage. It means that, you know, I’m just like an explorer and I’m, you know, I’m so many different things. I’m not just an immigrant. And slowly I started to move away from this introduction and I don’t say it anymore because I realized it’s just not relevant. And I’m like, I’m so many things, and you know, I had to adjust to every situation how I’m introducing myself. And in a way, I’m still in the probably in the camp where you are at, and oftentimes I just say that, you know, “I’m building — I’m actually like building my life in LA and it has many different parts. It has personal parts, it has professional parts.”

But honestly, and yeah, I will say it: It’s none of their business. And really, it’s none of their business. And so if you still don’t know, that’s okay, and that’s understandable because you are in transition and it takes time for you to figure it out. And for me, when it comes to my professional identity, I’m still figuring out like, am I a coach, am I a consultant, an advisor, whatever. And I don’t have one line — a perfect line — which helps me to introduce myself. So I always, as I said, I adjust to a specific situation. And when I don’t want to answer, because sometimes I’m like this — like, it’s none of your business and I don’t want to explain to you my whole life — I just say like, “I’m building my professional practice and you know, there are certain elements, this and this and that,” and I leave it there. And actually, I often use the tactic of coaching and ask a question and be curious to the other person. So once I learn more about my discussion partner, I actually can adjust how I further introduce myself or continue introducing myself. So I would say that, first of all, don’t feel pressured to answer that question. And if you want to answer, you can always, you know, say something in the lines that you are in transition or you are building something. And that’s okay, and that’s okay until you figure it out. Don’t worry about anybody else, just yourself — like, what makes you feel good and feel comfortable, and go with that. But I would, you know, I would give Claire an opportunity to reflect on this question as well and what I just said.

CLAIRE: Yes, thank you, Amy. This is a great question for us to end on. I would say, you know, I definitely echo Greta’s advice. I would say as women, we often feel pressure like to justify ourselves or our position, both when we’re in the workforce and outside. So I think we often put this pressure on ourselves like, “I have to come up with a good answer and it needs to be like this seamless one-line sentence or this elevator pitch,” as we’re often taught. And I think we put that pressure on ourselves — it’s not necessarily written anywhere, you know? So I think, you know, as a suggestion, you could — to Greta’s point — you can just say, “I’m a business owner. Tell me more about what you do.” Don’t feel like you have to spend like a few minutes kind of justifying all the different things that you do, because you already know your self-worth and your value and all of those things and what you bring to the world. And sometimes people are curiously asking this question as opposed to, you know, in a kind of a salesy way. So sometimes it’s interpreting like, what’s their intention? Are they going to try and sell you something, or is this just like a casual conversation where you met at a social or networking event? So hopefully that’s useful. I know we’re slightly over time, which is a good sign. Good sign.

AMY: Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate the follow. And I think — I know we’re done, but I just want to say I think for women, especially women over like 30 or whatever, it can sort of feel like, “I’m a complex human who’s lived an interesting life.” And so I want to have a good one-liner that represents all that I am. I don’t need to explain it, but I feel like it’s hard to find like a one sentence of — you know what I mean — that I’m not just a mother, or just a property owner, or just a whatever. And you’re right, Claire, like it’s not about — I know who I am, I don’t need the validation, but I think we all want to feel relevant, like we’re complex, interesting women and not like just a mom, or just an ex-wife, or just a — you know what I mean? And so I like to think about just because of also my age and feeling like someone who’s relevant and, you know, done some interesting things and therefore has interesting things to contribute to the world. So that’s where my question kind of comes from. But I really appreciate your answers, both of you. Thank you.

CLAIRE: Of course. Of course. Thank you everyone who joined today. We will be posting this recording on our YouTube channel. Stay tuned for our next, our third conversation. We usually put it out as a poll on LinkedIn and ask for some feedback, or if you’re watching this and you have a topic that you’d like for us to discuss, just send us a DM on LinkedIn and we’d be happy to consider it. So thank you very much and we’ll see you in the next one.

GRETA: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

First, you’re not alone.

Second, you almost certainly don’t need to blow up your life to figure this out.

Most of the women I coach arrive at this question after years of doing everything “right.”

They earned the promotions, built the reputation, and kept stacking accomplishments.

The problem is that the standard advice for it is terrible.

You’ve probably heard it: follow your passion, quit and travel, do a bootcamp, or just pick the next role and trust the process.

None of that addresses the actual issue, which is that you haven’t yet found language for what you want next. That’s what this article is for.

Below, I’ll walk through why so many capable women hit this wall, why the “big leap” narrative is often the wrong play, and what to do this week to start moving again.

If you want personalized support, you can book a clarity call with me and we’ll map out your next chapter together.

Why “I Don’t Know What I Want To Do With My Career” Is Showing Up Now

Let’s start by reframing the question itself, because the way most women phrase this problem is loaded with shame.

“I should know by now.”

“Everyone else seems to have it figured out.”

“I’ve been at this for 15 years, what’s wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with you. You’re encountering one of the most predictable transitions in a professional life, and the data backs that up.

Gallup’s annual U.S. employee engagement report showed it falling to a 10-year low of 31% in 2024, with 17% of employees actively disengaged [1]. Those numbers held steady through 2025. That’s roughly two-thirds of working adults who are not fully invested in what they do all day.

In my own work coaching women from companies like Google, Grammarly, and AI startups, I’ve seen this confusion show up in three distinct flavors:

The first is values drift. You took the job five or six years ago when you were a different person, with different priorities. You’ve since had kids, recovered from burnout, watched a parent get sick, moved cities, or simply matured.

This shift is more common than most people realize. Phoenix Insights research conducted by Ipsos found that a third of 45 to 54-year-olds expect to change careers before they retire [2].

The second is identity overload. You’ve been so successful at one version of yourself that you can no longer separate “what I’m good at” from “what I actually want.” When I ask clients what they’d do if no one were watching, they often go silent. The performance has been running so long they’ve lost contact with their preferences. (I’ve written more about why these transitions feel so unsettling for high performers if you want to go deeper on the identity piece.)

The third is structural staleness. The role is fine, the company is fine, and there’s nothing dramatic to point at. But you can already see the next three promotions, and the thought of doing them doesn’t move you. That flat feeling isn’t a problem to be fixed inside the role. It’s information about scope.

Pinpointing which of these is yours matters, because the response is different for each one. Values drift calls for a values audit. Identity overload calls for re-establishing contact with what you want. Structural staleness calls for an honest conversation about scope and whether this organization, or this lane within it, can still expand to match you.

If you’d like help pinpointing which of these three is yours, that’s exactly the kind of work I do on a first call.

Find Out Which One Fits

Why The “Big Leap” Narrative Is Usually Wrong

The internet’s favorite story about career change is the dramatic pivot. The lawyer who became a baker. The consultant who sold everything and started a vineyard. These stories are gripping precisely because they’re rare. They’re also survivorship bias at scale. You don’t read articles about the people who quit, ran out of money, took a worse job, and ended up more confused than before.

In 25 years of human resources leadership, I watched a lot of people make a lot of moves. The ones who landed well almost never started with a leap. They started with a series of small, low-cost experiments, and the leap, if it came at all, came after the data was in.

There are three reasons the leap-first approach tends to backfire.

The first is that you can’t reason your way to clarity from inside burnout. When your nervous system is fried, every option looks either terrifying or pointless. Research published in Nature’s Translational Psychiatry found that chronic stress biases human decision-making toward habits, with prolonged stress exposure causing measurable atrophy in the prefrontal cortex regions that govern goal-directed choices [3]. Decisions made from that state are not your best decisions. (I cover this in more detail in my piece on career transition anxiety.) You need recovery, even partial recovery, before the answer is going to be visible.

The second is that you don’t actually know yet what you’re optimizing for. If you can’t finish the sentence “I want a role where I get to ___,” you’re not ready to commit to a new direction. You’ll just port your existing dissatisfaction into a new context.

The third is that big leaps look brave but are often a way of avoiding a smaller, harder conversation. Quitting is sometimes easier than telling your manager you want a different scope, or telling yourself that you’ve outgrown an industry you’ve built your identity around. The leap can be a costume for avoidance.

The good news is that you don’t need to leap to make real progress. You need to start running experiments.

A Better Framework: The Low-Risk Move

When a client tells me, “I don’t know what I want to do with my career,” my first move is to take the pressure off. We’re not deciding the next 20 years today. Let’s start by deciding the next 90 days.

Within 90 days, what’s the smallest action you could take that would generate new information about who you are now and what you want? That’s the question. Not “what’s the right career?” but “what’s the cheapest experiment I could run to learn something I don’t currently know about my own preferences?”

Here’s what those experiments tend to look like:

Internal exploration. Talk to three people on different teams or in different functions at your current company. Not to job-hop, just to learn what their day actually looks like. One honest conversation with someone whose role you’ve always vaguely admired tends to generate more clarity than weeks of solo thinking.

External reconnaissance. Pick two adjacent industries or functions that have shown up repeatedly in your daydreams and book a 30-minute conversation with someone working in each. Be honest that you’re exploring, not job hunting. Most people are generous with their time when the ask is genuinely curious rather than transactional. There’s also strong research behind why this works. A large-scale MIT-led experiment published in Science, involving 20 million LinkedIn users over five years, confirmed that weaker, more distant professional connections are more likely to lead to new job opportunities than close ties, because they expose you to information outside your immediate network [4].

A scope shift in your current role. Sometimes the answer is the same job with a different mix. Propose a stretch project, ask to mentor someone in a function you’re curious about, or volunteer for the cross-functional initiative no one wants. This is low-cost, low-risk, and often surfaces direction faster than any amount of journaling.

A constraints inventory. Make a list of every constraint you’re carrying, financial, geographic, family, health, identity-based, and look at it honestly. Most people overestimate their constraints by a wide margin. Some are real and non-negotiable. Many are inherited and worth reconsidering.

The point of all four is the same. You’re just generating data.

Each conversation, each project, each small inventory gives you another piece of information you didn’t have last month. After 90 days of this, you usually have a much clearer sense of what’s pulling you, and crucially, what isn’t.

If you’d like a thinking partner to help you design the right experiments for your situation, let’s talk.

Map Out My Next 90 Days

What To Do This Week

If you’re reading this and want to move on something today, here’s the smallest possible starting point.

Open a blank document and write three lists.

First, the parts of your current role you’d be sad to lose.

Second, the parts you’d happily hand to someone else tomorrow.

Third, the things you’ve been curious about for at least 12 months but have never let yourself take seriously. That third list is usually where the signal is.

Then identify one person in your network who lives somewhere on list three. Send them a short, honest message asking for a 20-minute conversation. Not about your career. About theirs.

That’s it. That’s the first move.

Most of my clients are surprised by how much shifts after just one of these conversations.

When To Bring In Outside Help

There’s a moment in this process where well-intentioned solo work stops compounding. You’ve journaled. You’ve made the lists. You’ve had a few coffees. And you’re still circling.

That’s usually when coaching makes the biggest difference, because what you’re missing at that point isn’t more information.

It’s a thinking partner who can hear what you’re actually saying underneath what you think you’re saying.

A good coach won’t tell you what to do.

They’ll ask the question that makes the answer obvious to you.

The clients I work with often describe their breakthroughs as moments where they finally said out loud something they’d been avoiding for years, and once it was said, the path forward was clearer than they expected.

The data on this is consistent, the International Coaching Federation reports that a global PwC and Association Resource Center survey found that 86% of respondents agree that executive coaching has a high return on investment (ROI) [5]. If you want to see how we can work together, I’ve laid out the coaching options on a dedicated page.

If you’ve been stuck on “I don’t know what I want to do with my career” for months, or honestly, years, it might be time to stop trying to solve it alone. You can book a clarity call here and we’ll start mapping what comes next.

If you’ve been circling this question for a while, one focused conversation is often what finally breaks the loop.

Book A Clarity Call

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should it take to figure out what I want to do next?

Most of my clients reach a working answer, not the final destination but a directional one they can act on, within 8 to 12 weeks of intentional exploration. The “intentional” part matters. Drifting and hoping clarity will arrive doesn’t work. Structured experiments do. The women who treat this like a project with a timeline and check-ins almost always move faster than the ones who treat it as a feeling they’re waiting to have.

How is this different from just talking to friends or family?

Friends and family love you, which is exactly why they’re often the wrong sounding board for career questions. They have a vested interest in your stability, your proximity, and the version of you they already know. They’ll unintentionally steer you toward what feels safe to them. A coach has no stake in the outcome other than your clarity. The conversations are also structured differently. Instead of advice, you get questions designed to surface what you already know but haven’t given yourself permission to act on.

References

1. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-sinks-year-low.aspx
2. https://www.politics.co.uk/opinion-former/press-release/2023/05/18/generation-stuck-in-midlife-career-rut-risk-exacerbating-economic-inactivity-without-better-support/
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201259
4. https://news.mit.edu/2022/weak-ties-linkedin-employment-0915
5. https://coachingfederation.org/blog/coaching-statistics-the-roi-of-coaching-in-2024/

This is long because the situation is layered. Severance, taxes, immigration status, unemployment rules, resume rebuilding, networking, and emotional recovery do not move at the same speed, and most of them do not need to be decided today.

Read the sections you need now and bookmark the rest.

A note on the tone: there is a path forward, and thousands of laid-off Meta employees from the 2022 and 2023 rounds have already walked it. The market has changed, but so have you. Let’s get to work.

What Happened: The Meta Layoffs on May 20, 2026

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, Meta began notifying roughly 8,000 employees (~10% of its global workforce) that their roles were being eliminated. The cuts are rolling out in waves, starting at 4 a.m. local time for affected employees in Singapore, the UK, and the United States, according to Al Jazeera and CNBC.

Meta also canceled 6,000 open job requisitions and announced that up to 7,000 remaining employees will be moved into newly created AI-focused teams. The hardest-hit groups so far include Meta’s integrity team (the group that handles malicious content and hate speech), cybersecurity, content design, and parts of engineering and product.

In an internal memo, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that “success isn’t a given” in the AI era and framed the layoffs as funding for Meta’s enormous AI infrastructure investment: $125–145 billion in capital expenditures planned for 2026, the revised guidance Meta issued in its Q1 2026 earnings (up from an initial $115–135 billion range), and roughly 87% higher than the $72.2 billion the company spent on capex in 2025.

Why It Happened: This Is a Sector-Wide Reshuffling

Context matters because it shapes how you talk about this in interviews. Meta is not laying people off because the business is failing. The company is reporting strong revenue and reallocating headcount to fund a massive AI buildout. The same week, Intuit announced cuts of roughly 3,000 employees (17% of its workforce), and insurance brokerage Acrisure announced 2,250 layoffs (11% of its workforce). Both cited AI restructuring.

In other words: this is a sector-wide reshuffling and not a reflection on your skills. Employers screening resumes in mid-2026 know exactly what a “Meta May 2026” exit looks like. You will not have to explain it the way a 2008 finance layoff once required explaining.

If you’re staring at a separation agreement and feeling overwhelmed, you don’t have to figure this out alone.

Book Your Free Consultation

Severance and Benefits: What’s on the Table

Based on Meta’s public communications, U.S.-based affected employees are being offered:

• 16 weeks of base pay as severance, plus 2 additional weeks for every completed year of service.
• 18 months of COBRA health insurance premiums covered by Meta for the employee and family members. Reportedly three times what Meta has offered in prior layoff rounds.
• Three months of outplacement support through Lee Hecht Harrison, including career coaching and placement help.

Before you sign anything, slow down. Common items worth reviewing or negotiating:

• Equity vesting. Ask about treatment of unvested RSUs, your next vesting date, and whether the company will accelerate any portion.
• Bonus and PTO payout. Confirm prorated bonus eligibility and that unused PTO is paid out per your jurisdiction.
• Non-compete and non-solicit language. Some clauses are narrower than they appear; others are broader. California largely voids non-competes, but other clauses still apply.
• Reference and rehire status. Ask in writing whether you are eligible for rehire and what a reference inquiry will return.
• Filing deadlines. Most separation agreements give you a window (often 21–45 days) to review and a revocation period after signing.

This is not legal advice. If anything in the package is unclear or unusual, paying an employment attorney for a one-hour review before you sign is often the highest-ROI hour you can spend this month.

Severance Tax Considerations You Should Understand Before Signing

Severance is taxed as supplemental wages, not as regular salary, and that distinction matters in 2026.

• Federal withholding on supplemental wages is generally a flat 22% (or 37% on amounts above $1 million in a calendar year). This is withholding, not your final tax rate. Your actual liability depends on your full-year income. Many laid-off Meta employees end up owing more or getting a refund at tax time depending on bonus history.
• State withholding also applies, and high-tax states like California and New York can take a meaningful additional bite.
• Lump sum vs. salary continuation. Some packages offer both options. A lump sum lands all the income in 2026; salary continuation can stretch some income into 2027, potentially lowering your marginal rate if 2027 is a lower-earning year. There are trade-offs around unemployment eligibility (see the state section below) and benefits continuation.
• 401(k) and HSA before your last day. If you have not maxed your 401(k) for 2026, consider whether a final paycheck contribution makes sense. HSA contributions are similarly use-it-or-lose-the-opportunity. Confirm with your benefits portal before access shuts off.
• RSU sales. Vested-but-unsold RSUs can be sold strategically across tax years to manage capital gains. Talk to a CPA before any large block sale.
• COBRA premiums paid by Meta on your behalf are generally not taxable to you under federal rules, but premiums you later pay yourself are made with after-tax dollars.

None of this is tax advice. A two-hour conversation with a CPA who has worked with tech employees on equity-heavy comp will pay for itself many times over.

H-1B, L-1, O-1, and TN Holders: The 60-Day Clock Starts Now

If you are on a U.S. work visa, this section is the most time-sensitive thing you will read today.

Under USCIS rules, H-1B, L-1, O-1, E-3, and TN workers generally have a 60-day grace period from the last day of employment to either find a new sponsoring employer, change to a different nonimmigrant status (B-2 tourist, F-1 student, H-4 dependent), or depart the United States. The clock starts on your last day of employment, not the day notice is given and not the last day severance is paid. One important caveat: the 60-day grace period is technically discretionary under DHS regulations. USCIS isn’t required to grant it in every case, and recent reporting has flagged some Notices to Appear being issued during grace periods. Treat the 60 days as a planning window, not a guarantee.

Practical points:

• Severance does not extend your status. Even if Meta is paying you for months, USCIS does not count severance as ongoing employment for visa purposes.
• New H-1B transfers can be filed by a new employer at any time during the 60-day window. Premium processing is 15 business days (about 3 calendar weeks, not 15 calendar days) and is worth the extra $2,965 fee if you are close to the deadline.
• H-4 spouses and EAD holders. If your spouse is on H-4 with an EAD based on your approved I-140, their work authorization is tied to your status. Plan jointly.
• Approved I-140 portability. If your I-140 has been approved for 180+ days, you keep your priority date when moving to a new employer. This is a significant advantage if you are waiting on a green card.
• Leaving the U.S. If you cannot find a new role in time, departing within the 60 days preserves your future eligibility better than overstaying.

Talk to an immigration attorney this week, not next month. Many will do a free 15-minute call to scope your situation. Meta’s outplacement support may also include immigration referrals, please ask explicitly.

The First 72 Hours: Practical Moves That Matter

1. Download everything personal from your work device while you still have access: personal contacts, references, performance reviews you wrote, recommendation letters, non-confidential portfolio pieces. Do not take anything proprietary.
2. Save your manager’s and key colleagues’ personal contact info. You will want references and warm intros later.
3. File for unemployment in the state where you worked. See the state-specific section below for timing.
4. Check your health insurance end date. Meta is covering COBRA, but understand the mechanics, deadlines, and whether you’d prefer an ACA marketplace plan during the special enrollment period a job loss triggers.
5. Pause big financial decisions. Do not refinance, sell stock under pressure, or make irreversible moves this week. Give yourself two weeks of cash-flow clarity first.
6. If on a visa: call an immigration attorney within 72 hours. The 60-day clock matters more than almost anything else.
7. Tell your inner circle. Spouse, parents, two close friends. Hiding it is exhausting and isolating.

Unemployment by State: California, Washington, New York, and Texas

Meta’s largest U.S. footprints are in California, Washington, New York, and Texas. The rules differ.

California. Severance generally does not disqualify you from collecting unemployment in California. EDD treats a true lump-sum severance as a one-time payment that doesn’t reduce benefits. However, if your package is structured as salary continuation, EDD may treat those weekly payments as continuing wages that delay benefits until the continuation ends. Either way, file immediately at edd.ca.gov. The maximum weekly benefit is $450, which is modest relative to Bay Area tech salaries but adds up over 26 weeks.

Washington. Severance is treated as wages and typically delays benefits during the severance period. File anyway, it starts the clock and gets you in the system. Washington also has Paid Family and Medical Leave benefits that may apply in certain circumstances.

New York. Severance is treated as remuneration and may delay benefits while severance is being paid out, depending on whether it’s a lump sum or continuation. File a claim now and follow the New York Department of Labor’s guidance on reporting severance.

Texas. The rule is more nuanced than it looks. Severance that is unilaterally offered (paid out under a standing policy or stated in your offer letter) is generally disqualifying for the weeks it covers. Negotiated severance, especially when it’s exchanged for a release of claims, often is not. Salary continuation is also disqualifying during the payout period, while a lump sum results in a TWC-calculated disqualification window based on your regular rate of pay. File anyway to establish the claim, and report severance accurately to TWC.

In every state, file early. Filing is free, reversible, and does not commit you to anything. The downside of waiting is that you can permanently lose weeks of benefits.

What NOT to Do (The Common Mistakes That Cost People Months)

1. Do not sign the separation agreement the day you receive it. You almost always have weeks. Read it twice. Get one hour of legal review.
2. Do not post a bitter LinkedIn note. Every future employer and recruiter will read it. Vent privately. Post publicly.
3. Do not panic-apply to 200 jobs in week one. Volume applications convert at less than 2%. Targeted networking converts at 30%+. Spend your time accordingly. Having the Meta Alumni network at your disposal here really helps. You will not have a hard time finding another job.
4. Do not hide the layoff from your family. The financial and emotional secrecy compounds.
5. Do not cash out your 401(k). Early withdrawal penalties plus tax can vaporize 30-40% of the balance. A rollover to an IRA preserves everything.
6. Do not accept the first offer at a steep pay cut out of fear. Most laid-off Meta engineers land within 60–120 days. Negotiation is normal.
7. Do not stop networking once you have an offer. Continue conversations through your start date — those relationships are how you’ll find your next role too.
8. Do not ignore mental health. A layoff is one of life’s top stressors. Schedule something — therapy, exercise, a regular call with a friend — in week one.

An outside set of eyes on your severance, visa timeline, and next steps can save you weeks of guesswork.

Get a 15-Minute Strategy Call

Resume Rebuild: Lead With Impact, Not Title

The resume that worked for an internal Meta promotion is not the resume that wins external interviews. Rebuild for impact.

• Lead every bullet with a number. “Reduced p99 latency by 38% across X service supporting 200M MAU” beats “Senior Software Engineer at Meta” every time.
• Quantify scope, not just outcomes. Team size, system scale, revenue or user reach, time-to-ship.
• Use the STAR structure for the bullets that matter most: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Compress to one line.
• One page if you have under 10 years of experience. Two pages maximum, ever.
• One resume per job family. A backend engineer applying to AI infrastructure roles needs a different resume than one applying to fintech platforms.

ATS Resume Keywords by Role (Mid-2026)

ATS systems screen resumes before humans see them. These are the keywords showing up in 2026 job postings for roles ex-Meta employees commonly target. Include the ones that honestly describe your work.

Software Engineer (Backend / Infrastructure)

Distributed systems, microservices, Kubernetes, observability, SRE, p99 latency, AWS, GCP, Python, Go, Rust, gRPC, system design, event-driven architecture, Kafka, Spark, data pipelines, on-call.

Software Engineer (ML / AI)

PyTorch, TensorFlow, LLM, fine-tuning, RAG, vector database, embeddings, model evaluation, MLOps, GPU inference, distributed training, NVIDIA, transformer architecture, alignment, model serving.

Product Manager

Roadmap, OKRs, A/B testing, growth, retention, monetization, north star metric, product strategy, stakeholder management, cross-functional, user research, experimentation, PRD, GTM.

Designer

Design systems, Figma, accessibility, WCAG, user research, prototyping, design ops, mobile-first, cross-platform, motion design, design tokens, component library.

Trust & Safety / Integrity

Trust and safety, content moderation, policy enforcement, abuse detection, threat modeling, ML classifier evaluation, escalations, EU DSA, GDPR, online safety, risk operations.

Security

SOC 2, threat modeling, zero trust, identity and access management, incident response, security architecture, OWASP, red team, vulnerability management, SIEM, detection engineering, AppSec.

Data / Analytics

SQL, Python, dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, experimentation, causal inference, A/B testing, dashboards, Looker, Tableau, data modeling, ETL.

Read three real job descriptions for your target role. Mirror the language they use. ATS systems score on keyword overlap.

Plug-and-Play Templates

LinkedIn “I’m Open” Post

Last week I was part of Meta’s May 2026 layoff. I’m grateful for the years I spent there and excited about what’s next.
I’m a [role] with experience in [2–3 specific things]. I’m looking for [type of role] at [type of company: AI infra, fintech, marketplaces, etc.] and would love intros to anyone hiring in that space.
If you’ve been through a layoff, you know what helps: warm intros, recruiter referrals, and a quick coffee chat. Any of those would mean a lot. DMs are open.

Networking Outreach: Former Colleague

Hey [Name], I was part of the Meta cuts last week. I noticed you joined [Company] last year. Would you be open to 15 minutes to share what your team is hiring for and whether my background might fit? Happy to make it easy on you, I can send a one-paragraph summary first.

Networking Outreach: Cold, 2nd-Degree

Hi [Name], [Mutual contact] suggested I reach out. I was a [role] at Meta until last week’s layoffs and I’m exploring [type of role] at companies like [Company]. Would you be open to a brief intro call? I’m specifically interested in [one specific thing about their team / company]. Happy to send my resume first.

Interview Answer for “Why Did You Leave Meta?”

I was part of the May 2026 restructuring, Meta cut about 10% of the workforce to fund their AI investment. My team wasn’t immune. I’m proud of [one specific accomplishment] and I’m excited to bring that experience to a team like yours that’s [specific thing about the role].

Practice it once out loud. Move on. Interviewers do not need or want a long explanation.

Where Ex-Meta Talent Is Landing in 2026

Based on public movement patterns and recruiter chatter, the most common landing spots for ex-Meta employees in 2026 cluster in a few categories.

AI labs and AI infrastructure. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Mistral, Cohere, and Inflection are actively hiring. So are infrastructure companies like Databricks, Together AI, Scale AI, and Modal. Trust and safety experience is in particularly high demand at frontier labs.

Fintech. Stripe, Plaid, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, and Adyen continue to hire engineers and PMs at Meta-comparable comp bands.

Marketplaces and consumer. DoorDash, Airbnb, Etsy, Roblox, and Pinterest hire heavily from Meta and explicitly value the consumer scale experience.

Big tech competitors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and ByteDance all hire ex-Meta talent at scale. Compensation is comparable; culture varies meaningfully.

Cybersecurity. CrowdStrike, Wiz, Cloudflare (despite their own cuts), Snyk, and Okta hire ex-Meta security and integrity talent.

Startups (Series B–D). YC-backed companies and recently-funded growth-stage startups often hire ex-Meta employees at senior IC and director levels. Pay is lower, equity upside higher.

Solo / founder route. A nontrivial share of ex-Meta employees from 2022 and 2023 started companies. If you have severance runway, an idea, and a co-founder, it is a legitimate option.

Historical Context: What Happened to the 2022 and 2023 Meta Cohorts

The 2022 Meta layoffs cut about 11,000 employees (~13% of the workforce). The 2023 “Year of Efficiency” round cut roughly another 10,000. Both cohorts have been studied informally through LinkedIn data and recruiter surveys.

A few patterns from those rounds are worth knowing:

• The median engineer found a new role in roughly 2-4 months. Some took longer, some far less. Visa holders trended faster because the 60-day clock forced action.
• Senior PMs and designers generally took longer than engineers – closer to 3-5 months – partly because the roles are scarcer and partly because portfolio rebuilds take time.
• Most landed at companies you’ve heard of. Anthropic, Stripe, Airbnb, Google, and Snowflake absorbed large numbers. Founder paths were more common than people expected.
• Compensation was usually comparable or higher at AI labs and infra companies, and modestly lower at later-stage non-AI startups.
• The hardest months were months 2 and 3. The initial energy fades, offers haven’t landed yet, and confidence dips. Almost everyone who got through that valley landed within the next 30–60 days.

If the 2022 and 2023 cohorts found their footing, you will too.

Mental and Financial Coping

A layoff is one of the most stressful events on the standard life-event scales. Some things that tend to help:

• Treat your search like a job, not a 24/7 obsession. Set hours. Take weekends. Burnout in week three of a search is real and common.
• Map your runway honestly. Severance + savings + unemployment = X months. Knowing the real number reduces panic dramatically. Anything more than 6 months of runway puts you in a strong negotiating position.
• Build a daily structure that includes movement, sunlight, and at least one human conversation.
• Avoid the comparison spiral. Someone in your cohort will land a great offer in week two. Someone else will take six months. Neither is a verdict on you.
• Use mental health benefits while you still have them. Confirm whether EAP services, therapy coverage, or coaching benefits extend through the severance period.

If you find yourself struggling, talk to someone: a therapist, doctor, or trusted friend. If you are in crisis, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour.

Reconsidering Your Career? How Career Transition With Claire Can Help

Career Transition With Claire exists specifically for moments like this. I have talked to a lot of mid-career women who feel like they are becoming glorified AI prompters and are unsure if they want to stay on this path.

On my coaching calls, I will help you find clarity on what you want to do next.

If you have been in tech for ten, fifteen, or twenty years, the industry you signed up for looks nothing like the one you are working in today. The work has shifted, and most of what you used to love about it has changed. A specific kind of frustration has been showing up in my intake calls. Women who built deep craft over a long career are watching that craft get compressed into a chat window, while their job descriptions quietly mutate into “write more prompts faster.” Add the disproportionate share of mentoring, hiring, and DEI work that mid-career women historically absorb without compensation. As one woman put it: “I don’t want to be in tech anymore, or any job.”

That feeling is real. It also doesn’t have to mean the rest of your working life is locked in. I work with women in exactly this spot, and the conversations usually go in one of four directions:

• Out of tech entirely, into something that feels human. Healthcare administration, education, public sector and policy, nonprofit leadership, sustainability, urban planning, hospitality, small business ownership. The transferable skills are bigger than most engineers and PMs realize: running cross-functional programs, navigating ambiguity, managing budgets, and shipping under constraints translate cleanly into industries that are starved for that exact skill set.
• Adjacent to tech, but on your terms. Fractional product or engineering leadership for non-tech companies, advisory work for healthcare or fintech startups that need a senior IC’s judgment (not their prompts), board roles, expert witness work, technical due diligence for VC firms. Most of these pay well and demand 20 to 30 hours a week, not 60.
• Solo: consulting, coaching, or building something small. A meaningful share of the ex-Meta cohort from 2022 and 2023 didn’t take another corporate job. They built independent practices (one good client, then two, then a small team) or bought into established small businesses where their operational chops are rare. Severance plus COBRA plus a defined customer often gets you to ramen-profitable in 6 to 9 months.
• A real sabbatical first, then decide. Sometimes the right answer is “not yet.” With 6 to 12 months of runway, you can intentionally not work, recover from years of compounding burnout, and let the question of what’s next become answerable instead of urgent. This is a legitimate strategy, not a failure, and it is one of the most under-prescribed moves in tech.

What I help with, specifically: identifying which of your skills are actually transferable (and to which industries), building the financial runway model that tells you what’s possible, designing the conversations to have with your spouse or partner about a category change versus a job change, and the practical work of repositioning your LinkedIn, resume, and narrative so you stop showing up to interviewers as “ex-Meta engineer” and start showing up as the person you actually want to be next.

If you were affected by the May 2026 layoffs, the first 15-minute consult is on me. No pitch, no upsell, just an outside set of eyes on your situation.

Get Help With Finding Clarity

This article is informational and not legal, tax, immigration, financial, or career advice tailored to your specific situation. For decisions about your separation agreement, severance taxes, visa status, unemployment claim, or financial planning, consult a qualified professional in the relevant field.

Sources

• Meta cuts 8,000 jobs in sweeping global layoffs – Al Jazeera (May 20, 2026)
• Zuckerberg’s Meta layoffs memo: ‘Success isn’t a given’ in the AI era – CNBC (May 20, 2026)
• Meta layoffs 2026: Severance package and benefits offered to over 8,000 employees – BusinessToday (May 21, 2026)
• Meta slashes 8,000 jobs as it pivots towards AI – NPR (May 20, 2026)
• Meta raises 2026 capex forecast to $125B-$145B – Yahoo Finance (April 2026)
• Intuit to lay off over 3,000 employees to refocus on AI – TechCrunch (May 20, 2026)
• Acrisure announces 2,250 layoffs, totaling 11% of workforce – WZZM 13 (May 20, 2026)
• USCIS – Options for Nonimmigrant Workers Following Termination of Employment
• IRS Publication 15-A (2026) – Employer’s Supplemental Tax Guide
• California EDD – TPU 460.35 Severance Pay Guidance
• Texas Workforce Commission – How Money from Other Sources Affects Benefits

I hear some version of this question almost every week now. Sometimes it sounds like, “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career?” Sometimes it’s, “Is it too late to do something different?” Sometimes it’s, “Do I just hang on, or do I try one more thing?” The wording shifts. The underlying question is the same. I have a finite runway left. How do I want to spend it?

If you’re sitting with this question right now, I want to be clear about one thing before we go any further: this is not a small question, and you are not late to ask it. Most people I work with arrive here in their late 40s or 50s, exactly when the calendar starts feeling real and the old playbook starts feeling thin. If you’d like to see how I think about the timing piece specifically, I wrote about it in How Do I Know It’s Time For A Career Change. This article is about what comes after that decision: how to actually use the runway you have left.

Why The Last 10 Years Of Your Career Feel Different From The First 30

The first three decades of a career run on a fairly standard script. You build skills, you climb, you take on more responsibility, you optimize for income and title, you reach the level you set out to reach (or you don’t), and then somewhere around 50 the script runs out. Nobody hands you a new one.

Part of what makes the last decade feel different is that the runway is actually shorter than the runway most of us were trained to plan for. A person retiring at 65 in the U.S. today can expect to live close to two more decades [1], which means the work years between 55 and 65 carry real weight. They are not filler. They are the last full chapter of paid working life for most people, and they happen to overlap with the years where energy, perspective, and accumulated skill are at their peak.

The career arc I learned to plan for, education then work then retirement, doesn’t fit the lifespan most of my clients are actually living. The version that fits is closer to a multi-stage life [2] with several distinct chapters and clear transitions between them, an idea Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott have written about extensively. The last 10 years of a career is one of those chapters, and it deserves its own intentional design. [3]

Why This Question Usually Arrives Sooner Than You Expect

Most of my clients don’t wake up at 60 asking what to do with their final decade. They wake up at 50, sometimes 48, with a quiet but persistent feeling that something is shifting. By the time the question reaches my office out loud, most of them have been turning it over privately for a year or two. That tracks with what the encore career research at CoGenerate has reported: people who eventually make meaningful late-career transitions tend to start thinking about them around age 50, with the move itself taking about 18 months. The thinking starts well before the action.

In my work, I see the question arrive through three doors.

The first door is burnout, where the body finally votes against another year of the same intensity.

The second door is loss of meaning, where the work still pays well but no longer connects to anything you care about.

The third door is an external trigger, often a layoff, a restructuring, or the realization that the next promotion isn’t coming.

Any of these can be the moment a capable, accomplished woman starts asking what the rest of this is for.

If the question is showing up for you because of a layoff or a restructure, the timing pressure can make this feel like a crisis instead of an inquiry. It usually isn’t. A late-career layoff is more often a forced pause that creates space for a question you were going to need to answer anyway.

If any of those three doors is the one you’ve walked through, a focused conversation can help you separate the noise from the real signal.

Talk Through Where You Are

The Three Patterns I See When Someone Asks “What Do I Do With The Last 10 Years Of My Career?”

After a few hundred of these conversations, I’ve stopped pretending there’s one right answer. There are three patterns, and most people fit cleanly into one of them once they look honestly at what they want.

The Coast: Stay, but stop optimizing for growth

The coast is the choice to stay where you are, do good work, and stop trying to climb. You stop volunteering for the stretch project. You stop chasing the next title. You let the role be the role and reclaim the energy you’d been spending on advancement.

This is the most underrated of the three.

There’s a quiet bias in our culture against “just” doing your job, but for someone who has already built strong financial footing and just wants to protect their evenings, weekends, and health for a decade, the coast is a perfectly legitimate strategy.

The Climb: One more big push, on your terms

The climb is the choice to spend the last decade going for one specific thing you haven’t done yet. The C-suite role. The board seat. The book. The startup. The income peak that finally makes the math work for the rest of your life.

The climb works when there’s a clear, specific target and a clear reason it matters to you.

It does not work when it’s just inertia dressed up as ambition.

The clearest sign that a climb is healthy is that you can name the thing you’re climbing toward and the year you’d like to reach it.

The clearest sign it’s not healthy is that the answer to “why this?” is some version of “because I always have.”

The Pivot: Use the runway for something genuinely different

The pivot is the choice to spend the last decade doing different work than you did in the first three. Sometimes that’s a true encore career in a new field, often in education, healthcare, or social impact, which is where roughly 25 million Americans aged 50 to 70 [4, 7] have said they want to direct their next chapter. Sometimes the pivot is smaller, like moving from the corporate version of your skill set to the consulting or fractional version. Sometimes it’s a true reinvention. [4]

The pivot is what most people are romanticizing when they ask this question, and it’s also the most demanding of the three.

It usually requires real skill-building, real network-building, and a year or two of lower income while the new thing takes root. I wrote a full breakdown of the moving parts in How to Make a Mid-Career Change, and most of that mechanics applies to a late-career pivot as well, with one important exception I’ll cover below.

How To Decide Which Pattern Fits You

When someone arrives in my coaching practice asking which of the three to pick, I almost never answer the question directly. Instead, I ask a smaller one: What would you regret more in 10 years, having done this or not having done it?

That single question does more clarifying work than any assessment I’ve ever used. People at the end of their lives almost never regret leaving a job that drained them. They regret staying. The palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware put “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” second on her list of the most common regrets of the dying [9], behind only the regret of not having lived a life true to oneself. That’s worth holding next to whatever decision you’re sitting with. [10]

If the regret answer is unclear, the next question I ask is about energy. After 30 years of paid work, you know the difference between a Sunday-night feeling that comes from a hard week and a Sunday-night feeling that comes from being in the wrong place. If your current role consistently produces the second kind, the coast is unlikely to be the right pattern, even if it looks like the safest one.

The third question is about identity. A surprising number of capable women I work with realize they have been quietly identifying with their job title for so long that the thought of doing anything smaller, different, or less prestigious feels destabilizing. That’s not a reason to keep doing it. It’s a signal that part of the work of this decade is going to be untangling who you are from what your business card says.

The Money Question Inside The Question

Whichever pattern you pick, there is a financial question inside it that most people avoid until far too late. The honest version of “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career?” is “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career, given the savings I have, the lifestyle I want, and the years I expect to live after I stop?”

A late-career pivot, in particular, often pays less, at least initially. In my client work I see this consistently, and the same pattern shows up at scale in Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis [6]: workers who change careers later in life tend to move into roles that pay less and offer fewer benefits, though those roles often offer more flexibility and less stress. That trade-off can be the right one. It cannot be a surprise.

I’m not a financial advisor and I won’t pretend to be. But I will tell you that I won’t take a client through a pivot decision without making sure they’ve at least had the financial-runway conversation with someone qualified, ideally before the resignation letter goes out. The pivot is a much better experience when it’s a choice rather than a forced landing.

How To Avoid The Two Most Common Late-Career Regrets

After enough of these conversations, two regrets show up over and over in clients who waited too long to ask the question.

The first regret is staying in a role that was draining them for fear that nothing else would have them. Almost every time, the next role did have them. The market underestimates older workers more than older workers underestimate themselves, but only barely. Meaningful work is one of the few categories where older workers are increasingly being courted, not pushed out, and roughly 90% of workers over 50 in AARP’s research [13] said a job must offer meaningful work before they’d take it.

The second regret is treating the last decade like the first one and burning the runway on goals that mattered to a younger version of themselves. The promotion you wanted at 32 is not necessarily the promotion you want at 56. One of the harder pieces of late-career work is letting yourself want different things now without treating that as a betrayal of the person who built the career in the first place.

If you’d like a thinking partner to make sure your last decade isn’t a repeat of your first, I can help with that.

Plan The Next Chapter With Me

A Simple Framework I Use With Clients (The Four-Corner Check)

When a client and I are trying to choose between coasting, climbing, and pivoting, I run a quick four-corner check on the option they’re leaning toward. It borrows from the Japanese concept of ikigai, which roughly translates to “a reason for being” and is often described as the overlap of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

I ask four questions about the option in front of us:

Does this work draw on something I’m genuinely good at, not just something I’ve been doing for a long time?

Does this work connect to something I actually care about now, not something I cared about at 35?

Does this work meet a real demand someone is willing to pay for, at a price I can live on?

And does this work fit the version of life I want to be living for the next decade, including the non-work parts?

A solid yes in all four corners is rare and usually means you’ve found something worth pursuing. Two yeses and two maybes usually means a pivot is possible but needs more design. A pattern of “I’m good at it and I get paid for it, but the other two corners are empty” almost always points toward a coast or a pivot, not a climb. People who climb hardest in the last decade tend to be the ones with strong yeses in the care and world needs corners, not just the paid one.

When To Start Asking The Question

If you’re under 45, you can probably set this question down. Not because it isn’t important, but because the answer changes a lot between now and then, and locking in too early tends to produce decisions that don’t survive contact with your actual 50-year-old self.

If you’re between 45 and 55, this is the right window. Long enough out that you can plan, build, and reposition without panic. Close enough in that the question is real and the runway is visible. Most of my best client work happens in this window.

If you’re past 55 and you’ve never asked this question seriously, please don’t read that as bad news. Many of the most satisfying late-career stories I’ve watched up close started after the person had already crossed the line they’d assumed was the deadline. The 27% of workers who change occupations between their early 50s and late 60s, tracked in research from the Urban Institute [8], are not unusual. They’re the quiet majority of people who did something with the last 10 years of their career other than wait it out. [6]

What I’d Want You To Walk Away With

If I could put one thing in your pocket from this article, it would be this: the last 10 years of your career belong to you, and they are big enough to hold a real decision. They are not a postscript. They are not a holding pattern between now and retirement. They are a chapter, and you get to write it.

Whether that means coasting on purpose, climbing one last hill, or pivoting into something genuinely different, the worst version of this decade is the one where you don’t choose. The best version is the one where you do, and where the choice fits the woman you actually are now, not the one you were when you first picked this path.

If you’re sitting with this question and want a partner in the thinking, that’s exactly the conversation I do best in one-to-one coaching. When you’re ready, you can book a complimentary intro call here and we’ll talk through where you are.

When you’re ready to write the chapter on purpose instead of by default, this is where we start.

Book A Complimentary Intro Call

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it too late to start a new career in my late 50s?

In my experience, no. The data agrees. Roughly a quarter of workers who were employed full time in their early 50s are in a different occupation by their late 60s, and many of the most satisfying career transitions I’ve coached happened in someone’s late 50s or early 60s. The bigger risk at this age isn’t being too late, it’s underestimating what you bring to the table. [6]

How do I know if I should pivot or just coast for the last 10 years?

The fastest way I know is to ask which choice you’d regret more in a decade. If the thought of not pivoting produces more regret than the thought of pivoting, you have your answer, and the work becomes designing the pivot well. If coasting feels like relief rather than resignation, that’s also a valid answer, and the work becomes protecting the boundaries that make the coast worth it. [9]

What if I don’t know what I want to do for the last 10 years of my career?

Most people don’t, at first. Clarity in late-career planning rarely arrives as a clean answer. It usually arrives as a series of smaller “yes, more of this” and “no, less of that” signals over a few months. The work is to start collecting those signals on purpose instead of waiting for a single revelation.

Will I have to take a pay cut to change careers in my 50s?

Often, yes, at least initially. Workers who change careers later in life tend to move into roles that pay less than their previous ones in the short term, though they often offer more flexibility and less stress. Whether that trade is right for you depends on your savings, your lifestyle, and how much the new work matters to you. This is the conversation I always recommend having with a financial professional before any pivot becomes real. [6]

How long does a late-career transition usually take?

In my practice, I tell clients to plan for somewhere between 12 and 24 months from “I think I want something different” to “I’m doing the different thing.” That tracks with the encore career research, which puts the average transition at about 18 months. Faster than that and you’re often skipping important design work. Slower than that and you may be stalling. [4]

What’s the biggest mistake people make when planning the last decade of their career?

The biggest mistake I see is treating the last decade like the first one. The first three decades reward optimizing for advancement. The last decade rewards optimizing for fit, energy, and meaning. People who try to apply the old playbook to the new chapter usually end up exhausted and still asking the same question five years later.

References

1. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
2. https://www.london.edu/think/variety-is-the-spice-of-the-100-year-life
3. https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/the-100-year-life-living-and-working-in-an-age-of-longevity-by-lynda-gratton-and-andrew-scott
4. https://cogenerate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2014EncoreResearchOverview.pdf
5. https://www.bain.com/insights/better-with-age-the-rising-importance-of-older-workers/
6. https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2017/article/older-workers.htm
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encore_career
8. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/older-workers-move-recareering-later-life
9. https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
10. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/phrases-that-are-often-peoples-last-regrets-says-author-what-we-can-learn.html
11. https://hbr.org/2019/12/what-happens-when-your-career-becomes-your-whole-identity
12. https://crr.bc.edu/will-the-average-retirement-age-keep-rising-2/
13. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/work-finances-retirement/employers-workforce/multicultural-work-jobs-study-2023/
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

The harder question is not whether to change. It is who to do it with.

I work with women in exactly this season, and I have written before about why career transitions feel so unsettling for high performers. What I want to do here is talk specifically about how to choose a career coach for women over 40, because the wrong fit at this age is more expensive than at twenty-five. You have less runway, more responsibilities, and a network of people who will quietly judge whatever you do next. The coach you pick has to be equipped for that reality, not just for general “find your passion” exercises.

Here is what to look for, what to avoid, and how to know whether someone is actually qualified to help you make this decision well.

Why Career Coaching For Women Over 40 Is Different From General Coaching

Coaching a 28-year-old who is choosing between two job offers is a different task from coaching a 47-year-old who is wondering whether to leave a director-level role she has built over fifteen years.

When women over 40 come to me, the conversation almost never starts with “what should I do next.” It usually starts with something like “I don’t know what I want anymore,” or “I am successful on paper but unhappy in reality,” or “I have one more big move in me and I cannot afford to get it wrong.” The questions underneath are about identity, financial trade-offs, family logistics, and the slow erosion of meaning that can happen after a long stretch in the same field.

A coach working with women in this season needs to be able to hold all of that at once. She needs to understand that you are not starting fresh, you are pivoting from a real life that has weight. She needs to know how the job market treats women in their forties and fifties, including the parts of it that are not flattering. And she needs to give you strategy, not platitudes. If a coach’s main offering is breathing exercises and vision boards, that is not coaching for this stage of life.

If you are ready to talk through what the right kind of support looks like for your situation, I’d love to hear from you.

Schedule My Strategy Call

What To Look For In A Career Coach For Women Over 40

Here are the qualifications and qualities that actually matter. Not all of these are deal-breakers individually, but a coach who has none of them is probably not the right person for a mid-career pivot.

Real Hiring Experience, Not Just Coaching Theory

Coaching certifications are useful, but they are not a substitute for understanding how hiring actually works at the senior level. Before I became a coach, I spent more than two decades inside HR at companies like Google and Grammarly, partnering directly with hiring managers and watching how decisions get made about who gets the offer, the promotion, or the call back. That perspective is hard to fake.

When you interview a coach, ask about her professional background before coaching. If she has spent her career as a coach with no time inside the organizations she is now coaching people into, she may be excellent at the inner work and weaker at the strategic positioning. For women over 40, who are often going head-to-head with younger candidates and need to be sharp about how they frame experience, the coach’s market knowledge matters.

Industry-Relevant Experience For Your Target Field

This is the underrated criterion. A coach who built her own career in tech is going to understand what it actually takes to move within or out of tech. The closer the coach’s professional history is to the world you are trying to enter or exit, the more useful her advice will be.

If you are leaving a sector like nonprofit, healthcare, federal government, or hospitality into tech industry, ask the coach specifically about their experience in the tech space. Generalist career coaches can help with mindset and confidence, but the strategic moves, what to put on your resume, who to talk to, what skills to emphasize, vary a lot by industry.

A Real Methodology, Not Just Vibes

Good coaching is structured. There should be a framework for you to go through, not just open-ended conversations that feel pleasant but do not move you forward. My own approach is built around what I call the VITAL framework, which walks clients through five components:

Career Values: what actually matters to you in work and life.

Career Identity: who you are professionally and how you want to show up.

Career Trust: the self-belief that lets you act before you feel ready.

Career Abilities: your real strengths and how to position them in a new context. Career Legacy, the longer story you want your work to add up to.

You do not need to use my framework. But you need to use a framework. When you talk to a coach, ask her how she structures the work. If she cannot describe a process beyond “we talk about what’s on your mind that week,” you are probably looking at a friendly conversation rather than coaching.

A Specialty In Women, Or At Minimum, Real Comfort With Gender Dynamics

Career change in your forties and fifties looks different for women. The pay gap, the promotion gap, the caregiving load, the way ambition is read on a woman versus a man, all of it shapes the strategy. I have written about this in the context of coaching for high-anxiety, high-achieving women, and the same principle applies more broadly. A coach who works only with men, or who treats gender as if it were not a factor, will miss things that matter.

I work with women, including LGBTQ+ and trans women. If gender-aware coaching matters to you, look for a coach whose practice is built around it, not one who casually mentions she has female clients.

A Free Intro Call You Actually Find Useful

Career coaches offer a free first call to let you find out if you are the right fit. Use it. Pay attention to whether the call feels like a sales pitch or like coaching. If she spends the first thirty minutes telling you about her credentials and the last fifteen pushing you to commit, that pattern will probably continue. If the call itself moves something for you, even a little, that is a good sign.

When prospective clients book a free career strategy call with me, I treat it as a real working session. We talk about where you are, what you are weighing, and whether the work I do is the right fit. If it is not, I will tell you. If it is, you will leave the call with at least one useful insight, regardless of whether you book follow-up sessions.

What To Avoid In A Career Coach For Women Over 40

Some of the warning signs are obvious. Some are subtle and only show up after you have spent money.

Coaches Who Promise A Specific Outcome

Anyone who tells you they can guarantee a six-figure offer, a specific company, or a particular timeline is selling, not coaching. The job market has too many variables. A good coach will tell you what is realistic given your background, the current market, and the moves you are willing to make. She will not promise the outcome itself.

Coaches Who Push A Single Solution

If a coach’s entire pitch is built around one path, “every woman should start her own business,” or “the answer is always to leave the corporate world,” that is not coaching. That is a worldview being sold as advice. The real answer for any individual woman might be staying put and negotiating a different role, moving laterally, going independent, or doing something none of those scripts cover. A coach who only sees one route will steer you toward it whether or not it fits.

Coaches Without Real Hiring-Side Experience

I mentioned this above, but it is worth flagging again because it is the most common gap. A lot of coaches have never been in the room where hiring decisions are made. They can teach you to feel more confident, which is genuinely valuable, but they cannot tell you with much accuracy what a hiring manager at a company you want to join is going to think about your resume. For women over 40, who often need very precise positioning to get past initial screening, the hiring-side perspective is hard to replace.

High-Pressure Sales Tactics On The Intro Call

Coaches who use aggressive closing techniques, and high pressure sales people on the call. Real coaching does not need that. If you feel pressured rather than helped, leave the call and trust that instinct. Real coaches, the first call would be with them, not a sales person.

A Heavy Reliance On Personality Tests And Assessments

Tests like Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, or the Enneagram can be useful conversation starters, but they are not a career strategy. If a coach’s main offering is “we will run you through these three assessments and you will know what to do,” that is unlikely to deliver on a real pivot. The assessments tell you about yourself in ways you probably already know. The hard work is translating that self-knowledge into market-relevant decisions, and that is what coaching should do.

Vague Pricing Or No Clear Engagement Structure

A reputable coach should be able to tell you, before you commit, how many sessions are in a typical engagement, how long the work usually takes, and what the structure looks like. Coaches who keep this fuzzy are sometimes hoping you will not ask questions until you are emotionally invested. Ask early.

If you’d like to put any of these questions to me directly in a real working conversation, I’d be glad to make space for it.

Book A Free Intro Call

Questions To Ask Before You Hire A Career Coach

When you have a free call scheduled, here are the questions that will tell you the most about fit. I have written separately about what to ask a career coach before you start working with them, but the short version for women over 40 is this:

What was your professional career before you became a coach? Have you worked with women in my industry making the kind of pivot I am considering? What does a typical engagement with you look like, and what results have your clients seen? How do you handle it when a client disagrees about the right move? What kind of woman is not a good fit for your coaching?

That last question is the most revealing one. A coach who claims to be a fit for everyone is not paying attention to the limits of her own expertise. A coach who can name two or three types of clients she does not work well with is being honest, and that honesty is exactly what you want.

What Coaching Should Actually Deliver For Women Over 40

Here is what success looks like in this work. Not in vague terms, but in the specific outcomes you should expect from a good coaching engagement.

You should leave with clarity on what you want, framed in language that fits your real life, not abstractions. You should have a strategy for the next six to twelve months, including which moves to make, which to skip, and how to sequence them. You should know how to tell your career story in a way that frames decades of experience as an asset rather than a liability. You should have practical tools for the parts of the search that wear people down, including the conversations with people in your network, the interviews where you will be asked variations of “why now,” and the moments where confidence drops. And you should feel less alone with the decision.

I have watched women in their forties and fifties go from “I have no idea what I want” to landing offers that were better than what they came in with, often at higher compensation, almost always with better alignment. It is not magic. It is the result of doing the strategic work in the right order with someone who has done it before.

If you are weighing whether to start, the most useful next step is usually a real conversation. You can book a free career strategy call with me directly, or text (650) 680-3824. The call is thirty minutes, no preparation required, and you do not need to have any of it figured out before we talk.

Thirty minutes, no preparation, and you leave with at least one useful insight whether you book again or not.

Start The Conversation

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 40 too old to change careers?

No. The data points the other direction. In a survey by the American Institute for Economic Research, 82 percent of older workers reported a successful transition to a new career after age 45, particularly when they leveraged skills from their previous career. Forty is closer to the start of your second professional act than the end of your first. [2]

How much does a career coach for women over 40 typically cost?

Pricing varies widely depending on the coach’s experience, the format, and whether you are buying single sessions or a multi-month engagement. Rather than focusing on the sticker number, think about it as an investment relative to the cost of staying in the wrong role for another two or three years, or accepting a mismatched job out of urgency. A real coaching engagement usually pays for itself in better positioning, faster decisions, and offers that match what you actually want.

How long does career coaching usually take?

Most career transitions take three to six months of focused coaching, sometimes longer if the pivot involves new credentials, an industry change, or a return from an extended career break. Some women come to me for shorter engagements when the question is sharper, such as preparing for a specific role search or working through a single major decision.

What is the difference between a career coach and a career counselor?

Career counselors are typically trained in assessment-based guidance and often work in academic or institutional settings. Career coaches focus on action, strategy, and accountability for the kind of pivot you are making in the real-world job market. The two roles can overlap, but for mid-career women navigating a specific transition, coaching is usually the more practical fit.

Can a career coach help if I do not know what I want yet?

Yes, and honestly, most of my clients arrive in exactly that state. The work of figuring out what you want is the first phase of the engagement, not a prerequisite. If you knew exactly what you wanted, you would not need a coach.

References

1. https://secondactsuccess.co/2026/03/04/midlife-career-transitions-for-women-why-more-women-are-changing-careers-after-40/
2. https://career.io/career-advice/navigating-career-change-at-40

I work with women executives every week who are sitting with that exact question. Most of them are not running away from their nonprofit. They are running toward a version of their career that pays them what their skills are actually worth, gives them resources to operate at the level they are capable of, and lets them set down some of the weight. I went through a version of this question myself when I left where I was comfortable with, for the corporate world, and I have spent the last twenty-plus years in HR at Google, Grammarly, and other companies helping women navigate exactly this kind of pivot. The harder parts of this transition are almost never about whether you are qualified. They are about framing your identity, language, and giving yourself permission. If you are an executive woman thinking about leaving the nonprofit sector, this is the guide I would walk you through in our first session. For broader context on this category of move, you may also want to read how to make a mid-career change.

Why More Executive Women Are Leaving The Nonprofit Sector

The pattern is not in your head, and the move you are contemplating is not an outlier. McKinsey’s Great Attrition global survey of more than 13,000 workers across six countries found that 72 percent of public and social sector workers who quit during this period either changed industries entirely or left the workforce, the highest rate of any sector studied [1]. Nonprofit turnover sits at roughly 19 percent versus around 12 percent in other sectors, and in a separate 2025 survey nearly 7 in 10 nonprofit employees said they planned to look for a new job that year [2]. Burnout among leaders is the strongest signal underneath all of this. In a 2024 study of nonprofit leaders, 95 percent expressed concern about burnout in their organization, 33 percent were “very much” concerned about their own burnout, and 76 percent said burnout was at least slightly impacting their organization’s ability to achieve its mission [3]. When the people running the sector are this depleted, exits at the executive level follow.

For women in particular, the pressure compounds in a way that doesn’t always get named out loud. Women make up roughly 70 to 75 percent of the nonprofit workforce, but the AAUW’s Broken Ladders report found that women hold only 22 percent of chief executive roles at the 2,200 nonprofits with annual budgets of at least $50 million [4]. In other words, the bigger the organization, the smaller your odds of leading it as a woman. Academic research analyzing tax returns from 340 human service organizations found that the likelihood of a woman being hired as a nonprofit CEO decreases by 0.2 percentage points with each million-dollar increase in revenue, meaning a $50 million-budget nonprofit is 8 percentage points less likely to hire a woman than a $10 million one [5]. The women who do reach the top often run smaller, harder-funded organizations and absorb more operational load than their counterparts at bigger orgs. And the pay gap inside those roles is widening, not narrowing. Candid’s 2024 Nonprofit Compensation Report, which analyzed 209,655 observations from 128,238 tax-exempt organizations, found that female CEOs at nonprofits with budgets over $50 million now earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to their male peers, a meaningful decline from 82 cents in 2012 [6]. At organizations with budgets over $1 million more broadly, women CEOs face median pay gaps of around 18 percent compared to their male peers [7].

When you stack that against what private sector roles pay for similar responsibility, the math becomes hard to ignore. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Human Resources analyzing administrative tax data from workers who changed employers found that the average nonprofit worker earns roughly 5.5 percent less than the average for-profit worker, with about 20 percent of that gap attributable to a true nonprofit pay penalty after accounting for who sorts into the sector [8]. That gap widens significantly at the executive level. Nonprofit CEOs at small organizations earn roughly 30 to 40 percent less than for-profit CEOs at companies of similar revenue, with the gap narrowing to 20 to 30 percent at mid-size organizations [9]. The women I work with are not greedy. They are tired of carrying executive-level responsibility for sub-executive compensation, especially when they look ahead to the next ten years of earnings and the retirement they want to fund.

None of these reasons are shameful. You are allowed to want something different in your forties, fifties, or sixties than you wanted in your twenties. This shows up especially intensely in women who have built their identity around being the one who cares.

If any of these numbers describe what your career has felt like, let’s talk about what the next chapter could actually look like.

Explore Your Pivot With Me

Is The Private Sector Actually The Right Move For You?

Before we talk about how to make the pivot, I want you to sit with whether it is the right pivot. Leaving nonprofit work because you are burned out is a real reason, but burnout will follow you into the private sector if you do not unpack what caused it. In my coaching practice, I have seen women jump from a nonprofit ED role into a corporate VP role and discover that they traded one set of pressures for another set they were less prepared for.

A few honest questions to work through before you decide.

What part of your current job is draining you? If it is the fundraising treadmill, the board management, or the chronic underfunding of your team, the private sector probably will feel like relief. If it is the volume of work, the politics, or the emotional labor of managing people, those exist everywhere and may even intensify at larger companies.

What does your relationship to mission look like? Some of my clients realize they need a for-profit company whose product they genuinely believe in, like a healthcare company, an education platform, or a sustainability-focused business. Others discover they are fine with mission-neutral work as long as it pays well and ends at 6 p.m. Both answers are valid. The wrong answer is assuming one of them without checking.

How replaceable is your nonprofit experience in your target field? An ED of a $20 million human services nonprofit is sitting on operations, finance, HR, fundraising, and board governance experience that most corporate VPs do not have. An ED of a $500,000 arts nonprofit may need to specialize harder to land at the same level. Both are valuable. The translation work is different.

If you want a deeper framework for this kind of decision, I walk clients through career transition anxiety and how to make a decision without panicking before any tactical planning starts.

What Actually Translates: Your Nonprofit Experience As Private Sector Currency

The biggest mistake I see executive women make is underselling what they have already done. Years of running a nonprofit means you have already operated as a senior generalist, often with broader scope than your private sector peers at the same level.

Think about what nonprofit leadership actually demands. You have managed budgets, often under conditions of significant scarcity, which means you have made resource-allocation decisions that have direct consequences. You have led teams through change, often with limited tools for retention. You have reported to a board, which means you have operated under fiduciary oversight, learned how to manage upward, and translated complex operational realities into the language of governance. You have fundraised, which is sales. You have built coalitions, which is partnerships and business development. You have handled crisis communications, regulatory compliance, donor relations, program design, and impact measurement, sometimes all in the same week.

In a private sector context, that experience reads as P&L responsibility, stakeholder management, board-level reporting, revenue generation, partnership development, and operational leadership under constraint. The work is the same. The vocabulary is different.

The Five Real Challenges Women Face In This Pivot

When my clients hit friction in this transition, it is almost never about whether their skills are good enough. It is about five specific translation problems that derail the search if you do not see them coming.

Identity And Mission Letting Go

The first challenge is the hardest because no one warns you about it. If you have spent fifteen years inside a nonprofit, your sense of professional identity is probably tangled up with the mission. Leaving can feel like betraying something, especially if the organization is in a fragile place. I have had clients tell me, in tears, that they feel selfish for considering a higher-paying corporate role.

The reframe I offer them is this. Your impact does not end when you change sectors. It changes shape. A woman I worked with left a public health nonprofit for a healthcare technology company and now influences the access decisions of a product that reaches ten times as many patients as her old organization could. Another left a women’s economic empowerment nonprofit for a corporate ESG role where she actually has budget to move the needle. Mission-driven work exists in the private sector. You just have to look for it on purpose. I have written more about this dynamic in decoupling self-worth from success during career change.

Translating Your Resume Out Of Nonprofit Language

The second challenge is mechanical and fixable. Most nonprofit resumes are written in nonprofit dialect. They talk about programs served, populations reached, grant cycles managed, and capacity building. Corporate hiring managers, even sympathetic ones, often cannot map that language to anything they recognize.

The fix is to rewrite every line of your resume around the verbs the private sector uses: revenue growth, P&L responsibility, operational efficiency, team scaling, cross-functional leadership, stakeholder management. “Stewarded a $4M operating budget” reads more powerfully as “managed $4M P&L with full budget authority.” “Built relationships with major donors” becomes “developed and closed six-figure partnership agreements.” If you grew a development program from $2 million to $5 million, that is revenue growth. If you cut administrative costs by 20 percent during a funding gap, that is operational efficiency. Both versions are accurate. One speaks the language of the audience.

For a foundational resume framework, my post on the mid-career resume covers the structural rebuild this often requires.

Recalibrating How You Talk About Metrics

In the nonprofit world, success is usually framed in terms of impact: lives changed, services delivered, communities reached. In the private sector, success is framed in terms of business outcomes: revenue, margin, growth rate, retention, market share. These are not opposing values, but they are different muscles, and if you walk into a corporate interview leading with impact language, you will lose the room.

The shift I coach is to lead with the business metric and let the human impact sit underneath it. Instead of “we served 12,000 families this year,” try “I managed a service operation with a $4 million annual budget that delivered 12,000 client engagements at a 23 percent reduction in cost-per-engagement year over year.” Same accomplishment. Completely different signal to a corporate hiring committee. Most executive women I coach have spent so long describing their work in mission terms that they have to actively re-learn how to describe it in outcome terms. Practice this until it stops feeling cold to you, because at the executive level, your ability to speak the language of business outcomes is what separates a credible candidate from an interesting one.

Negotiating Compensation You Have Never Asked For Before

This one is where I see the most money left on the table. Many of my nonprofit clients have spent their entire careers in organizations where comp conversations were apologetic and constrained by donor optics. When they get into a private sector negotiation, they anchor low because that is what feels normal.

A few things to internalize before you start interviewing. The private sector negotiates. The first offer is almost never the best offer. Equity and bonuses are real money, not theoretical money, and they are negotiable. Sign-on bonuses exist and are common at the executive level. Severance terms can be negotiated up front, especially in volatile industries. Your nonprofit salary should not be the anchor for your private sector ask, because the market rate for the role is the anchor.

Get comparable salary data from Levels, Payscale, and LinkedIn’s salary insights before any conversation, and have a coach or trusted advisor look at the offer with you before you accept. I have helped clients move offers by 25 to 40 percent in negotiation, and the most common reason they didn’t ask for more in the first place was simply that they didn’t know they could.

Adjusting To A Different Pace And Culture

The final challenge is cultural, and it has more layers than most women expect. Four shifts catch executive women off guard the most.

Decision velocity. Nonprofits, particularly larger ones, often move slowly because consensus matters, board dynamics matter, and the cost of getting something wrong is reputational with mission stakeholders. Private sector companies, especially ones in growth mode, can make and reverse decisions in days. This is liberating once you adjust, but it can feel reckless at first.

Language. Business vocabulary is its own dialect, and even if you know the concepts, you may not have practiced the words. Things like KPIs, OKRs, revenue per employee, gross margin, churn, ICP, ARR. None of this is hard, but if you have spent twenty years saying “outcome measurement” and “impact reporting” instead, you will have a learning curve in your first 90 days. Read a few books on business strategy before you start. Listen to a couple of business podcasts. Have ChatGPT explain anything you don’t understand in plain English. The fluency comes faster than you would expect.

The absence of mission-fueled overwork. Many executive women coming from nonprofit have built their entire work pattern around the mission as justification for the hours. When you are suddenly working for a company whose mission is more limited, you may find yourself working far fewer hours and feeling guilty about it. That guilt fades. The recovered evenings, weekends, and capacity for the rest of your life do not.

Clearer org charts. Private sector environments often have more defined roles and a lower likelihood that you will be expected to wear seven hats by 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. The thing most clients miss is the closeness with the mission. The thing they do not miss is being the entire HR, finance, fundraising, and program operation in a single body.

If any of these five challenges is the one quietly holding you back, that’s exactly what one focused conversation can unstick.

Book A Free Strategy Call

The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Your Resume, It’s Your Network

If you are an executive woman pivoting from nonprofit to private sector and you are stuck, your network is almost always where the friction is, not your qualifications.

Here is what tends to happen. You have spent years inside a sector where your peers are other nonprofit leaders, foundation program officers, board members from professional services backgrounds, and consultants who serve nonprofits. You know an enormous number of people, but most of them sit on the same side of the river you are trying to cross.

The good news is that the bridges are usually shorter than you think. An MIT-led study published in Science, based on a five-year experiment involving 20 million LinkedIn users, found that weaker professional ties produced more job mobility than close, frequent connections, precisely because they expose you to information and networks outside your immediate circle [10]. The second-degree contacts you barely know are statistically more useful for a sector pivot than your closest collaborators.

What this looks like in practice: instead of asking your nonprofit colleagues for referrals into the private sector, ask them who in their network has made a similar move, or who works on the corporate side of the partnerships they have stewarded. Foundation program officers often have unusually wide cross-sector networks. So do board members who run businesses themselves. So do consultants and lawyers who work across both worlds.

Then you do informational interviews. Not job interviews. Conversations. The goal is to learn how the sector you are moving toward actually evaluates people like you, what the language sounds like from the inside, and what specific roles might actually fit. Most women I coach are surprised by how generous people are when the ask is genuinely curious and not transactional.

Where Executive Women Tend To Land

Not every private sector role is a good landing spot for someone coming from nonprofit leadership. Some translate naturally, some require a steeper learning curve, and some will frustrate you within six months. Here is what I have seen actually work for senior women making this move.

Operational leadership at mission-aligned companies. B Corps, public benefit corporations, and companies with strong ESG or impact mandates often actively want executives who understand both the operational rigor of business and the values orientation of nonprofit work. COO, VP of Operations, and Chief of Staff roles at these companies tend to fit nonprofit executives well because the work itself is similar to what you have already been doing.

Corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and impact roles. These departments inside large corporations are often led by people who came from the nonprofit or government sectors. Compensation is real private sector compensation, but the work involves social impact strategy, community partnerships, and stakeholder management, all of which map closely to executive nonprofit experience. The risk here is that some of these roles are window dressing without real budget or authority. Vet carefully during interviews.

Foundations and family offices. Technically still nonprofit in the case of foundations, but the work culture, compensation, and operational rigor often look much more like the private sector than like a frontline nonprofit. Family offices and the impact investing arms of wealth management firms are also hiring senior people who understand the social sector landscape.

Consulting and advisory. Boutique consulting firms that serve nonprofits, foundations, and impact-driven companies often hire senior nonprofit executives because the credibility transfers immediately to clients. McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and the Big Four all have social impact practices that recruit from senior nonprofit ranks. If you are entrepreneurial, building your own advisory practice is a viable third option, especially if you have a strong network already.

General private sector executive roles. This is the harder pivot, but it does happen. Women who have led significant operations or finance functions in nonprofits can move into comparable roles in mid-sized private companies, especially if the company is values-aligned or has gone through a recent culture transformation. This path typically requires the most translation work on the resume and interview side.

The functional translations that come up most often: development teams to enterprise sales or partnerships, program leadership to product management or operations leadership, ED-level scope to chief of staff, COO, or general management roles. If you want to see how I think through these landing-spot decisions with clients one-on-one, the options are laid out on my services page.

A Six-Month Plan For Making The Move

Here is the rough timeline I walk executive women through when they decide to commit to the pivot.

In the first month, do the internal work. Get clear on what you actually want out of the next role: industry, function, scope, comp range, culture, location, and lifestyle. Write it down. This becomes your filter for every opportunity that comes across your desk over the next six months, and it will save you from chasing the wrong shiny thing in month four.

In month two, rebuild your resume and LinkedIn profile in private sector language. Get three or four people who know both worlds to review them. Update your headline so it reads like a private sector executive who happens to have nonprofit experience, not a nonprofit lifer who is testing the waters. The order of those two things matters more than people realize.

In month three, start the networking work in earnest. Reach out to twenty-five to thirty people in your target industry for informational conversations. Not job conversations. Information conversations. Ask them how they think about hiring, what skills they look for, what is changing in their field, who else you should talk to. This is the most important and most under-done step of the whole pivot.

In months four and five, apply selectively. Quality over quantity. At the executive level, the right ten applications will outperform fifty mediocre ones. Use your network for warm introductions wherever possible, because executive roles are filled through relationships far more than through job boards.

In month six, negotiate the offer with the same rigor you would apply to a major board decision. Do not rush. Do not be apologetic. Do not anchor to your nonprofit salary.

What To Do If You Are Still On The Fence

If you have read this far and you are still not sure whether to leave, you are in good company. Most of the women I work with do not arrive certain. They arrive curious, with a slow-burning sense that they have more in them than their current role lets them give. The pivot is not a leap you make once. It is a series of small decisions about exploring, learning, networking, and testing the water until the next move becomes obvious.

The worst thing you can do is stay stuck in deliberation for another two years, watching your runway shrink. The best thing you can do is start the exploration on purpose, even if you do not commit to anything yet. That is what I help clients do. We map out where you actually want to go, we build the plan to get there, and we keep you accountable to the version of your career you said you wanted before the daily fires pulled you off course.

Curiosity is enough to start. You don’t need to be certain before we talk.

Start The Exploration

Frequently Asked Questions

Will my nonprofit experience be taken seriously by private sector hiring managers?

It depends entirely on how you present it. The mistake I see most often is leading with mission language and sector specifics, which makes hiring managers struggle to translate. When you reframe the same work in outcome and operations language, P&L responsibility, team size, revenue generated, partnerships closed, the experience reads exactly like comparable private sector experience. The skills are the same. The vocabulary needs an upgrade.

Should I take a step down in title to make the move?

Almost never. Senior women coming from nonprofit leadership routinely undersell themselves and accept roles two levels below their actual capability, then spend the next two years climbing back up. The exception is if you are making a true functional pivot, like program leadership into product management, in which case some level adjustment is reasonable. For a straight sector pivot at the same function, hold your level.

How long does this kind of transition usually take?

Most of my clients land somewhere between four and nine months from the moment they decide to seriously pursue the move. The variance depends mostly on network strength and clarity about what you actually want. Women who skip the clarity step and just start applying to roles can spend twelve months in motion without landing anywhere good. Women who do the clarity work first and then activate their network deliberately usually move faster, even though it feels slower at the start.

Can I move back to the nonprofit sector later if I change my mind?

Yes. Senior leaders move between sectors throughout their careers, and the cross-sector experience usually makes you more valuable, not less, when you return. Nonprofit boards and executive search firms increasingly look for leaders with private sector operational experience, especially at the CEO and COO levels. The door does not lock behind you.

Is the salary jump actually that significant?

Often, yes. The gap varies wildly by function, geography, and seniority, but for senior operational, finance, and revenue-generating roles, the move can mean a 30 to 60 percent increase in total compensation when you factor in base, bonus, and equity. This is not a guarantee, and some specialized nonprofit executive roles, like large healthcare nonprofits and top-tier foundations, pay competitively with the private sector. But for most women I coach, the financial improvement is real and meaningful.

Should I get an MBA or certification before I make the move?

In most cases, no. At the executive level, your operating track record matters more than another credential. The exception is if you are pivoting into a heavily technical field like finance or data, where a credential is functionally a license to be considered. For most operational, GM, COO, or general leadership pivots, your experience is the credential.

References

1. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/08/mckinsey-quitting-workers-attrition/
2. https://www.missionedge.org/news-and-resources/talent-burnout-and-retention-the-defining-challenge-of-the-nonprofit-workforce
3. https://cep.org/news/press-releases/nonprofit-leaders-cite-burnout-as-a-top-concern-in-a-new-study-on-the-state-of-u-s-nonprofits/
4. https://www.aauw.org/app/uploads/2020/03/women-in-leadership.pdf
5. https://theconversation.com/male-nonprofit-ceos-earn-more-but-the-problem-runs-deeper-than-a-simple-gender-pay-gap-119068
6. https://candid.org/about/press-room/releases/candid-s-2024-nonprofit-compensation-report-reveals-steady-executive-pay-growth-persistent-gender-pay-gap-and-regional-disparities
7. https://grantwritingandfunding.com/women-in-nonprofits-does-representation-equate-to-leadership-pay-equity/
8. https://econpapers.repec.org/article/uwpjhriss/v_3a56_3ay_3a2021_3ai_3a4_3ap_3a1226-1253.htm
9. https://www.nonprofitlists.com/blog/nonprofit-ceo-salary.html
10. https://news.mit.edu/2022/weak-ties-linkedin-employment-0915

If you’ve been laid off, restructured out of a role you thought was stable, or had a leadership decision pull the rug from under you, the first few days can feel surreal. You go home at 10 a.m. on a Monday, sit on your couch, and the question staring back at you is, “What do I do now?” I’ve been there myself, and in my coaching work with women across tech and leadership, I hear that exact question every week.

The hardest part is that the old definition of success, the one tied to the title, the company, the income, the identity, stops working overnight. Rebuilding what success means to you is real work, and it doesn’t happen in a weekend. But it can be done with intention, and the path through is far less lonely than it feels in those first 72 hours.

This is what I share with my clients when we sit down together for the first time after an unexpected change. If you’re walking through it right now, or coaching yourself through the high-anxiety, high-achieving woman version of the same story, I hope some of this lands.

Why Unexpected Career Change Feels So Different in 2026

A decade ago, layoffs were rare. They signaled a company was in trouble, and they came with empathy, severance conversations, and time to plan. That’s not the world we’re in anymore.

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the technology sector announced 52,050 job cuts, a 40% jump from the same period in 2025. Across all U.S. industries, employers cut 217,362 roles in Q1, with artificial intelligence cited as the leading reason in March (15,341 cuts, or 25% of the month’s total). Tech alone has shed almost 900,000 jobs since 2020, with no sign of slowing.

What stands out to me, more than the numbers, is the way the layoffs are being conducted. The perceived lack of empathy. The transactional tone. People who gave 10, 15, or 20 years to a company, who were top performers, getting an email at 6 a.m. on a Monday telling them they’re no longer part of the job. Share prices often rise on the announcement. The message that sends to the people on the other end of it is, frankly, brutal.

That’s the backdrop. If you’re feeling shaken, you’re not overreacting. The contract between employee and employer has changed, and most of us never agreed to the new terms.

The First Wave: What You’re Actually Feeling

When I sit with clients in the weeks after they’ve been let go, I see the same mix of feelings come up almost every time. Grief. Loss. Embarrassment. Shame. The thought, “I never thought this would happen to me.” Self-doubt: “Is this a reflection of my work?”

These feelings are normal, and they take time to work through.

There can also be financial pressure on top of the emotional load, especially if you’re the main breadwinner in your household.

That pressure is real, and it can make it tempting to skip past the processing step entirely and start applying to jobs in a panic the next day.

I’ve watched a lot of people try that, and it almost never goes well. Applications sent from a place of panic read as panic. The interviews that follow read as panic. You end up in the wrong room having the wrong conversation.

The first job is to let yourself feel what you’re feeling, while still moving forward in small ways. Tell the people closest to you. Take a few mornings to sit with it. Then begin.

My Own Story: The Dublin Office Closed Leading To Google Opportunity

I’ll share a moment from my own career, because the pattern I’m describing isn’t theoretical for me.

Years ago, I relocated from London to Ireland for a new job. I’d given up my flat, packed my life, and was excited to be back near my family. I’d been in the new role less than two months. One morning I walked into the office and noticed something off. A lot of closed doors. People whispering. Within an hour, my manager called me in and told me the head office had decided to close the entire Dublin office. Everyone was being let go.

I was in shock. It was 8:30 in the morning. I asked, “But I just started here two months ago. How could you not have known this was coming?” The answer was that the financials had hit a bad quarter and the company had made the call. None of us had seen it.

The first few days I was consumed with the same questions everyone is consumed with. How will I tell my friends and family? Does this reflect badly on me? What do I do now?

But then something shifted. The job I’d taken in Ireland was in food manufacturing, and while it was interesting, it wasn’t really the industry I wanted. I’d always wanted to work in tech. Dublin happened to have a thriving tech sector. So I started looking, available at short notice, in the right place at the right time. That’s how I ended up at Google.

I would not have found that role if I hadn’t been let go. I tell that story not to suggest layoffs are secretly a gift (they aren’t), but to make a point that took me years to fully see: being adaptable and staying open to opportunities you didn’t originally plan for is one of the most valuable things you can do during an unexpected transition. The plan you had on Sunday night is not the plan you need on Wednesday afternoon.

If you’re in those first foggy weeks after an unexpected change and want a thinking partner to help you figure out the next step, I’d love to talk.

Book a Free Discovery Call

Identity After a Job Loss: The Hardest Part Nobody Warns You About

When I left Google after almost 12 years, my identity was a huge part of what I was leaving behind. I had grown up there professionally. So much of who I was, how I introduced myself, what gave my days shape, was bound up in that role. Walking away meant figuring out who I was without it.

Greta Petruska, leadership coach, I spoke with described the same thing after she left McKinsey, where she’d spent 13 years. She made the decision herself. She knew the next step was somewhere else. What she wasn’t prepared for, in her words, was “the morning after when nobody calls.” She found herself questioning, “What is the impact I’m creating?” She had built her entire identity around that job, and stepping away from it meant rebuilding from the foundation up. It took her time to go back to her values, her purpose, and figure out what the next chapter looked like.

If you’re noticing that your sense of self feels shaky, that’s okay. That’s a normal reaction to losing something that, whether you realized it or not, was holding a lot of weight in your life.

The good news is that identity is meant to evolve. It evolves whether we want it to or not. As we mature, our value systems shift.

The things that mattered to us in our 20s are not the things that matter in our 40s.

A career transition, even an unwanted one, can be the moment that forces the question, “What do I actually want now?” Many of my clients tell me it’s the first time in years they’ve stopped to ask it.

What Actually Helps in the First 90 Days

Here’s the practical part. When clients come to me in the early stages of an unexpected career change, this is the work we do together.

Process before you pivot. Give yourself a real beat to feel what’s happening. A few days, sometimes a few weeks. Talk to people who care about you. Don’t try to outrun the emotion by sprinting into job applications. The plan you build from a settled place is dramatically better than the plan you build from a panicked one.

Take inventory of what you actually have. I see so many people, including the colleague I mentioned earlier, hit a moment where they think, “I built a career and now I’m at square zero.” It’s not true. You have years of skills, relationships, judgment, and pattern recognition. Even if your next chapter is in a different industry or a different culture entirely, those things are the foundation you’re building from. Going back to your fundamentals (your values, your strengths, what you genuinely care about) often reveals more options than you can see when you’re standing in the middle of the shock.

Reconnect with your network. Yes, even though you hate networking. When you’ve been at one company for a long time, you become a little removed from how the rest of the market works. How other companies hire. What’s actually happening in your industry. Reaching out to people you haven’t spoken to in a while is uncomfortable, but it’s where most of the real opportunities live. Coffee chats, virtual or in person. People in the workforce, people also looking, people who were out of work and got back in. Each one teaches you something about the current landscape.

Be honest about being in transition. A friend of mine who recently moved to California told me the hardest part of networking, in the beginning, was admitting she was new and looking. After 15 years of experience, it felt embarrassing to say, “I need help.” Once she let that wall down and started telling people, “I’m new here, I’m building connections, I’m in the middle of figuring out what’s next,” everything got easier. People want to help. They can’t help you if they don’t know what you’re navigating.

Walking through these steps with someone who’s done it themselves can change how the whole process feels. Let’s see if we’re a fit.

Schedule Your Intro Call

Networking When You’re an Introvert (Like Me)

I want to address this directly because it comes up almost every time I bring up networking with a client. Some version of, “I hate networking. I don’t want to put myself out there. I’m an introvert.”

Same. I can do one or two networking events a week before I’m done. Here’s what works for me, and what I share with clients who are dreading it:

Go to events that have structure. Two unstructured hours of small talk with strangers is a special kind of awful. Two hours that include a 30-minute talk in the middle? Much more bearable. Show up 15 minutes before the talk, do 15 minutes of networking, sit through the talk, and you’ve already met a few people who chose to be in that room because they care about the same things you do. That’s a built-in filter.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to meet 10 people or land a job offer that night. One or two meaningful connections is a successful evening. If you can come home having had a real conversation with someone who shares your industry or interests, you’ve done well.

It’s about depth, not breadth. The curated experience matters more than the volume.

Redefining Success: The Question Underneath the Question

The reason this article is called “Redefining Success” is that I’ve watched the meaning of the word shift, in real time, in the room with my clients. The version of success they had at 28 (climb the ladder, earn more, take the bigger title) is rarely the version that fits at 38 or 48.

The colleague I mentioned, after she left McKinsey, found that flexibility had become one of her highest values, when in the past she’d given it almost no weight. Being able to choose how to spend her time mattered more to her than the title or the prestige. She didn’t realize that until she was outside the structure that had been making the choice for her.

I see this all the time. People come into coaching after a layoff or a burnout episode, and the first thing we have to do is rebuild the definition. Not what their parents told them success was. Not what their LinkedIn feed says success is. What it actually is, for them, at this stage of life. Sometimes that means a different job in the same industry. Sometimes it means a portfolio of work (some contract, some freelance, some part-time), spreading the risk so that no single company holds your future. Sometimes it means starting something of your own.

There’s no one right answer, and the question is the work.

The Shift Toward Portfolio Careers

When I joined the workforce in my 20s, the unspoken contract was: you give your loyalty, the company gives you stability and growth. Most of my clients now don’t trust that contract anymore. They’ve watched it break too many times.

What I see them moving toward is portfolio work. Some contract work. A side project. Some freelancing. A combination that means if one piece of income or one company stops working, the rest holds you up. It’s not for everyone. It requires a different relationship with uncertainty than a single full-time job, and it can challenge your identity in new ways. But for a lot of women I work with, it’s becoming the more honest answer to the question, “How do I want to build my career from here?”

If that’s the direction you’re considering, the same advice applies: don’t copy-paste someone else’s version of a portfolio career into your own life. Reflect on what fits your personality, your financial situation, and what you actually want your days to feel like.

When to Bring in Help

There’s a moment in most career transitions where you realize you can’t see your own situation clearly. You’re too inside it. The voices in your head are loud, the perspective is narrow, and the same three options keep spinning.

That’s the moment to bring in someone outside. A coach, a mentor, a trusted advisor. Someone who can ask the questions you can’t ask yourself and help you spot the options you can’t see from where you’re standing.

This is the work I do every day. If you’re navigating an unexpected career change and you’d like a thinking partner, I offer a complimentary intro call where we can talk through your goals and figure out if coaching is the right fit for you right now.

Ready to Figure Out What’s Next?

If you’re in the middle of an unexpected career change and the path forward feels foggy, you don’t have to figure it out alone. I help women like you redefine success on your own terms and build a next chapter that actually fits.

Book a free discovery call and let’s talk through what you’re navigating.

Your next chapter starts with one conversation. Take the first step today.

Book Your Free Discovery Call

Full Transcript of Redefining Success After Unexpected Career Change

A conversation between Claire Campion and Greta Petrushka

Speakers:
– Claire Campion — Career transition coach; formerly HR executive at Google and Grammarly (~20 years corporate, ~12 years at Google)
– Greta Petrushka — Leadership coach and CEO at HTB Consulting; formerly McKinsey (13 years), then two tech startups; moved from Eastern Europe to California two years ago

CLAIRE: Welcome to our live discussion today on the topic of redefining success after unexpected change. And speaking of unexpected change, Greta and I were due to go live on LinkedIn about 15 minutes ago, but LinkedIn live did not want to play ball with us. And so in real time, we improvised and pivoted, and we are now recording on Zoom. Yay! The conversation will be exactly the same, but we just won’t be live on LinkedIn as promised. We’ll be live on Zoom.

GRETA: Awesome. Thank you, Claire.

CLAIRE: So, currently, a lot of people are dealing with a career change that they didn’t plan for, whether it’s from restructures, layoffs, leadership decisions, or simply realizing the definition of success no longer works for them. Today we wanted to open up a conversation about what these moments really feel like and some ways to be able to navigate through them. But first, some introductions. My name is Claire Campion. I’m a career transition coach, formerly an HR executive at Google and Grammarly. Greta?

GRETA: Hi everyone. My name is Greta Petrushka. Right now, I’m a leadership coach and CEO at HTB Consulting. Before that, I worked for McKinsey for certain years and two tech startups, and I just recently — I mean two years ago — I moved to the US, but it feels like it happened just now. So we are two Europeans living in the US.

CLAIRE: Exactly. So why is this topic important today? Firstly, for me, I would say at the moment, hardly a day goes by when I don’t read in the news about another round of layoffs. These days used to be rare and a sign that potentially a company wasn’t doing well in the past, but now we’re seeing this more and more often, and the message is quite the opposite. Share prices often rise when layoffs are announced. Personally, the part that stands out to me is the way the layoffs are conducted and the perceived lack of empathy in how they’re handled, and how they’re now being seen almost as a transactional process — even if somebody has been there, you know, 10 or 20 years and were a top performer. Greta, can you share a bit more about why this topic is important to you?

GRETA: Yes, you know, it’s just the same as you, like reading the news and also like adjusting to the US processes. It’s quite brutal to see how these layoffs are happening, and I also went through quite a bit of change in the past six years, I would say. Some of them were by choice and some of them not so much. So this topic is top of mind because, as I mentioned, I moved to the US two years ago and I’m still adjusting, and it’s quite a bit of an adjustment. So everybody who is navigating change, I just empathize with those people, and I’m one of those as well.

CLAIRE: Thank you, Greta. So, I would say from what I’ve seen and also actually personally experienced once myself earlier in my career with job losses and unexpected change, is that in the first instance, it is very tough — and especially in the beginning when you get mostly that shock news that you’re being laid off or there’s a team restructuring or something, you know, very fundamental is changing in your work. And oftentimes I think we feel a mix of feelings. It can be anything from grief to loss. And you know, sometimes we feel embarrassed or ashamed. We often may think “I thought it would never happen to me.” We often doubt ourselves and wonder “is it a reflection of my work?” And it does take time to work through these feelings and to process them. And there often can be added financial pressure too if you are the main breadwinner in your household.

I would also say the pace at which many of us are living our lives today is just fast-paced. We live in a very dynamic, fast-moving world, and many of us can default into that lifestyle of living our life on autopilot and moving fast, and then a surprise restructure or a severe episode of burnout comes along and really forces us to pause and to take stock of things. In my coaching work, I often hear people saying, it’s the first time in years that I’m actually thinking, what do I actually want to do now with my career? Because maybe earlier in their career, they stumbled into their career, or they were encouraged to go a certain path that maybe their parents encouraged them or for financial reasons they were told go down this path. Greta, I know identity is a topic close to your heart. How do people think about identity after a job loss, for example?

GRETA: So you know, this is something which can hit really hard. And so for example, when I left my job at McKinsey, it was my decision, and you know, I knew that the next step is maybe somewhere else, but what I didn’t realize is that for so long it was just like a huge part of my identity. So work was extremely important for me, and when I made this decision, what I was not prepared for is the morning after when nobody calls. And actually, okay, I was questioning myself — what is the impact I’m creating? So my identity was really around my job and work at McKinsey. So it took quite a bit of time to understand how to go back to my fundamentals, how to go back to my values, how to go back to my purpose, or maybe even find my purpose for the next chapter. But identity is definitely something which is evolving, and not just because of job loss or the decision to change careers, but actually as we mature in our lives, our value systems are changing and life happens. So the best thing we can do is adapt and go with the flow.

CLAIRE: Yes. And I’ve seen so many people say similar to what you just mentioned — that this wasn’t the plan, but it was the turning point I almost didn’t know I needed. When you speak about identity, do you want to share a bit more about the length of time you were at McKinsey, and do you think because you were there for a number of years, your identity evolved throughout that period of time?

GRETA: Yes, that’s for sure. So I spent 13 years at McKinsey, which is significant, right — not, you know, any company and any profession. And I started there when I was mid-20s, I would say, and my priorities were completely different. I was like super eager, very hungry, you know, I wanted to learn, experience, and just like get everything that came with the job. I was traveling a lot and building my career, and it was a really fantastic time, and I had exposure to many different people and all sorts of tasks and responsibilities. But as I got older and older, something else grew in me, and I guess this is also part of how my identity evolved and how my value systems shifted. So I actually wanted to spend more time at home. I wanted to spend more time with my family. And right now, you know, it’s been six years — six years, five years since I left McKinsey — and I’m in a very different place right now living in California instead of Eastern Europe. There is a cultural shock, and what I also noticed and realized for myself is that flexibility is something which I value extremely right now, which in the past was not really important for me because I was so dedicated to my job that everything else was, you know, put in the second, third, fifth priority. And right now how I can spend my time is extremely important.

CLAIRE: Thank you for sharing all of that. I also had a similar experience, which is how Greta and I met and bonded a number of months ago. For me personally, I had a corporate career for 20 years. A long stint of that, almost 12 years, was with Google, a mix of in Europe and here in California. And I thoroughly enjoyed my job when I started there. You know, it was fast-paced. I was learning a lot. I was in the office for a lot of hours, but it was very motivating, and I was around lots of very smart people, and Google is always working on innovative things. So it’s always interesting. But once I hit like 10, 11 years, I was getting older, my priorities were also changing, and while I looked very successful on paper — good job, good title, earning good money, also traveling the world and got the opportunity to relocate to California — I also realized that I had stopped enjoying the environment, and work actually felt like it was draining my cup more than filling it up. And for me, I had this constant tension for probably 12 to 18 months before I decided, okay, you know, this is the sign, this environment isn’t for me anymore. I also chose to leave, and then a year ago started working for myself and set myself up as a coach. But my identity was a huge part of my working at Google for so long. It was also where I probably grew up through most of my career. And leaving and figuring out my identity after I worked there was also something I definitely grappled with for a few months.

GRETA: Yeah, absolutely. It resonates with me as well. It took me, I would say, two years to make a decision. And probably that was the hardest decision in my life, to be honest. And it took some time to adjust and figure out, like, okay, so how do I create value in this world without this job, without this title, without everything that comes with the job. So when kicking off this topic and this discussion, you were talking about how many different emotions and feelings are coming up when an unexpected change happens. And for both of us, this example is an example for our decision — and we made this change, and still came with so many feelings which we had to deal with. And right now there are so many people who are just given this decision and they cannot control the circumstances. So I’m just wondering — what is your perspective when an unexpected change happened, and you didn’t really expect to get let go on a Monday morning, 6:00 a.m., just getting an email that you are no longer part of the job? So what could help to navigate such a situation?

CLAIRE: Yes, this actually happened to me earlier in my career. I relocated from the UK to Ireland for a job. Gave up my job in London, and I was ready to make the move back to Ireland, and I had literally been in my job less than two months, and I went into the office one morning. There were a lot of closed doors and people whispering, and I thought, something doesn’t feel right. And within an hour, my boss called me into the office and said the head office of the company had decided to completely close down the Dublin office, and everybody was being let go.

GRETA: Wow.

CLAIRE: And of course, I was in shock. It was 8:30 in the morning. I had just gotten into the office. And I also said to my manager, “But I just started here like two months ago. How could you not have known this was coming?” And they said, “We honestly didn’t. Our financials have hit a really bad quarter, and this is what the company have decided.” So yes, in those weeks afterwards, I think first there is the shock of literally just processing what happened, because you go home and it’s 10:00 a.m. and you’re just sitting there going, “What do I do now?” And I think you think of a number of things. You think, okay, how will I tell my friends and family? Does this reflect badly on me? And I think that’s the first few days you’re kind of consumed with that, at least for me personally.

And then it’s like, okay, what am I going to do now? What’s the forward plan? And I think the company I ironically had moved across to Ireland for was an interesting role, but it probably wasn’t in the industry that I would have personally chosen. It was in the food manufacturing industry. And I thought at the time, this job is fine for now and for a few years, and it will get me back to Ireland. But when I realized I had to find a new job, I was like, you know, I always wanted to work in tech. I’m here in Dublin. There are so many tech companies here. And I started looking for a job in tech, and ironically, this is when I started at Google. I probably wouldn’t have found that job if I hadn’t been let go and was available at short notice and in the right place at the right time. And so I think being adaptable — although it’s easy to say being adaptable — just being open to new opportunities, even if they weren’t originally what you thought might come up. And comfort in knowing that it’s less about you, even though our mind often wants to go there, and not letting it affect our self-esteem and our self-confidence too much. And then after we’ve had that healing time, I think it is very much about figuring out, okay, what’s the ideal role, the ideal environment, the ideal type of work I want to be doing, and kind of almost pivoting in that direction and going after it and seeing what opportunities come up.

GRETA: And thank you for sharing. This is such an amazing example, and you know, there was so much wisdom in what you were saying. And what sits with me quite a bit is, like, how to see opportunity in a situation which doesn’t seem like an opportunity at first. So I agree with you that processing is an extremely important part, and asking help from others during those times — that’s definitely something which I would also highlight. But probably the hardest part is how to shift perspective and, you know, in a given situation just like see the positive and try to leverage it to your advantage and really just like look around. Okay, I have this skill set and experience, no matter how little, you know, or how long, and take it as a stepping stone and as a foundation. And don’t think like, okay, now I need to start from scratch. I built a career and now I’m at square zero. It’s not true. So you have so much knowledge and experience on which you can build the next chapter, and the next chapter might be in a completely different industry, environment, or culture. But going back to the fundamentals and your values, your strengths could actually help you see much more opportunities than what presents itself at first.

CLAIRE: I totally agree, and I think, you know, when I joined the workforce in my 20s and into my 30s, the kind of psychological contract with the company was: you work hard, you dedicate yourself to the company, and ultimately they will look after you, you’ll be well paid, have interesting work, etc. That’s at least my experience in the tech industry, which is most of my experience. And then over time in the most recent years, I think that psychological contract has changed, and it’s much more shifting to the US system of employment at will. And while historically if you had one good job that was great, but now I think people are shifting away from — do you know the expression “putting all their eggs in one basket”? — and people are starting to look at portfolio work is one way of calling it, or gig work. So maybe doing something on the side yourself, maybe doing some contract work, maybe freelancing, or a combination of some of those. And I think that spreads out the risk going forward, that even if one thing is not going well, then maybe another part is. And I see a lot of people are moving in this direction going forward.

GRETA: Yes, absolutely. And this is something which is fascinating to me in California. So I met so many people who are just like doing multiple things at the same time, and it’s extremely inspiring. But again, I want to emphasize the identity part, because it’s again an adjustment. So for me, having the corporate background and working for tech startups, and now I consider myself an entrepreneur — so what does it even mean? What is the definition? And you know, what does success mean for me right now? And obviously going after clients and working on different projects, it’s a completely different way of life, and it’s not for everybody. So I would say that it’s a great option to have multiple streams of income. But first, I would definitely recommend to reflect if this is for you, if this is matching your personality or not. And you know, maybe I couldn’t have been an entrepreneur like 20 years ago or 15 years ago or 10 years ago, but in my current environment and my current life situation, this is something which I enjoy and I see a lot of opportunities in there. But again, reflecting on what’s important to you specifically and tailoring your solution to yourself — that’s extremely important. So I don’t think that when unexpected change happens, like copy-paste solutions can work. So this is the time when asking for help could be extremely valuable. So asking help from your mentors, asking maybe are there people who can advise you, going to a coach of course — but just don’t sit by yourself and try to figure out on your own, because there might be a perspective you are just not seeing, and bringing that richness into your thought process could actually expand your choices for the next step very differently.

CLAIRE: And I would actually double down on one of the things you said there about asking for help. I actually would say it’s a must to lean into your network, to reconnect with people that maybe you haven’t spoken to for a long time, to do virtual coffee chats, real-life coffee chats, depending on where you’re going, and just learning about maybe how the market works, especially if you’ve been in one company for maybe several years. My learning was, when you’re in one company for a number of years, you’re a bit removed from the marketplace, what’s happening, how other companies are hiring, and the reality of being close to looking for a job. And so things change, and I would say when you’re back on the job market, definitely reconnect with people across all spectrums. People who are in the workforce, people who are also looking, or maybe people who were out of work for some time and have gotten into a job, and maybe they have some insights they could share. Because as I mentioned, things are changing all the time, and especially with AI, the way companies are hiring. Some companies are even using AI now to do a first round interview, which was a crazy thought 15 years ago when we thought that might actually happen.

GRETA: Yes, absolutely. And again, emphasizing the message on networking and gathering information — and this hits home for me quite a bit, because when I moved to California, I really didn’t have a network here. I didn’t know many people, and the people whom I knew didn’t have connections in California. So the ones who were willing to make introductions actually couldn’t. So I found myself in a situation where I realized I just really need to put myself out there. And the first step was, like, figure out what “out there” means for me. And I started to go to different networking events, women’s circles, and co-working spaces. I went to a certain talk series when topics were resonating with me, because that’s already a filter. So the people who go there are probably in the same field or share the same values that you are. So I started to do that quite aggressively, and at some point I said, like, okay, I’m burnt out of networking because I was doing it so much. But I had to realize that if I don’t show up, nobody will knock on my door and offer me anything basically.

And it’s important for the story that I was applying to jobs like crazy. So I think it’s a full-time job, and I was doing everything I could, and I was very disappointed because the results didn’t come as I expected them to come. So I had to find other ways and alternative solutions. So I just, you know, pushed it as much as I could, and eventually I landed myself a job. And I found out that coaching is something which is close to my heart, and I always wanted to support people, and I always did that throughout my job. So it was kind of like an evolution. But for sure I had to persevere, and I had to show a lot of resilience throughout this period.

CLAIRE: That’s what I was going to ask you — to use your own words, you were “job hunting like crazy” and you weren’t being that successful at the time. Looking back now, what would you say are some of the ways or some of the things that helped you keep your motivation up or helped you just keep going?

GRETA: You know, it’s a family thing. It’s in my DNA to never give up. That’s something which is just, you know, tattooed to my heart or into my heart. But honestly, I always tell myself that, you know, I’m capable. I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of value to offer. So for me, accepting failure in this way was not an option, and it was very hard. So there were days like, I just cannot sit again in front of LinkedIn and, you know, research companies and adjusting my resume and pushing — but you know, that’s what it takes. You have to; you have no choice. And I think that the job market is very tough in the US. I didn’t think that it’s going to be this tough, but it is. So yes, you have to push it. There is no other option.

CLAIRE: Especially I would add — especially so for someone like me who didn’t have a network. So if you, you know, if you went to school in the US, and if you already have work experience in the US, I’m not saying it’s easy. Maybe it’s slightly easier. And if that’s the case, I would just emphasize the power of leveraging your network. That’s, I think, that’s key. And I know for a lot of people, when we say the word networking, people have a visceral reaction. They’re like, “Oh, I hate networking. I don’t like going. I don’t like putting myself out there.” And I would say I would describe myself as an introvert. So I too can only do a maximum of one to two networking events in a week, and I am forcing myself. But what I found workable was, if I go to events where the schedule is quite structured. So let’s say there’s a talk in the middle, and it’s not just two hours of trying to make conversation with people that you don’t know, which can feel very, very long for anyone who finds that difficult or a little bit daunting. So I find, yes, if I go 15 minutes before the talk starts, do 15 minutes of networking, join the talk — and I think to your point, you usually meet people there who are interested in the same, whether it’s industry or specialism, etc. And then I think it’s not putting so much pressure on yourself that you have to meet 10 people or you have to find a job tonight. I think it’s making one or two meaningful connections.

GRETA: Yes, and then that’s a good night of networking and being comfortable with that.

CLAIRE: Yes, absolutely.

GRETA: I 100% agree with you that it’s more about depth and the curated experience. So I’m very similar to you. So there were some situations when I’m like, I just cannot go to another networking event. So you have to understand your own boundaries, and you know, energy level, which you were also talking about. And really finding the people who you genuinely connect with. And for me, it’s also hard to go to these events and within just like no time, you know — what is your title, what you are building, what you are good at, what is your value proposition? And it’s also again, it’s a question of personality. So some folks are extremely good at that, and they have this perfect sentence about themselves. I was not one of those. So I’m still adjusting — how am I introducing myself? But finding your circle, your people, it’s very critical and helpful, because then it’s going to give you also confidence.

And maybe one more thing I would say — for me, it was very hard at the beginning to say that I’m new to this. I’m new to this country. I’m new to this state, and I’m, you know, after 15-plus years of experience, I’m again looking for a job. So it was maybe even embarrassing, and so I had to overcome this mindset and say, like, okay, you know, they might be in the same situation, or they have been in this situation. So why do I think that I’m special and alone in this situation? So I started to actually embrace the fact that I’m new to this state and this city, and actually started to open up about, like, yes I’m new, I’m looking for new connections, and I need help. And it became much, much easier than it was before. So as always, it’s about the mindset and how you want to look at it. So the situation is always as is, right? So it depends on what is your perspective. You can see it as a problem or you can find opportunities in there, and that’s a game changer.

CLAIRE: Yes, I would totally agree with you. And I think hopefully your recent experience of having gone through all of this will be useful for our viewers and people watching this video today.

GRETA: Yes, I hope so too.

CLAIRE: So, in closing, I would say — I know we’ve been talking maybe for 30 or 35 minutes, I wasn’t actually keeping track — but I would say to those of you watching, if you’re in the middle of an unexpected change, firstly, I think we empathize, and hopefully that comes across today. And I would say that at a big-picture level, at least in the world, the way of working is dramatically changing. And so it’s not about you, your performance, your skills. And um, I appreciate that sometimes, where our minds can go and try and tell us that that was the reason. And I also think, as we mentioned, the days of working hard for one company and almost selling your soul are gone. And sadly, now there’s just a lot to process and get used to. If you’ve been let go and you find yourself on the job market, or at least figuring out what’s your next step, what’s your next direction — we talked about adaptability and resilience, and I do think those two things come up to the surface during those times. And I think leaning on friends, family, networks as well. Greta, would you have any closing words today?

GRETA: Yes, just one. Actually, you summarized it extremely nicely. I guess for me the last point would be to connect to yourself. So give yourself time and also grace. And we didn’t really talk about purpose and what really motivates you, but during this time, it’s definitely an opportunity to turn inwards and just take stock of, like, okay, so what I want to do, and what is this situation helping me to see? And going back to your values and your purpose is always a good start, and you can take it from there anytime change hits you.

CLAIRE: Thank you, Greta. So, if today’s conversation has surfaced questions for anybody watching today, feel free to reach out to Greta or me. We’re always happy to help people think through their next step or just have an informal conversation. So, thank you very much.

GRETA: Thank you, guys. Thank you, Claire.

The interview is designed to test structured problem-solving, product insight, user empathy, communication under pressure, and your ability to make sound decisions with incomplete information. 

Google outlines these competencies clearly, and independent analyses confirm the interview’s focus on product design, analytical thinking, technical fluency, and cross-functional leadership. In this guide published by Product Alliance (2024), “Google’s hiring process has many levels and validation requirements, something essential to such a large company hoping to scale their teams but maintain the quality of their employees.” 

As someone who partnered with PM and engineering teams across Google, I learned quickly that these interviews are not about perfection. 

They reveal whether you can think and navigate ambiguity, influence without authority, and remain calm while breaking down complex problems in real time. And as a woman who’s spent two decades working in high-pressure tech roles, I also know how much self-doubt can creep in during this process. My goal is to show you exactly what matters, what doesn’t, and how to prepare with intention.

What Google Really Evaluates in PM Interviews

Let’s start with clarity. Google evaluates PM candidates across four primary dimensions, which have remained fairly consistent over the years: product sense, analytical thinking, technical judgment, and leadership. While these are often listed separately, in practice, they are deeply interconnected and evaluated together through how you reason, communicate, and make decisions under ambiguity.

• Clearly define who you are building for, why their problem matters, and how your solution aligns with Google’s broader strategy.
• Articulate a well-scoped MVP to validate key hypotheses and a thoughtful long-term roadmap (e.g., a 3-5-year vision) that reflects a thorough vision.
• Can you step back from your own use case and think about how the product could scale and be valuable for Google’s next billion users?

That’s why Google expects PMs to integrate multiple sources of insight. When the Luzmo guide advises, “Combine both, and you’ll deeply understand your customer’s needs. It will help you make better decisions about your roadmap and prioritize what creates the most impact for your customer,” it is urging product managers to merge quantitative analytics (usage metrics, adoption rates, A/B‑test results) with qualitative user feedback (interviews, open‑ended survey responses, support tickets). 

So that the “what” revealed by numbers is enriched by the “why” uncovered in user stories. 

This synergy produces a fuller picture of behavior and motivation, validates hypotheses, and enables more informed, high‑impact prioritization of features on the product roadmap. [1] 

Closely tied to product sense is analytical thinking, which evaluates whether you can make decisions rooted in data rather than instinct alone. Even if you’re not deeply technical, Google expects PMs to understand experimentation, metrics, and approaches to evaluating product success. 

In this guide published by Aha! (2020): “Qualitative and quantitative data complement each other… Qualitative data helps you bring empathy into product decisions… Quantitative data helps you bring objectivity to your product decisions.” [2] 

This balance is central to how Google assesses whether you can navigate complexity without oversimplifying it.

Google’s emphasis on leadership through influence and teamwork, rather than relying solely on formal authority. In this report published by Google re:Work (2023): “Build Community enables team success through collaboration, inclusion, and sustainable high performance.” [3] 

It’s about influence, clarity, communication, and resilience, skills that women often excel at but sometimes undervalue in themselves. 

As a Former Head of HR at Google, I watched some of the best PMs earn trust not through volume, but through precision, empathy, and the ability to hold steady in ambiguity.

Don’t walk into a high-stakes interview unprepared. Get feedback from a former Google HR leader who knows exactly how PM stories are evaluated and hired.

Get Google-Tested Feedback With Claire

How to Prepare for Google’s Product Sense Interview

The product sense portion of the interview is often the one that candidates fear most. The goal is not to pitch the perfect feature. It’s to demonstrate how you think about users, problems, opportunities, and prioritization. 

Google expects structured thinking, framed in a way that clearly communicates who you’re building for, why they matter, and how you would weigh trade-offs. Google PM interviewers repeatedly look for clarity around user segmentation, problem statements, success metrics, and trade-off considerations. [4] 

When I coached PM candidates during my time in tech, I encouraged them to anchor their answers in a logical narrative. 

Define the user. Identify the problem. Explore the constraints. Analyze options. Decide. Explain your trade-offs. It’s all about being clear. 

Google wants to see that you can hold complexity while making grounded, defensible decisions. 

They want to know you can do this as a partner to engineering, design, research, policy, and operations, where priorities frequently conflict.

How to Prepare for Google’s Execution Interview

Execution questions reveal your ability to break down ambiguous problems and focus on what matters most. Candidates often overengineer their answers, but the strongest PMs bring calm, clarity, and logic.

What are the goals of the product? (Increase active users?, improve user satisfaction?) How would you go about getting user feedback? (Talk to customer support team? Gather key stakeholders?). How would you execute and launch a product and what would you monitor post launch?

Execution interviews at Google align closely with frameworks used across the industry, root-cause analysis, prioritization logic, metric selection, and risk assessment. 

According to Google Cloud’s official blog on product management practices, “successful product managers lead with influence and empathy, connecting cross-functional teams as they navigate tough decisions.” Product development requires UX, engineering, business, and other teams to work together, with PMs serving as the connective tissue across these functions. [5,6,7] 

Your interviewer is looking for your ability to stay grounded. Can you identify the highest-impact levers? Can you maintain a user-centered perspective while accounting for business constraints? Can you explain the “why” behind your decisions? These questions are not theoretical.

They reflect the daily realities of PMs who are operating inside large, complex, constantly shifting systems.

Does Google Require PMs to Be Technical?

This is one of the most common questions I hear from women preparing for these interviews. The truth is, Google does not expect PMs to code. But they do expect technical fluency, the ability to understand how systems work, ask the right engineering questions, and identify constraints.

PM (Product Manager) candidates are evaluated primarily on their reasoning about technical trade-offs rather than hands-on coding ability, highlighting that PMs operate as strategic translators across functions. [8]

As someone who partnered with engineering leaders every day, I can tell you that technical fluency builds trust. You don’t need to be an engineer. You just need enough understanding to participate meaningfully in conversations, recognize when something is non-trivial, and know what questions to ask.

Hop On A Call With Me, And I Can Deep Dive Into What Specifically You Need To Learn Here To Bridge The Gap

Schedule Your Free Consultation Today

Behavioral Questions: What Google Actually Wants to Hear

Behavioral interviews at Google often surprise candidates because they’re not about listing accomplishments. They’re about understanding your patterns, how you think, how you lead, how you navigate conflict, and how you show resilience. 

Companies are increasingly prioritizing behavioral and soft-skills evaluation because these traits are highly predictive of long-term success in cross-functional roles. [9,10]  

When I worked as a Former Google HR Lead, I noticed a consistent theme: the best PM candidates were specific. They used real examples. They anchored their stories in outcomes, not tasks. They were confident without posturing. They balanced decisiveness with humility. Women sometimes apologize for their achievements or soften their contributions; this is where preparation matters. You deserve to take credit for your work. Google wants to hear it, clearly and directly.

How Women Can Stand Out in a Google PM Interview

Women excel in cross-functional skills like inclusion and collaboration, but these contributions are often undervalued or unrecognized within organizations. 

Google’s interview process rewards clarity, composure, and collaborative influence, not bravado. You stand out not by being louder, but by being more grounded, thoughtful, and intentional.

Confidence in these interviews doesn’t come from believing you’re perfect. It comes from trusting your preparation and speaking clearly about your experience. It comes from honoring the fact that you’ve already solved complex problems. You’ve already operated in chaotic environments. You’ve already influenced stakeholders. You’re not auditioning for the right to be here. You’re presenting evidence of the capability you already hold.

How to Practice for the Google PM Interview

Practice doesn’t mean memorizing scripts. It means strengthening your ability to think out loud with structure, clarity, and calm. Structured preparation improves not only performance but also confidence and cognitive flexibility in high-stakes evaluations. [11] 

When I coach women through these interviews, we work on slowing down. We focus on getting comfortable with silence so your thinking can catch up with your words. We refine your ability to set context quickly and explain your decisions logically. We explore product scenarios that mirror the ambiguity of Google’s real environment. And most importantly, we address the internal narratives that often hold talented women back, stories of not being “technical enough,” “senior enough,” or “strategic enough.” These stories are rarely true, but they can shape your confidence until you learn to challenge them.

Google tests structure, not memorization. Let’s train your brain to think out loud with the clarity and composure required to pass.

Book Your Free Consultation Now

So, How Exactly Do I Prepare?

Preparation should focus on structured communication, product sense, execution reasoning, and behavioral clarity. Interview analyses highlight that Google evaluates how you think, beyond memorized frameworks. [12,31]  

Practice doesn’t mean cramming frameworks the night before or memorizing scripts you repeat back to the interviewer. It means training your brain to think out loud in a structured, calm, and user-centered way, even when the question is vague or surprising.

Interviewers are looking for “structured thinking.” If you answer a vague question like “Design a better alarm clock” by immediately listing features, you will fail. You must identify the user and problem first. 

If you follow the structure robotically but your actual ideas are boring or lack insight, you will not pass. Structure is the floor, not the ceiling. The structure is to help your mind so it isn’t blank when you get asked a question, and you can stay composed.

Google explicitly evaluates: Cognitive ability, Leadership, Googleyness (collaboration, comfort with ambiguity), and Role-Related Knowledge

What Google is really testing is your ability to:

• Stay composed under pressure
• Break down messy, ambiguous problems into clear steps
• Make trade-offs and explain your reasoning
• Communicate in a way that engineers, designers, and business partners can actually use

Research on structured interviews shows that preparation focusing on clear frameworks and behavioral examples significantly improves both performance and confidence in high-stakes interviews, because it reduces cognitive load and helps you recall relevant examples faster.

Below is how I recommend women (especially those transitioning into PM from roles like marketing, operations, analytics, engineering, or consulting) actually practice.

Step 1: Build a Simple, Repeatable Structure for Every Question

You don’t need a thousand frameworks. You need 3-4 simple structures you can rely on when your brain wants to panic. 

For example:

Product sense questions

• Who is the user?
• What is their core problem or need?
• What are the key use cases?
• What constraints matter most (technical, legal, business, UX)?
• What options are available?
• What trade-offs are you making and why?
• How will you measure success?

Execution questions

• What is the business or product goal?
• What’s going wrong (symptom vs root cause)?
• What data would you look at first?
• What levers do you have (product changes, experiments, process fixes)?
• How would you prioritize them?
• How will you know if your solution is working?
  

Behavioral questions

• Situation: brief context
• Task: what you were responsible for
• Actions: what you actually did, in detail
• Result: what changed because of you (ideally with some numbers)
• Reflection: what you learned and what you’d do differently now

Your goal in practice is not to sound robotic. It’s to train your mind so that when a tough question lands, your default is structure instead of spiraling. 

Step 2: Practice Thinking Out Loud (Not Just in Your Head)

Reading interview guides is helpful, but it’s not enough. Google is evaluating how you communicate your thinking, not just the content of your ideas.

They need to see your “processing power” and how you got to the answer, not just you have the answer.

Here’s how to train for that:

1. Record yourself on your phone or laptop. Pick 3-5 questions (product sense, execution, and behavioral) and answer them out loud for 2-3 minutes each. Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for finishing.
2. Watch or listen back: without self-criticism. Notice:
   • Do you jump straight into solutions without defining the user or problem?
   • Do you ramble or lose your own thread halfway through?
   • Do you speak too fast, mumble, or trail off?
     1. Do not “vomit words” just to fill the air; talk through your logic, not your anxiety.
   • Do you avoid owning your impact (“we” did everything) instead of clearly stating what you did?
3. Make one improvement per round. Instead of trying to fix everything, pick one habit to work on in each practice round, like:
   • “I will explicitly define the user first.”
   • “I will pause for 5 seconds to structure my thoughts before answering.”
   • “I will clearly state my recommendation at the end of my answer.”
     

Step 3: Build a “Story Bank” for Behavioral Questions

What are the specific moments where you showed leadership, resilience, problem-solving, and cross-functional influence?

Create a story bank: a simple document or spreadsheet with 8-12 detailed examples you can reuse from different angles:

• A time you led without formal authority
• A time you resolved a conflict between stakeholders
• A time you turned around a failing project
• A time you made a tough trade-off or unpopular decision
• A time you advocated for users despite pressure to ship quickly
• A time you made a mistake and learned from it
• A time you handled ambiguity with limited direction
  

For each story, write down:

• Context: Company, team, product, your role
• Problem: What was at stake? Why did it matter?
• Complication: What made it hard? (Conflicting stakeholders, unclear direction, technical risk, tight deadline)
  Your actions: What you did specifically, conversations, decisions, analyses, experiments, escalations
  Outcome: Results, ideally with numbers or a clear impact
  What you learned: How it changed how you operate now

Women often downplay or soften their contributions (“we just…”, “I kind of…”, “it wasn’t a big deal”). Practice stating your actions clearly and factually, no apology, no over-inflation. Just truth.

Step 4: Simulate Real Product Sense and Execution Questions

To prepare for product sense and execution interviews, you need to practice on messy, realistic scenarios, not just textbook prompts.

Here’s a way to do that:

1. Pick everyday products you already use.
   • Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Calendar
   • Workplace tools you know (Slack, Jira, Figma, Zoom)
   • Consumer apps you love (Spotify, Duolingo, Airbnb, Uber)
2. Run mini interview drills with yourself:
   • “How would I improve onboarding for this product?”
   • “How could this product better serve a specific user segment, say, busy parents, early-career professionals, or small business owners?”
     1. Don’t just assume you only need to fix “broken” products. You must also be able to take a good product (like Spotify) and make it better or expand it to a new market.
   • “If daily active users dropped by 15% overnight, how would I investigate?”
     1. “But new user sign-ups are up 20%. Weekly retention is flat. What’s happening, and what do you do?”
   • “What metrics would I track to know if a new feature is successful?”
     1. Why this metric over other metrics? What are the trade-offs?
3. Timebox your answers.
   Give yourself 15-20 minutes per question:
   • 3 minutes: silently structure your approach
   • 10 minutes: talk your answer out loud (as if in the interview)
   • 5-7 minutes: review and refine what you could improve next time

This builds the exact muscles Google is testing: structured thinking, prioritization, trade-offs, and user-centric reasoning under time pressure. You can only build these muscles by drilling and practicing, not just reading.

Step 5: If You’re Not a PM Yet, Practice Product Thinking in Your Current Role

If you’re transitioning into PM, Google isn’t expecting you to have held the title already. They’re looking for evidence that you already think like a product manager, using data, understanding users, aligning stakeholders, and shipping meaningful improvements.

You can start doing that today:

In Marketing:
Don’t just run campaigns. Ask:

• What user behavior are we trying to change?
• How does this campaign tie back to product metrics (adoption, activation, retention)?
• What qualitative feedback are we hearing, and how could that inform product changes?

In Analytics or Data Science:
Don’t just build dashboards. Ask:

• What decisions will this analysis inform?
• How can we translate this into clear product recommendations?
• What experiment would we run next based on this insight?

In Engineering:
Don’t just implement tickets. Ask:

• Why are we building this feature?
• How does it help the user and business?
• Are there simpler solutions that deliver 80% of the value?

In Sales, CS, or Operations:
Don’t just react to escalations. Ask:
Which issues are patterns, not one-offs?

• How can we aggregate these into product-level insights?
• What feature or workflow change would prevent these issues upstream?

Capture these examples. They become your behavioral stories and your proof that you’ve already been operating with a product mindset, and you are a Product Manager even without the PM title.

Step 6: Do Mock Interviews That Feel Uncomfortable

At some point, you need another human in the loop.

• Ask a trusted friend, colleague, or mentor to play interviewer and stick to the format: 30-45 minutes, with follow-up questions and light pressure.
• Consider practicing with current or former PMs (especially those who’ve worked at Google or similar companies). They’ll challenge your assumptions and pushback you where it matters.
• Ask for specific feedback, not “How did I do?” Instead:
  • Was my structure clear? Did I define the user and problem well? Where did I lose you? Did my recommendation feel grounded and realistic?

Take notes after each mock. Notice patterns. Are you consistently skipping trade-offs? Forgetting metrics? Over-indexing on business and under-indexing on user needs? That’s your practice roadmap.

Step 7: Practice Confidence, Not Just Content

You can have the right frameworks and still undercut yourself in the room.

Especially for women, interview prep is rarely just about content. It’s also about rewriting the story you tell yourself about being “technical enough,” “senior enough,” or “ready enough.”

Here are some practices I use with clients:

• Normalize silence. Before answering, pause, breathe, and silently outline your approach. Interviewers see this as thoughtfulness, not incompetence.
• Use grounded language. Swap:
  • “I’m not sure if this is right, but…” for “Here’s how I’d approach this…”
• Own your impact. When you tell a story, be explicit:
  • “I led…”, “I decided…”, “I proposed…”, “I escalated…”, “I aligned…”
• Anchor to evidence, not emotion. Instead of “I don’t think I’m ready for PM,” ask:
  • What problems have I already solved that look like PM work? Where have I already influenced without authority? Where have I used data and user insight to shape decisions?

Every time you practice, you’re not just rehearsing answers. You’re training your nervous system to stay steady in a high-stakes, high-visibility environment, exactly the environment PMs live in every day. [12]

If you’d like more support, this is where working with a coach can be transformative. We can tailor your preparation to your background, identify the strongest stories you’re not yet telling, and rehearse until your structure and confidence feel natural, not forced.

From there, the interview stops being an interrogation and starts becoming what it truly is: a structured conversation about whether the way you think, lead, and solve problems aligns with what Google PMs do every day.

You have the steps, now you need the feedback that matters. Stop guessing what you need to fix and get tailored interview coaching before your final round.

Book A Call With Claire Now

Product Manager Frequently Asked Questions

What is the hardest part of the Google PM interview?

Most candidates find the product sense interview challenging because it requires rapid, structured thinking under uncertainty. This aligns with industry-wide insights showing that PM interviews increasingly test ambiguity navigation and strategic decision-making.

Should PMs at Google know how to code?

No, but technical fluency is required. Google evaluates your ability to understand systems, ask thoughtful questions, and assess feasibility. Google’s own career site confirms this distinction between fluency and coding skills.

What makes women especially strong PM candidates?

Studies from the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2024 show that women consistently excel in cross-functional leadership, communication, and collaborative influence, skills that Google values deeply in PMs. [13] 

Bringing It All Together

Preparing for a Google Product Manager interview is about learning to think out loud in a way that shows clarity, curiosity, and composure. It’s about grounding yourself in the experience you already have and trusting that you belong in the conversation. I’ve coached hundreds of women through transitions like this, and I always say the same thing: You’re not stuck. You’re on the edge of something better.

If you want tailored interview prep, clarity, and a grounded strategy for your next step, I’d love to support you.

Book a Discovery Call with me and let’s get clear on your next chapter.

References:

1. https://www.luzmo.com/blog/product-analytics 
2. https://www.aha.io/blog/qualitative-vs-quantitative-data-for-product-managers
3. https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/managers-developing-great-managers-at-google
4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/googles-hiring-process-designed-rule-out-toxic-hires-how-popomaronis
5. https://cloud.google.com/transform/how-to-apply-google-product-management-practices-to-your-business
6. https://www.edstellar.com/blog/product-manager-roles-responsibilities
7. https://www.techcxo.com/product-organizational-structure/ 
8. https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/how-technical-do-product-managers-really-need-to-be-59e9a7a3243f
9. https://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/news/the-soft-skills-that-matter-to-employers/ 
10. https://www.voyagersopris.com/vsl/blog/ensuring-the-accuracy-of-your-assessment-results 
11. https://www.apaservices.org/practice/ce/tools/interview 
12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGo3eXZTb_U
13. https://www.apa.org/topics/women-girls/female-leaders-make-work-better 

Ready to navigate this with clarity instead of panic? Let’s figure out your best next move together.

Book a Free Discovery Call with Claire

The headlines have been relentless. Since 2023, Google has cut an estimated 15,000-20,000+ positions. [1] In December 2024, CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed a 10% reduction in managerial roles, targeting managers, directors, and vice presidents. In April 2025, hundreds more were let go from the Platforms and Devices unit covering Android, Pixel, and Chrome. [2] If a whisper of restructuring has reached your team, we completely understand the weight of that uncertainty.

I have seen it before from the inside. Watching talented, dedicated professionals face the exact situation you may be sitting with right now. And what we know for certain is this: how you respond in this window, before any decision is made, matters enormously.

This guide walks through the emotional, financial, and career steps to take when a Google layoff feels possible. Think of it as the survival playbook nobody handed us when we needed it most.

Why Google Restructuring Feels Different, And Why That Makes Sense

Working at Google is not just a job. For many of us, it is woven into our sense of professional identity, the prestige, the mission, the community of brilliant people we get to work alongside. So when the company begins to restructure around you, the emotional response can feel closer to grief than to a simple career setback. [3,4,5]   

Research from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America confirms that when a layoff is announced or rumored, the brain’s threat-detection system activates regardless of whether your role is actually at risk. [6,7] 

Stress, disrupted sleep, and catastrophic thinking are not signs of weakness, they are a perfectly normal neurological response to perceived instability.

What matters is that we do not let that stress drive our decisions. Mental health experts at Tava Health note that people who skip the emotional processing and jump straight into frantic job-search mode are significantly more likely to experience burnout during the transition. Feeling the fear first is not a detour, it is the fastest path through. [8] 

“Layoffs almost always reflect business decisions, not personal value.” – Tava Health, Coping with Layoffs & Reorgs [8] 

Step 1: Regulate Before You React

Before updating the resume, before calling a recruiter, before drafting an anxious Slack message to a manager, pause. This is the step that will save us the most time and energy later.

Give yourself a structured window to feel it

Licensed counselors recommend setting a “worry window”, a short, defined period each day (say, 10 to 15 minutes) to write down fears, acknowledge them, and then consciously close the notebook. This contains the anxiety rather than letting it bleed into every hour of the day. Journaling, long walks, yoga, honest conversations with someone we trust, all of these help us process before we pivot. [9] 

Talk to someone who gets it

HBR research on surviving layoffs consistently shows that building a strong support system, friends, former colleagues, mentors, coaches, is one of the most reliable predictors of a healthy career transition. Isolation amplifies fear. Connection rebuilds perspective. [3] 

If the emotional weight feels particularly heavy, there is also no shame in reaching out to a therapist or counselor. Professional support during a major life transition is not a luxury, it is a strategy.

Don’t let a corporate restructuring define your worth, let’s define your future instead.

Claim Your Free Career Clarity Session

Step 2: Get Your Finances Into Position

Financial clarity is one of the most powerful antidotes to layoff anxiety. When we understand exactly what our situation looks like, and what we could do if the worst happened, the fear tends to shrink to something manageable.

Build or bolster your emergency fund

Fidelity’s financial planning team and Experian’s financial guides both point to the same benchmark: three to six months of essential living expenses is the target. If that feels out of reach right now, start smaller. Even one month’s worth of cushion changes the emotional math considerably. [10,11] 

Understand your severance and benefits

Google has historically offered competitive severance packages. Based on past rounds of layoffs, U.S. employees have typically received full payment of unused vacation time, previous year bonuses, and access to outplacement services. Review your employment agreement now, not in the shock of an announcement, so you know what to expect and can assess whether anything is negotiable. [12]  

Greenspring Advisors also recommend reviewing your vested stock options immediately, as options typically have a window of around three months to be exercised after a layoff. Missing that deadline can be costly. [13] 

Trim discretionary spending proactively

Financial experts from U.S. News to Discover agree: reduce discretionary spending while income is still reliable. This is not about panic-cutting everything enjoyable, it is about buying yourself a longer runway of financial peace of mind. [14] 

Step 3: Protect and Strengthen Your Professional Brand

This is the practical, forward-looking work, and it is most effectively done before any announcement, while we still have access to colleagues, internal references, and the Google brand behind us.

Update your resume and LinkedIn profile

Glassdoor’s career trends expert Jill Cotton advises updating application materials before any layoff strikes, because emotions from a sudden announcement can cloud judgment and slow the process. Quantify achievements where possible: “Reduced onboarding time by 30%” will always outperform a list of job duties. [15] 

Now is also the moment to ask trusted colleagues and managers for LinkedIn recommendations. As Fidelity’s planning resources note, soliciting these while we are still actively working together yields the most specific, genuine endorsements, and those endorsements will still be there long after any organizational change. [11] 

Reactivate your professional network

The best networkers stay in touch while they are working so that when a need arises, those relationships are already warm. WonderMind’s reporting on layoff recovery found that professional connections who offered job leads and words of encouragement were the most impactful factor in how quickly people bounced back. Reach out to former colleagues. Attend a community event. Show up in spaces where your expertise is valued, not from desperation, but from genuine connection. [16]

Keep a record of your work (within company policy)

Save examples of your work, positive feedback from peers, and measurable results, anything that does not violate confidentiality agreements. Fidelity’s layoff prep guide suggests these materials can be invaluable for future applications and interviews, helping candidates stand out in ways that a standard resume simply cannot. [11] 

Step 4: Use This Moment to Clarify What You Actually Want

Here is something we do not often say out loud: a restructuring can be an unexpected invitation to do the deeper career work we have been putting off. Not every Googler who faces a layoff is devastated. Some feel a quiet relief, the nudge they needed to finally ask the question they had been avoiding: Is this actually what I want?

The VITAL Framework was designed to guide professionals through five steps covering Career Values, Career Identity, Career Trust, Career Abilities, and Career Legacy, because so many talented people have never been given a structured way to answer that question. It reflects a pattern we have seen repeatedly: long hours, constant pressure, and very little space to step back and think intentionally about what comes next.

This is the work that separates a career transition from a career upgrade. And it is the work we wish more people had access to before the layoff letter arrived, so they could move from reactive to intentional.

Ask yourself the hard questions now

Before the market decides your next move for you, take the time to sit with questions like:

• What do I most value in my work, and does my current role (or any future role at Google) actually deliver that?
•  If I could design my career from scratch, what would it look like?
• What skills have I built that I have not fully leveraged?
• What would feel like a meaningful use of the next five years of my career?

These are not abstract exercises. The professionals who make the most fulfilling transitions are the ones who did this inner work before the outer circumstances forced them to.

Stop letting uncertainty dictate your future and start building a career strategy that aligns with your true values.

Book a Free Discovery Call with Claire

If the Layoff Actually Happens: Your First 48 Hours

If the call does come, here is what the research, and lived experience, tells us to do:

• Give yourself permission to feel it. Do not rush to appear fine.
• Review your paperwork before signing anything. Read the separation agreement carefully, understand your severance, and know your rights. If there is any complexity, a brief consultation with an employment attorney is worth the investment.
• Update your LinkedIn and activate Open to Work. This signals availability to recruiters and can start generating opportunities while you are still processing the news. Write a short, clear post if you feel ready, transparency about a layoff is not stigmatized in today’s tech landscape, and your network will often rally around you.
•  File for unemployment benefits immediately. Eligibility and timelines vary by state, but the clock on many programs starts when you file, not when you were laid off. Do not delay this step.
• Reach out for support, professional and personal. Now is the time to lean on your network, your community, and ideally, a coach or mentor who can help you see the path forward with fresh eyes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if a Google restructuring will affect my role?

Watch for hiring freezes, less leadership communication, team mergers, and changes in performance focus. These often signal upcoming layoffs, prepare, don’t panic.

Is a Google layoff always about my performance?

Usually not. Layoffs are driven by business priorities and restructuring, not individual performance.

Should I try to negotiate my severance package?

Yes. You may be able to improve benefits, vesting, or support. Review carefully and consider asking HR or legal advice.

How long does it typically take to find a new role after a tech layoff?

It varies, but being prepared, strong network, updated CV, clear goals, can significantly speed things up.

Could a Google layoff actually be an opportunity?

Yes. It can be a chance to reassess your career and move toward work that better fits your goals.

Get Clarity on Your Next Move

Navigating a potential Google layoff, or any significant career transition, is genuinely hard. The financial stakes are real. The identity questions are real. And the uncertainty about what comes next can feel paralyzing without a clear process to work through it.

That is exactly why the VITAL Framework exists, to give professionals a structured, values-first approach to figuring out their next move. Whether the next step is a new tech company, a pivot into something entirely different, or even entrepreneurship, we want to help make that decision from a place of clarity rather than fear.

If any of this resonates, we would love to talk. Book a free discovery call here and let’s take a look at where you are, where you want to go, and what it will take to get there.

Further Reading:

• The Career Change Checklist For Googlers (What To Evaluate Before You Decide Your Next Move)
• What the VITAL Framework Reveals About Your Career Values

Ready to find a role that fits your life, not just your résumé?

Book a free clarity call with Claire

Why So Many Googlers Are Looking for Something Different

If you’re a Googler wondering whether there’s a path to more flexibility, a shorter commute, a hybrid or remote arrangement, or simply a work environment that leaves room for the rest of your life, you’re far from the only one thinking this way. Over the past two years, Google has gone through wave after wave of restructuring, from voluntary exit programs to rolling layoffs that have collectively affected 12,000 employees since 2023. Even for those who remain, the company many joined, known for its generous perks and expansive culture, has been transforming into something leaner and more demanding.

That shift has prompted a lot of Googlers to take a fresh look at what they actually want from work. And increasingly, what they want is flexibility.

The data backs this up. According to FlexJobs’ 2026 Remote Work Trends Report, 85% of workers now say remote work matters more to them than salary when evaluating a job opportunity. 69% have switched careers or seriously considered doing so in search of something that fits their life better. If that resonates with where you are right now, this guide is for you.

We’re going to walk through how to think about this transition clearly, what flexibility really means, where the market currently stands, how to find companies that actually walk the talk, and how to position your Google background when you do.

Ready to stop wondering and start moving? We’ll help you figure out exactly what you want and how to go get it.

Connect with Claire

What Does “More Flexibility” Actually Mean for You?

Before starting a job search, it’s worth pausing on this question, because “flexibility” means different things to different people, and the clearer we are about what we actually need, the better equipped we are to find it.

For some, flexibility means the freedom to work from home full-time. For others, it’s a hybrid arrangement, maybe two or three days remote, combined with a more reasonable commute. For others still, it’s about asynchronous schedules that accommodate caregiving responsibilities, health needs, or simply a preference for working in non-linear hours. And for some, the real desire isn’t remote work at all, it’s a role with clearer boundaries, a more sustainable pace, and a culture that doesn’t glorify overwork.

FlexJobs reports that 95% of workers want some form of remote work, but how they want that to look varies widely: 54% want full-time remote, 41% prefer hybrid, and only 5% want full-time in-office. Taking a moment to sit with what your version of this looks like will save a lot of time and frustration later.

Some useful questions to reflect on:

• Do I want to work remotely every day, or would I welcome some in-person connection?
• Is schedule flexibility (flextime) as important to me as location flexibility?
• Am I looking for a slower-paced culture, or just a more flexible structure within a still-ambitious environment?
• What does my ideal Tuesday afternoon look like?

This kind of reflection is actually one of the core elements of the VITAL framework we use in our coaching practice, starting with your values before jumping to job listings. It changes everything.

Where the Flexible Job Market Actually Stands Right Now

Here’s the honest picture: flexible work is genuinely available, but the market has gotten more nuanced. Robert Half’s analysis of over 2 million U.S. job postings found that as of Q4 2025, 24% of new roles were hybrid and 11% were fully remote, with fully in-office roles still making up the majority. Fully remote positions have declined slightly from a peak in late 2024.

At the same time, competition for remote roles is intense: only about 10% of job postings are fully remote, but they attract on average 2.6 times as many applications as in-person roles. This means strategy matters.

Research from 2025 data found that approximately 45% of senior-level roles (31% hybrid, 14% remote) include some form of location flexibility. This stands in contrast to only 28% of entry-level roles (18% hybrid, 10% remote) that offer similar options, suggesting that many organizations still view flexibility as a perk to be earned through experience rather than a baseline offering. [7] 

Technology leads in flexible work adoption, with 94% of the sector having adopted remote work policies. Specifically, between 42% and 55% of all tech job postings now offer hybrid or remote options. This represents the highest rate of any sector, with remote education (+20% growth) and finance (30% fully remote) following closely behind.

How to Find Companies That Actually Offer Flexibility

One of the most important skills in this kind of search is learning to distinguish between companies that say they support flexible work and companies that actually do. The difference is significant, and it’s discoverable with some research.

Start with dedicated flexible job boards

FlexJobs is one of the most well-regarded platforms for vetted remote and hybrid roles. Unlike general job boards, they screen listings for quality and authenticity, which removes a lot of noise. LinkedIn, We Work Remotely, and Remote.co are also reliable resources for finding roles with built-in flexibility.

When using these platforms, filter not just by “remote” but also by terms like “async-first,” “flexible hours,” and “results-oriented”, these signal cultures that have built flexibility into how they operate, not just where people sit.

Verify culture through Glassdoor and employee reviews

A company can say anything on its careers page. What current and former employees say on Glassdoor and Blind is usually more telling. Look specifically for mentions of work-life balance, manager support for remote work, and what happened when return-to-office mandates were rolled out at other companies, did this company follow suit or hold firm?

Research from Boston College’s Center for Work & Family recommends reaching out directly to current or past employees via LinkedIn to get candid perspective on actual flexible work practices, not just what’s written in the policy. [9] 

Pay attention to the language in job postings

Job descriptions reveal a lot about culture. Phrases like “we trust our people to get work done,” “results-driven environment,” “async communication preferred,” or “flexible schedule” are signals worth noting. Conversely, language heavy on “in-office collaboration,” “team presence,” or vague use of “hybrid” without specifics may indicate a more rigid environment than advertised.

Look at the Flex Index

The Flex Index tracks workplace policies across thousands of U.S. companies and is one of the most data-driven ways to assess which organizations have actually embedded flexibility into their operating model. It’s particularly useful for comparing companies in the same sector.

Find a role that values your results more than your office badge-in time. Don’t wait for another reorg to decide your schedule for you.

Talk to Claire About Your Next Move

How to Position Your Google Experience for Flexible Roles

Your Google background is genuinely valuable in the flexible job market, the key is framing it for the right audience.

Many hiring managers at smaller or mid-size companies may assume that a Googler is accustomed to abundant resources, large teams, and a very specific way of working. Being proactive about addressing this assumption, and demonstrating adaptability, autonomy, and a results-first orientation, makes a real difference.

Some things worth highlighting when applying and interviewing:

Your ability to work cross-functionally and autonomously. Google’s matrixed structure means most Googlers have navigated complex stakeholder environments with significant independence. That’s directly transferable to distributed or remote teams.

Your comfort with async communication tools. Whether it’s Google Workspace, Slack, or project management platforms, fluency in digital collaboration tools is something remote-first companies actively look for.

Your results, not just your role. Flexible and remote companies tend to hire on outcomes. Frame your contributions in terms of what you built, shipped, improved, or led, not just your job title or team size.

Your values alignment. Many Googlers who are looking for flexibility are also looking for something more meaningful, a company whose mission aligns with what they care about. This is worth articulating directly. 

According to FlexJobs, 58% of professionals say their career expectations have changed significantly since entering the workforce. Naming that evolution honestly, and connecting it to why a specific company interests you, resonates more than a polished corporate pitch.

Negotiating Flexibility: What to Know Before You Sit Down at the Table

If a role doesn’t explicitly advertise flexibility but everything else about it is compelling, it’s often worth having the conversation. 

FlexJobs’ guidance recommends waiting until you have a full picture of the offer before beginning flexibility negotiations, understanding the whole benefits package helps you frame the conversation more strategically. [10] 

The most effective approach is to frame your task around what the employer gains, not what you want. Instead of leading with personal preference, highlight how flexibility would enhance your productivity, reduce commute-related fatigue, or enable you to serve clients in different time zones.

The research actually supports this framing: flexible companies have grown revenues 1.7 times faster than mandate-driven firms from 2019 to 2024, which means employers open to the data are increasingly receptive to this conversation.

Capstone Search Group advises that if a flexible arrangement is agreed upon, always get it in writing as part of the formal offer. Verbal agreements about work arrangements can fade quickly as managers change and company priorities shift.

If the company isn’t willing to budge right now, it may not be a dealbreaker, but it’s important to be honest with yourself about whether you can thrive without the flexibility you need. Starting a role hoping that things will change is a common path to burnout.

Leverage your Google experience to secure a high-impact, flexible role that prioritizes your life as much as your career.

Book a Free Clarity Call with Claire

A Practical Step-by-Step Approach to Your Search

We find that having a clear process takes a lot of the anxiety out of this kind of transition. Here’s a framework we walk clients through:

Step 1: Clarify your non-negotiables 

What level of flexibility is a hard requirement versus a strong preference? What industries or types of work feel meaningful? What does your ideal week actually look like?

Step 2: Research the market before you apply

Spend time understanding which companies in your target industry have genuine flexible cultures. Use the Flex Index, Glassdoor, and employee reviews. This front-loaded research saves enormous time later.

Step 3: Update your materials for a flexibility-forward market

Reframe your résumé and LinkedIn profile to emphasize autonomy, cross-functional collaboration, outcomes, and any prior experience with distributed or async work. These are signal words for flexible-culture hiring managers.

Step 4: Activate your network intentionally

Referrals are one of the most effective ways to find remote and hybrid roles. Let your network know what you’re looking for and be specific, not just “something more flexible,” but the type of work, the culture, and the arrangement you’re targeting.

Step 5: Approach interviews as a two-way process

Ask explicitly about flexibility during interviews, how the team communicates, whether async work is common, how performance is evaluated. The way a company answers these questions tells you as much as the answers themselves.

Step 6: Negotiate from a place of clarity

Know what you want, frame it in terms of mutual benefit, and get any agreements in writing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it realistic to find a remote or hybrid job after leaving Google?

Yes. Your Big Tech experience makes you a top-tier candidate for senior roles, which offer the highest rates of flexibility. Nearly half of all senior-level positions now include permanent hybrid or remote options.

Will I have to take a pay cut to get more flexibility?

Not necessarily. High-salary remote roles ($100k+) are currently the most in-demand listings in tech and management. Flexibility is increasingly a standard part of the value proposition rather than a salary trade-off.

How do I know if a company’s flexible work policy is genuine?

Look beyond the job board. Verify culture by checking Glassdoor, Blind, and LinkedIn. Direct outreach to current or former employees is the most reliable way to confirm if a company actually honors its flexibility claims.

What if I’m not sure what kind of flexibility I need?

Start with clarity, not a search. Identify your core values and work style before looking at listings. Consulting a career coach can help you determine the specific arrangement you need to avoid burnout.

Can I negotiate flexibility if a job posting doesn’t mention it?

Yes, but timing is key. Wait until you have a firm offer before negotiating. Frame your request around productivity and outcomes rather than personal preference, and always get the final agreement in writing.

What We Know From Supporting Women Through These Transitions

At Career Transition with Claire, we work with a lot of women who have spent years at demanding tech companies, Google included, and who are now looking for careers that actually fit their whole lives. What we see consistently is that the biggest obstacle to finding flexibility isn’t the job market. It’s the internal work of getting clear on what you actually want, and believing that wanting something different is both valid and achievable.

Many of the women we work with came into coaching thinking they needed a tactical job search strategy. And yes, strategy matters. But the real turning point usually comes earlier, when they reconnect with their values, clarify what kind of legacy they want to build, and give themselves permission to want something different than what they’ve been optimizing for.

That’s the heart of what we do with the VITAL framework: Values, Identity, Trust, Abilities, and Legacy. It’s a process that was built from real experience, including navigating the very corporate environments many of our clients are trying to leave, and it works because it starts with you, not the job market.

If you’re at that crossroads right now, we’d love to talk. A free clarity call is a great place to start.

Ready to take your next step? Whether you’re feeling the AI anxiety or just know something needs to change, Claire is here to help. Let’s find out what’s truly possible for your career.

Book A Free Discovery Call

If you’ve found yourself lying awake lately wondering whether your job will still exist in five years, many others feel the same way. We are living through a genuine inflection point in the history of work, and the noise around artificial intelligence can make even the most grounded professional feel a little unsteady. 

The anxiety is understandable. But so is the opportunity, and that’s what we want to talk about.

For women navigating the modern workplace in 2026, this moment is arriving on top of an already complex set of pressures. 

According to Gallup’s March 2026 research, women in leadership roles have reported burnout at significantly higher rates than their male peers, an average of 29% versus 19%, and that gap has been consistent for four straight years. We see this. We feel it. And we want you to know that what you’re experiencing is real, it is documented, and it does not have to be permanent. [1] 

The question isn’t whether AI is changing careers, it absolutely is. 

The question is whether we let that change happen to us, or whether we use it as a catalyst to build something we actually want.

What Is Actually Happening to the Job Market Right Now?

Let’s start with an honest look at the landscape, because making a clear-eyed career decision means understanding what we’re really dealing with. The statistics can feel alarming when taken out of context, so let’s walk through them together.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, the rapid integration of artificial intelligence is fundamentally restructuring the global labor market by prioritizing skills over traditional credentials. 

In the UK, candidates possessing AI-related competencies command a 23% wage premium, significantly outpacing the returns on a Master’s degree (13%) or a Bachelor’s degree (8%). [2] 

This demand is also driving a shift in job quality; AI-focused roles in the US are approximately three times more likely to offer remote work options and twice as likely to include enhanced parental leave compared to standard roles. 

Beyond compensation, AI skills act as a powerful equalizer in hiring, increasing interview callback rates by 8% to 15% and effectively offsetting traditional disadvantages for older applicants or those without advanced degrees. [2] 

It’s a fundamental re-organization of how we work.

At the same time, a CNBC survey of senior HR leaders found that nearly 9 in 10 expect AI to reshape roles in 2026, but critically, those same leaders say workforce reductions are being driven by a general need to cut costs, not purely by AI automation. The technology is accelerating change that was already coming. [3] 

For professionals in knowledge-based roles, the very roles that many ambitious women have worked hard to build, PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer offers genuinely encouraging news: workers who develop AI skills earn wages up to 56% higher than peers in the same roles without those skills. AI fluency is becoming one of the most powerful equalizers in the modern job market, and it’s available to anyone willing to learn it. [4] 

Tired of the burnout? Take control of your career.

Schedule Your Strategy Session Now

Why Women Are Disproportionately Feeling the Pressure

Here’s something we think is important to name clearly: women are not struggling more because they’re less capable. They’re struggling more because the structural conditions of the modern workplace have asked more of them for longer, with less support.

The McKinsey and LeanIn.Org Women in the Workplace 2025 report, the largest study of its kind, drawing on data from 124 organizations employing roughly three million people, found that for the 11th consecutive year, women remain underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline. 

In C-suite roles, women hold just 29% of positions. The “broken rung” at the first step to management persists, and this year, for the first time, women reported being notably less interested in promotion than men. But as the report makes clear: when women receive the same career support as men, that ambition gap disappears entirely. [5] 

And then there’s AI itself. The same McKinsey report highlighted that only 21% of entry-level women say their managers encourage them to use AI tools, compared with 33% of men. Given that AI skills are now directly linked to higher wages and better job quality, this support gap is not a minor inconvenience, it’s a compounding career disadvantage. [5] 

The CBIA’s analysis of the 2025 Women in the Workplace data underscores that when employees are encouraged to use AI, they are over 50% more likely to build those skills. Access matters. [6] 

We understand where many of you are coming from. You’ve worked incredibly hard, you care deeply about doing good work, and you may still feel like you’re running to stand still. That experience is valid. And it’s exactly why a deliberate, values-driven career transition can feel so liberating, because it puts you back in the driver’s seat.

How Do You Know If It’s Time for a Career Change?

One of the most common things we hear from women considering a transition is some version of this: “I don’t know if I’m burned out or if I just need a holiday.” That distinction matters, so let’s explore it.

According to DHR Global’s 2026 Workforce Trends Report, 83% of workers are experiencing at least some degree of burnout, a number that has remained stubbornly consistent year on year. [7] For women in leadership, the McKinsey and LeanIn.Org data shows 60% of senior-level women frequently feel burned out, compared to 50% of their male counterparts. This isn’t a personal failing. This is a systemic reality. [8] 

The difference between needing rest and needing a change often comes down to whether your core values are being honoured in your current role. A holiday restores your energy. A career realignment restores your sense of purpose. When you return from time off and the dread returns with you by Tuesday, that’s usually a signal worth listening to.

Other signs that might indicate it’s time to explore something new include: feeling invisible despite your contributions; doing work that doesn’t reflect your actual skills; sensing that your growth has plateaued; or simply waking up most mornings and feeling deeply disconnected from what you do. We’re not here to push you into a decision, but we are here to help you get honest with yourself about what you actually need.

Career Change and AI: The Surprising Opportunity Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s a perspective that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime: AI is creating an extraordinary window for career changers. People who might previously have been passed over because they lacked formal credentials in a new field are now finding that demonstrated AI skills and a clear portfolio of capabilities can open doors that once seemed closed. [9] 

Research from the World Economic Forum’s 2026 analysis of AI skills and hiring found that AI skills can act as a partial equalizer in hiring, particularly for older applicants and candidates without advanced degrees.  [2] 

When AI skills were listed on a résumé, call-back rates improved substantially for groups that traditionally faced disadvantages. The skills-based hiring revolution that HR professionals have been predicting for years is finally arriving, and it favors adaptable, curious people who are willing to learn. [2] 

This is genuinely good news for career changers. If you’ve spent years developing deep expertise in one field and are now considering a career change, your existing knowledge combined with new AI fluency is a powerful combination. You don’t have to start from zero. You have to start from where you are, and that’s quite a head start.

The National University’s 2025 AI jobs analysis identifies the fastest-growing career categories of this era: AI and data science specialists, cybersecurity professionals, renewable energy technicians, personal financial advisors, and roles in human-centred work that requires emotional intelligence, creativity, and complex judgment, all areas where human-centred skills, including emotional intelligence, creativity, and complex judgment, are at a premium. [10] 

 These are capabilities that many women bring in abundance, and where their strengths create distinctive career advantage

The VITAL Framework: A Grounded Approach to Career Transition

When we think about career transition, we believe the starting point is never the job market, it’s you. That’s the philosophy behind the VITAL framework, developed by Claire based on her own experience of navigating a deeply personal and ultimately transformative career shift after 25 years in HR at companies including Google and Grammarly.

VITAL stands for Values, Identity, Trust, Abilities, and Legacy, five interconnected pillars that together form the foundation of a career that feels genuinely aligned, not just strategically sensible.

Values: What Actually Drives You

The first step is getting clear on what you actually care about, not what you’re supposed to care about, or what’s most impressive to put in a LinkedIn headline. Real career clarity starts with understanding your core values. Do you need autonomy? Creative expression? Deep human connection? Financial security? Intellectual challenge? When your work aligns with your values, it doesn’t feel like a grind even on hard days.

Identity: Who Are You Beyond Your Job Title?

In an era where AI is reshaping so many roles, it’s more important than ever to have a clear sense of who you are independent of your title. Identity work in career coaching is strategic. Knowing your professional identity helps you communicate your value clearly and navigate change without losing yourself in the process.

Trust: Building Confidence in Yourself and Your Path

One of the most common things holding talented women back isn’t lack of skill or lack of opportunity, it’s lack of trust in themselves. Whether that shows up as imposter syndrome, risk aversion, or simply an inability to imagine a different future, the Trust pillar of VITAL is where deep transformation often begins. This means learning to trust your own judgment, your own experiences, and your own capacity to navigate uncertainty.

Abilities: Mapping What You Bring to the Table

You have more transferable skills than you probably realise. Career coaching research consistently shows that most people dramatically underestimate the breadth of their capabilities, because they’ve been doing things for so long that they feel easy, and we tend to discount what comes naturally. The Abilities step is about mapping your full skill set with fresh eyes and identifying where those skills create the most value in the evolving job market.

Legacy: What Kind of Impact Do You Want to Leave?

The Legacy step invites a longer lens. It asks: in ten or twenty years, what would you want to look back and say you contributed? Legacy can be deeply personal, like raising children or contributing to your community. But having a sense of legacy gives your career choices direction and meaning that transcends any single job or title.

Let’s build your path using the VITAL (Values, Identity, Trust, Abilities, Legacy) method.

Schedule Your Strategy Session Today

Practical Steps for Making a Career Change in 2026

Step 1: Audit Your Current Reality

Before making any decisions, get honest about where you actually are. What energizes you at work? What drains you? What have you been tolerating that you no longer should? Gather data about your own experience so you can make informed choices.

Step 2: Get Clear on What You Want (Not Just What You Don’t Want)

Many people entering career transitions have a crystal-clear picture of what they want to escape, but a much hazier picture of what they’re running toward. Both matter. Spend real time imagining your ideal working day, your ideal environment, your ideal contribution, and your ideal relationship with your work.

Step 3: Invest in AI Literacy

Regardless of which direction your career takes, building basic AI fluency is one of the highest-return investments you can make right now. You don’t need to become a data scientist. But understanding how AI tools work, how to use them effectively in your field, and how to think about AI-enabled workflows will differentiate you in virtually every hiring market.

According to PwC, this single investment can translate to a 56% wage premium. [9] 

Step 4: Build Your Network Intentionally

The hidden job market, roles filled through relationships before they’re ever advertised, has always been significant, and it remains so in 2026. Reconnecting with former colleagues, joining professional communities in adjacent fields, and reaching out to people doing work you admire are all concrete steps that cost nothing but time and courage.

Step 5: Work With a Career Coach

Navigating a career transition is genuinely hard work, and it’s much easier with a guide who has walked a similar path. A good career coach doesn’t tell you what to do, they help you figure out what you want to do, and then help you build a credible, confident path toward it. We believe deeply in the power of this work because we’ve seen it change lives.

Frequently Asked Questions About Career Change in the Age of AI

Is it too late to change careers in 2026?

No. The AI-driven shift to skills-based hiring makes 2026 an ideal time for a career change. Research shows that AI competencies can increase interview invitations by 8-15%, effectively neutralizing traditional barriers like age or lack of a Master’s degree.

How do I know which careers are safe from AI?

Focus on roles centered on human judgment, emotional intelligence, and complex strategy. While AI automates routine tasks, roles in healthcare, counseling, strategic leadership, and creative direction remain high-value because they require the nuance and empathy that machines cannot replicate.

What if I can’t afford to just leave my job?

Use a phased transition. Many professionals build new competencies while employed through modular training and coaching. This “bridge” approach allows you to secure certifications and clarity without losing your current income, making the final move both financially stable and sustainable.

How does AI affect women’s careers specifically?

AI offers both a risk and a reward. While administrative roles face higher automation, AI-centric leadership roles are three times more likely to offer remote work. The key challenge is a “support gap”: women currently receive less sponsorship for AI training, making proactive upskilling essential for long-term career security.

Can coaching really help with a career transition?

Yes. Coaching provides the clarity and confidence required to navigate a volatile market. By using structured frameworks like VITAL, coaching helps you translate your existing experience into the “skills-first” language that 2026 employers prioritize, ensuring you capture the 23% wage premium associated with AI-ready talent.

The Bottom Line

We want to leave you with this: the disruption happening in the job market right now is real, but it is not unprecedented. Every major technological revolution in history has ultimately created more opportunity than it destroyed, and the people who navigated those transitions most successfully were not the ones who waited for certainty before acting. 

They were the ones who got clear on who they were and what they wanted, developed the skills the new era required, and made intentional, courageous moves.

You deserve a career that reflects your full capability. One that honours your values, energizes you, and allows you to contribute in ways that actually matter to you. That career exists, and we’d love to help you find it.

If you’re ready to explore what a career transition could look like for you, learn more about Claire’s coaching approach and book your free discovery call. You don’t have to have it all figured out before you reach out, that’s exactly what we’re here for.

Struggling with career transition anxiety? Career coaching is for women who are ready to stop second-guessing and start building. 

Book a free call with Claire

There is a moment that so many of us know well. We are sitting at our desk, going through the motions of a job that no longer fits, and somewhere between the morning emails and the afternoon meetings, a quiet but persistent thought surfaces: “There has to be something more than this.” And then, almost immediately, the anxiety rushes in.

Career transition anxiety is real, it is common, and, here is the important part, it is not a sign that something is wrong with us. It is, in fact, a completely predictable neurological response to change. Research shows that career transition anxiety typically stems from three core fears: losing financial stability, losing our professional identity, and worrying about what others will think. Recognizing these as predictable patterns, rather than red flags, is the first step toward working with them instead of against them. [1] 

We understand how paralyzing this can feel. Whether we are five years into a career that slowly drained us or twenty years into one that once felt like a calling, the idea of making a major change can bring us to a complete standstill. This article is here to walk alongside us through that feeling, to name what is happening, explain why it happens, and offer practical, grounded strategies to help us move forward without having to white-knuckle it through fear.

Why Does Career Change Feel So Scary? The Science Behind the Anxiety

Before we can calm career transition anxiety, it helps to understand where it is coming from. When we contemplate a major career shift, our brain cannot easily distinguish between “potentially life-changing decision” and “actual physical threat.” Both activate the same ancient threat-detection system. Our brains evolved to minimize uncertainty, and to flag the unknown as danger. This is why even changes we deeply want can trigger full-body panic. [1]  

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thinking at work here. System 1 delivers quick, emotional responses, that surge of dread when we imagine leaving a stable paycheck. System 2 engages slower, more analytical processing, the part of us that can weigh options and plan. Successful career changers acknowledge their instinctive fears without letting them take control, while relying on deliberate thinking to guide their strategy. [1] This is not about ignoring our feelings. Emotions carry important information. It is about not letting fear be our only advisor.

On top of this, anxiety can physically alter how the brain processes information during decision-making, activating the amygdala’s threat response while limiting access to the rational prefrontal cortex. So when we are anxious, we are quite literally less able to think clearly about our options. [2] This is why trying harder to “figure it all out” when we are in an anxious spiral so rarely works.

What Is Decision Paralysis, and Are We Experiencing It?

One of the most common ways career transition anxiety shows up is through decision paralysis. Decision paralysis happens when anxiety makes it difficult to choose, often because we fear negative outcomes or feel overwhelmed by too many options. [1] We might find ourselves doing endless research, asking everyone we know for advice, making pros and cons lists that somehow never resolve anything, and still feeling completely stuck.

We might be lying awake at night running circles in our head, or notice that every time the topic of our career comes up, our stomach tightens and our thoughts become so loud it is hard to think straight. This feeling of being stuck, paralyzed between two equally frightening options, can be deeply exhausting.. We are using so much energy and getting absolutely nowhere. [3] 

Here is what we want to tell ourselves: Analysis paralysis is not a permanent personality trait. It is often situational, and it can affect even the most confident decision-makers, especially during stressful or uncertain times. Understanding this can be genuinely freeing. [4] 

The Pressure Women Face Around Career Decisions

For women especially, career transition anxiety carries an extra layer. Research from Monash University surveying over 1,300 women found striking levels of stress connected to career decisions. Over a quarter of respondents often felt down or worried about choosing a career, and around one in five felt overwhelmed by the career information and choices they faced. Perhaps most telling, over half were worried that others would not approve of their choices. [5]  

We carry so much alongside our own career ambitions, other people’s expectations, the fear of disrupting our families, the concern about financial impact on our households, and the weight of having worked hard to get where we are. More than a third of women who had already chosen a career still reported feeling anxious about their decision, partly because they understood their path was unlikely to be linear and felt pressure from others who expected otherwise. [5] 

If any of this resonates, working with a career coach for high-anxiety women who understands these unique pressures can make a profound difference. Having a thinking partner who sees both the practical and emotional dimensions of the transition changes everything.

How to Make a Career Decision Without Panicking: 7 Practical Steps

1. Name the Fear, All of It

The first step in working with career transition anxiety is to bring it into the open rather than letting it operate in the shadows. Acknowledging our fears helps us move beyond them. We do not need to ignore our feelings or push them aside, we want to let ourselves see them for what they are and address them. [6] 

Try journaling through the following questions: What exactly am I afraid of? What is the worst-case scenario, and then what? If that happened, could I handle it? What would I do? Following our fears to their very end often reveals that we have more options and resilience than we give ourselves credit for.

2. Separate the Fear of Change from the Signal That Change Is Needed

Learning to tell these apart matters enormously. When we feel that flicker of excitement underneath the dread, that is often our deepest intelligence pointing us toward what we actually want.

Breathing exercises activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm your mind. Try guided mediation to help separate the fear of change from the signal itself to change. [7]

3. Give Ourselves Permission to Decide Without Perfect Information

One of the biggest traps in career transition anxiety is waiting for certainty before acting. The problem is that certainty about a new path rarely arrives before we take steps toward it. Research consistently shows that having too many choices can increase anxiety while reducing overall satisfaction,, a phenomenon psychologist Barry Schwartz famously called the paradox of choice. [1]  

We do not need the full picture to take the next small step. We do not need to know exactly where we will land to begin moving toward it. A helpful reframe: we are not making a permanent, irreversible decision. We are making the next right decision with the information we have right now. We can course-correct as we learn more.

If you are feeling stuck between staying where you are and making a change, career coaching can help turn that anxiety into clarity and a practical next step.

Talk through your career transition with Claire

4. Anchor to Values, Not Just Options

When we are in an anxious spiral comparing job titles, salaries, and industries, we have often lost sight of something more fundamental: what actually matters to us. The career transition process invites vulnerability, authenticity, and honest reflection on our goals, fears, and talents. Before we can make a clear decision, we need to understand our authentic selves. [8] 

Try this: set aside the job titles and industry research for a moment. Ask instead, what do I want to feel at work? What kind of contribution do I most want to make? What would make me excited to get up on a Monday? These value-based anchors give us a compass when the options feel overwhelming.

5. Reduce the Decision to the Smallest Possible Next Action

Rather than trying to decide “everything at once”, the new career, the timeline, the financial plan, the retraining, we can work with how our brains actually function best. Breaking the main goal into smaller, manageable steps with daily or weekly targets, allows us to build momentum without being crushed by the weight of the whole picture. [9] 

What is the one next step that would move us a little further forward? Maybe it is having one informational interview. Maybe it is signing up for one short course. Maybe it is simply writing down what we genuinely want. Small, committed actions are more powerful than enormous, paralyzing plans.

6. Build a Support System, and Choose It Carefully

We are not meant to navigate this alone. Perceived social support strongly predicts successful career transitions, while fear of social disapproval often keeps people stuck. [1]  The people around us matter, which means we need to be intentional about who we bring into our inner circle during this process.

This might mean finding a mentor who has navigated a similar change, joining a community of others in career transition, or working with a career coach who specializes in this territory. It also means being honest with ourselves about which relationships in our lives tend to amplify our anxiety and which ones help us think more clearly.

7. Use Your Body as Well as Your Mind

Career transition anxiety is not just a mental experience. It lives in our bodies too, the tight chest, the sleepless nights, the sick feeling in the stomach when we imagine taking the leap. Breathing exercises activate the parasympathetic nervous system, helping promote calm and mental clarity. Even a few minutes of intentional breathing before a high-stakes decision can genuinely shift our physiological state. [7] 

Movement, rest, and grounding practices are not luxuries during a career transition, they are part of the decision-making toolkit. When our nervous system is regulated, we think more clearly, access our values more easily, and make decisions from a steadier place.

The Role of a Career Coach in Reducing Career Transition Anxiety

There is a reason that working with a career coach can be so transformative during periods of transition: it gives us a structured, skilled thinking partner who can help us separate the noise from the signal. Cognitive-behavioral approaches are particularly effective for managing the uncertainty and decision-making struggles that come with major career change. [1] 

A good career coach does not just help us update our resume or practice interview answers. They help us get clear on what we actually want, identify the fears that are keeping us frozen, and build a practical plan that accounts for both our goals and our real-life circumstances. They hold the belief in our possibilities steady when we cannot hold it ourselves.

If this resonates, we would love to explore what that kind of support could look like for us. 

Learn More About Working with Claire as Your Career Coach.

When Career Change Anxiety Becomes Something More

It is worth naming that sometimes what feels like career transition anxiety is also connected to deeper patterns, high anxiety, perfectionism, a history of over-responsibility, or the kind of people-pleasing that can make it genuinely difficult to trust our own wants. If we notice that anxiety is consistently interfering with our ability to make decisions across many areas of life, that is worth paying attention to.

This does not mean anything is wrong with us. But it may mean that alongside practical career coaching, some support from a therapist or counselor could be genuinely valuable. Both can exist at the same time. Many of the women we work with are addressing both layers simultaneously, and it makes everything more possible.

Frequently Asked Questions About Career Transition Anxiety

Is career transition anxiety normal?

Yes. Career changes often trigger fear and uncertainty because the brain interprets change as potential threat. Even people leaving a job they enjoy may experience anxiety during transitions.

How do I know if anxiety means the change is wrong?

Anxiety usually reflects fear of the unknown rather than a wrong decision. A helpful question is: Would I regret not trying this in five years? If the answer is yes, the anxiety may be about growth, not danger.

How long does career transition anxiety last?

 It varies, but anxiety is often highest during the contemplation stage before action begins. Once people start making decisions and taking steps forward, anxiety typically decreases.

Can a career coach help with career change anxiety?

Yes. A career coach can help clarify goals, build confidence, and create a structured plan for change. If anxiety significantly affects your wellbeing, combining coaching with therapy can be especially effective.

What if I make the wrong career decision?

Most career decisions are not permanent. People adjust their paths, change roles, and learn from experience. What matters most is trusting your ability to adapt and move forward.

Getting the Right Support for Your Next Chapter

Career transition anxiety is one of those experiences that can make us feel deeply isolated, like everyone else has it figured out and we are the only ones running circles at 2am. We want to say clearly: that is not true. This feeling is widely shared, deeply human, and something that becomes so much more manageable with the right support.

If we are ready to stop circling and start moving, to make a decision that feels aligned rather than panicked, we would be honored to walk that path alongside us. Explore career coaching with Claire at Career Transition with Claire, and let’s find the clarity that is already in us, waiting to be uncovered.

At Career Transition with Claire, we help women navigate the inner work of career change, not just the resume, but the identity, the confidence, and the clarity to move forward as fully themselves.

Book A Discovery Call Today

Let’s be honest: when someone asks “what do you do?” at a party, most of us answer with our job title. It’s so deeply wired into how we present ourselves that the line between who we are and what we do can become nearly invisible. 

So when we decide to change careers, or when that change is forced upon us, the emotional ground beneath our feet can feel like it’s crumbling because we’ve lost a piece of how we defined ourselves. [1] We understand that feeling, and we’re here to walk through it with you.

The good news is that this disorientation is completely normal, and, more importantly, it’s workable. Learning to decouple self-worth from career success is one of the most transformative and freeing shifts we can make in our professional lives. 

In this article, we’ll explore why so many of us tie our identity to our careers, what it costs us when we do, and, most crucially, how to build a more resilient sense of self that can thrive through any career transition.

Why We Tie Our Identity to Our Careers

We live in a culture that quietly equates what we produce with who we are. A Pew Research Center survey found among workers with a postgraduate degree, 53% say their job is central to their identity, compared to 39% of all workers overall. That number is striking, and for many of us in demanding or high-achieving fields, it’s no surprise at all. [2] 

Historically, careers were inherited rather than chosen, a farmer’s son became a farmer. But today, with so much professional choice comes the expectation of professional passion. Research from the International Journal for the Advancement of Counseling defines career identity as a structure of meanings in which individuals link their motivations, interests, and competencies with career goals. In other words, our careers can become deeply personal, and when they do, a career setback stops feeling like a professional event and starts feeling like a personal verdict. [3]  

This merger of self and job title is sometimes called “work enmeshment,” and it often develops gradually, almost imperceptibly. Psychologists warn that over-identification with one’s career can lead to a fragile self-concept, where career highs and lows become deeply tied to self-worth. We might not even notice it’s happening until we’re in the middle of a career transition and suddenly can’t quite answer the question: “But who am I now?” [4,5] 

What Happens When Career Change Threatens Our Sense of Self?

When we decide to change careers, whether by choice or by circumstance, that closely guarded identity is put under real pressure. The professional identity crisis that follows is not a sign of weakness. A professional identity crisis is defined as a loss of one’s sense of self in work, and it can surface as feelings of dissociation, grief, disorientation, or even depression. These are real emotional experiences, and they deserve to be taken seriously. [6,7] 

This is often the hidden emotional cost of career change that doesn’t get enough airtime. While practical conversations about resumes and networking are essential, the internal work of untangling our sense of worth from our title is just as important. When self-worth becomes excessively tied to professional performance, individuals face greater psychological challenges during career transition. The career change itself might be the right move, but without addressing this identity piece, we can carry the weight of self-doubt into every new professional chapter. [8]  

The Imposter Syndrome Connection

One of the most common companions to career change is imposter syndrome, that nagging inner voice insisting we don’t really belong in our new direction. Though not a formal psychiatric diagnosis, imposter syndrome is a well-documented behavioral health phenomenon, particularly among high achievers, characterized by persistent self-doubt and a fear of being exposed as a “fraud” despite demonstrated competence. [9,10]  

When we change careers, we step away from the years of experience and recognition that built our professional confidence, and into a space where we’re genuinely starting fresh. That transition can feel incredibly exposing.

It’s worth noting that imposter syndrome doesn’t mean we’ve made a mistake. Research shows that imposter feelings are particularly acute when taking on new roles or new responsibilities, which means that feeling out of place in a new career is, ironically, completely normal. What stops us from moving forward is not a genuine lack of capability, but the story we’re telling ourselves about what our discomfort means. [11] 

The High Cost of Performance-Based Identity

There’s a crucial distinction between a purpose-based identity and a performance-based one, and it matters enormously when we’re navigating change. USC associate research professor and performance science researcher Ben Houltberg, PhD, who studies the motivations behind the pursuit of excellence, notes that one of the most significant consequences of a performance-based identity is that it requires people to devote constant cognitive and behavioral effort to maintaining that identity in the face of challenges. [12] 

High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais emphasizes that performance should be an expression of who we are rather than the definition of who we are. When identity becomes contingent on outcomes, every career transition, even a positive one, can feel threatening. We’re not just changing jobs; we’re being asked to temporarily release the armor of our credentials, titles, and expertise. And that can feel terrifying. [13,14]

The antidote, as Gervais describes it, is shifting from a performance-based identity to a purpose-based one, one where our worth is anchored in the meaning of what we’re doing and the impact we can have, rather than in how we’re being evaluated by others. That kind of purpose-based identity is sustainable in a way that performance-based identity simply isn’t. It doesn’t collapse when the external circumstances change. [12] 

Doing the inner work of career transition can feel overwhelming when you’re navigating it alone. Coaching provides a structured, supportive space to explore your values, strengths, and the kind of work that truly fits who you are.

Explore Career Transition Coaching with Claire

How to Decouple Self-Worth from Career Success: A Practical Guide

Separating our sense of value from our professional performance isn’t something that happens overnight, but it is something we can work toward, intentionally and compassionately. Here’s how we can begin.

1. Name What’s Happening Without Judgment

The first step is simply acknowledging that this is hard because we cared. The grief and disorientation of a career transition often signal how much meaning we were drawing from our work. Core beliefs like “my job defines me” or “without work, I am nothing” are deeply held, often unconscious assumptions, but they can be identified, examined, and gently revised. Simply naming those beliefs is a powerful starting point.

Journaling can be especially valuable here. Writing down the thoughts that arise, “I feel like a failure,” “I don’t know who I am without this title”, gives us a way to observe them with a little distance, rather than being submerged by them. The goal isn’t to talk ourselves out of our feelings; it’s to create enough space to see them clearly.

2. Reconnect with the Multidimensional Self

Our careers are one part of a much richer picture. Sage Therapy recommends the “Who Am I?” Identity Exploration Exercise, which invites us to reconnect with our values, passions, relationships, and strengths, the parts of ourselves that have nothing to do with our job title. [15]  

Questions like: What roles do I play outside of work? What activities make me feel most alive? 

What values guide my decisions regardless of my career?

This isn’t about dismissing our professional accomplishments, it’s about remembering that those accomplishments are expressions of who we are, not the totality of it. The creativity, persistence, empathy, and curiosity that made us good at our last career will travel with us into the next one. They belong to us, not to our job title.

3. Audit Your Values, Not Just Your Skills

Career transitions are a natural moment to ask: what do I actually value? Not what I’ve been rewarded for, but what genuinely matters to me. Identifying personal values, through exercises like writing down 20 values and narrowing them to five, helps us connect to roles and environments that align with our priorities. This is the foundation of a sustainable career, one built on meaning, not just performance metrics.

When we understand our values clearly, the transition feels less like a leap in the dark and more like a navigation toward what genuinely fits. That clarity helps reduce the anxiety of imposter syndrome, because we’re not trying to become someone we’re not, we’re growing toward who we already are.

4. Celebrate Transferable Strengths

One of the most encouraging truths about career change is that very little of who we are professionally actually stays behind. Most people have more transferable skills than they realize, and taking inventory of those skills and experiences can meaningfully reduce feelings of inadequacy. Every project we’ve managed, every relationship we’ve navigated, every problem we’ve solved has built something durable in us. [6] 

We encourage the people we work with to build what we think of as a “strengths archive”, a living document of wins, moments of impact, and qualities that colleagues and clients have recognized in us over the years. Looking back at that archive on difficult days is a powerful reminder that our value is accumulated across time and experience, not erased by a career change.

5. Invest in Identity Beyond Work

If our entire identity lives inside our career, then our resilience lives there too, and that makes us uniquely vulnerable when things shift. Relationships, hobbies, volunteerism, spirituality, and personal growth all contribute to a richer sense of self, and we must actively invest in these areas to build the resilience and meaning that will carry us through transitions. [7] 

This isn’t about balance for balance’s sake, it’s about survival. When we have a full life outside of work, we have something to come back to when professional circumstances feel uncertain. We have proof, every single day, that we are more than what’s on our LinkedIn profile.

6. Reframe the Transition as Growth, Not Loss

Mindset reframing is powerful, but it has to be grounded in something real. Cognitive-behavioral approaches, identifying automatic negative thoughts, examining the evidence, and developing balanced alternative perspectives, have been shown to significantly reduce feelings of inadequacy during career transitions. This isn’t toxic positivity; it’s a genuinely evidence-backed approach to shifting the stories we tell ourselves. [9,16] 

One reframe that resonates with many: “I am not starting over. I am starting from experience.” The discomfort of being a beginner again is real, but it doesn’t erase everything we’ve built. It simply means we’re growing in a new direction, and growth, by its nature, is supposed to feel a little uncomfortable.

Supporting Yourself (and Others) Through the Identity Shift

For those of us supporting friends, partners, or colleagues through a career transition, it’s worth understanding that the emotional difficulty they’re experiencing isn’t just about practicalities. It’s about identity. When someone says “I don’t know who I am anymore,” they’re not being dramatic, they’re telling us something true and vulnerable. We can meet them there. [7] 

The most helpful thing we can offer is not a quick solution but the reminder that their worth was never located in their job title. That their qualities, their way of showing up, their values and their passions, those are theirs to keep. The career change is an invitation to rediscover those things, not lose them. [11] 

For those of us who are in the thick of this journey ourselves, working with a career coach or therapist who understands the identity dimensions of career change can be transformative. Mentorship relationships, peer support groups, and open conversations about vulnerability can mitigate the isolation of career transition and reinforce a more realistic and compassionate self-appraisal. [6,11] 

At Career Transition with Claire, this is exactly the kind of work we do together, helping people navigate not just the practical steps of a career change, but the deeper inner work of building an identity that’s resilient, authentic, and genuinely their own.

If you’re ready to move forward with more clarity and confidence, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. 

Schedule Your Free Discovery Call Today

Frequently Asked Questions About Self-Worth and Career Change

Why do I feel like I’ve lost my identity after a career change?

Because for many of us, our career was doing a lot of identity work. When the role disappears or shifts, we’re left facing a question we may not have had to answer in a long time: who am I outside of what I do? This is disorienting, but it’s also an invitation, perhaps the first one in years, to answer that question on our own terms. You haven’t lost your identity; you’ve been invited to expand it.

Is it normal to feel like an imposter when changing careers?

Completely. Imposter syndrome is especially active during transitions because we’ve temporarily left behind the accumulated experience and recognition that built our professional confidence. The discomfort doesn’t mean we’ve made the wrong choice, it means we’re doing something genuinely new. With time, intentional self-reflection, and the right support, those feelings do shift.

How long does it take to feel confident in a new career?

This varies for everyone, but research suggests that professional confidence tends to build as we accumulate small wins and evidence of competence in our new environment. Celebrating incremental progress, rather than waiting until we feel “fully” established, is one of the most effective ways to accelerate that confidence-building process.

What’s the difference between a purpose-based and a performance-based professional identity?

A performance-based identity derives self-worth from how well we’re doing relative to external benchmarks. A purpose-based identity is anchored in the meaning of what we’re doing and the values we’re expressing through our work. The first is fragile because it depends on external conditions; the second is resilient because it travels with us through change.

How can a career coach help with the emotional side of career transition?

A good career coach addresses not just strategy but psychology, helping you untangle your sense of worth from your professional title, identify your transferable strengths, reconnect with your values, and build the inner resilience to move forward with confidence. If this resonates, we’d love to explore what that might look like for you. Reach out to us at Career Transition with Claire to learn more.

Final Thoughts

Career transitions are among the most emotionally complex experiences we can move through as professionals. The disorientation, the doubt, the grief of leaving behind something familiar, these are all real, and they all deserve acknowledgment.

But underneath all of that, something important is true: your worth was never located in your job title. It was always in you, in the way you think, the care you bring, the problems you solve, and the values that guide you. A career change doesn’t erase any of that. It offers you the chance to carry it somewhere new.

We believe that the people who do this inner work, who learn to separate their self-worth from their professional success, tend to not just survive career transitions, but to emerge from them more authentically themselves. More resilient. More intentional. And often, more fulfilled than they’ve ever been. If you’re in the middle of this journey, we’d love to walk alongside you. Explore our resources at careertransitionwithclaire.com and reach out to start the conversation.

If you’re feeling that shift, there are three common career paths to explore.

Explore Career Transition With Claire

HR program management is a role that sits at the center of execution. You manage complex initiatives, align stakeholders, design scalable processes, and keep work moving across teams. Over time, many professionals in this role realize the work has expanded well beyond traditional HR. 

The question becomes whether it makes sense to stay within HR or pivot into strategy, operations, or organizational development.

Research from Deloitte shows that 81% of business executives say the business agenda and the people agenda have never been more intertwined, and that HR is increasingly co-creating business strategy rather than merely supporting it. [1] A separate Deloitte survey found that 85% of global organizations feel the need to transform HR to meet new business requirements. [2] 

As expectations rise, many HR program managers find themselves doing work that already overlaps with adjacent functions, often without the title, authority, or compensation to match.

This article breaks down the most common career paths beyond HR program management, explains how each role differs in scope and impact, and outlines how to make a deliberate transition rather than a sideways move that leads to the same frustrations.

Why HR Program Managers Commonly Outgrow the Role

HR program management often begins as a role focused on execution and coordination. Over time, the scope expands to include workforce planning, operating model changes, leadership enablement, and company-wide transformation initiatives.

According to McKinsey, large-scale transformation efforts fail about 70 percent of the time. [3] McKinsey identifies multiple root causes for failure, including poor execution, lack of employee engagement, inadequate management support, and poor cross-functional collaboration, rather than identifying weak execution and cross-functional alignment as the most common causes above all others. [4] 

The challenge is that many HR organizations still treat program management as a delivery function rather than a strategic one. Decisions are made elsewhere, while program managers are expected to manage timelines, dependencies, and stakeholder expectations without meaningful influence over direction. Over time, this leads to stagnation, burnout, or the feeling that you are operating below your actual capability. [5] 

This is usually the point where professionals start exploring roles in strategy, operations, or organizational development because those functions are closer to decision making, business outcomes, and long-term leverage.

Is Strategy a Natural Career Path After HR Program Management?

Strategy roles attract many HR program managers because they promise proximity to decision making and long-term planning. Corporate strategy, business strategy, and people strategy roles all involve diagnosing problems, evaluating options, and influencing leadership choices. Michael E. Porter, in his landmark 1996 article in Harvard Business Review, defines strategy as the process of choosing what an organization should and should not do, arguing that the essence of strategy is making trade-offs, not simply improving operational effectiveness. [6] 

For HR program managers, the transferable skills are real. You already synthesize complex information, manage tradeoffs, and align senior stakeholders. However, the gap is often financial and market fluency. Strategy teams typically expect strong comfort with financial modeling, competitive analysis, and external market dynamics. Bain’s own published career materials describe how consultants spend their core working time gathering and analyzing data, building financial models, and developing business cases, skills that sit at the heart of strategy roles.

This means a move into strategy often requires deliberate skill building. That may include learning to read P and L statements, understanding unit economics, or gaining experience with scenario modeling. Without this, HR program managers risk being funneled into internal strategy or transformation roles that resemble program management under a different label.

Strategy is a strong fit if you want to shape direction, influence leadership thinking, and are willing to invest in building commercial and financial depth.

If you’re considering a move into strategy but aren’t sure how to reposition your experience, explore the transition resources on Career Transition With Claire.

Explore Career Transition Resources

How Operations Roles Extend HR Program Management Strengths

Operations roles are one of the most common and successful transitions for HR program managers. Business operations, people operations, and operating model roles focus on how work actually gets done across an organization. These roles sit between strategy and execution, translating goals into scalable systems.

The nature of operations work aligns closely with program management. According to McKinsey, high-performing operations leaders are responsible for designing workflows, improving efficiency, managing tradeoffs, and ensuring consistent execution across teams. This mirrors much of what senior HR program managers already do, particularly in large, matrixed organizations.

The key difference is scope. Operations roles typically have broader authority over resources, prioritization, and performance metrics. Instead of managing programs within HR, you may oversee cross-functional processes that impact revenue, customer experience, or company scalability. This often leads to greater visibility and career optionality.

For HR program managers who enjoy systems thinking, problem solving, and operational rigor more than advisory work, operations is often the most natural next step.

What Makes Organizational Development a Distinct Path?

Organizational development is frequently misunderstood as a softer extension of HR. In reality, modern organizational development focuses on how structure, culture, leadership, and systems interact to drive performance. The field has deep roots in organizational psychology and systems theory, with a strong emphasis on measurable outcomes. [7] 

The Society for Human Resource Management defines organizational development as a planned, organization-wide effort to increase effectiveness through interventions in processes, structures, and culture, grounded in behavioral science. In practice, this includes operating model redesign, leadership capability building, change management, and large-scale transformation.

For HR program managers, organizational development can feel familiar, but the role demands stronger diagnostic skills and the ability to influence without formal authority. According to Prosci, effective organizational change efforts require leaders who can connect strategy, behavior, and execution rather than simply managing timelines 

This path suits professionals who want to stay close to people systems while increasing strategic influence. It is less about running programs and more about shaping how the organization evolves over time.

Strategy vs Ops vs Organizational Development: How to Choose

Choosing between strategy, operations, and organizational development depends less on your current title and more on how you want to spend your time. Strategy roles emphasize analysis, long-term thinking, and executive influence. Operations roles emphasize execution, systems design, and measurable outcomes. Organizational development roles emphasize change, leadership behavior, and organizational effectiveness.

Research from Gartner shows that only 25% of employees feel confident about their career path at their current organization, [8] and just 46% say they are satisfied with their career development, suggesting that most professionals are not deliberately aligning their roles with how they want to create value. [8] HR program managers who skip this reflection often end up in roles that look impressive on paper but feel misaligned day to day.

The most effective transitions happen when you treat your next move as a shift in how you create value, not just where you sit on the org chart.

Want help identifying whether operations is the right next step for you? Start mapping your transferable skills and transition options.

Assess Your Next Career Move

How to Transition Without Starting Over

Transitioning out of HR program management does not require abandoning your experience. It requires reframing it. Employers respond to impact, not titles. According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report, transferable skills and demonstrated outcomes are increasingly valued over linear career paths. [9] 

Start by repositioning your work in terms of business outcomes. Instead of describing programs delivered, articulate problems solved, systems improved, and decisions influenced. Build credibility by gaining exposure to adjacent functions through cross-functional projects, internal rotations, or stretch assignments. Supplement gaps with targeted learning rather than broad credentials. [10] 

Most importantly, be clear about what you are moving toward. Many stalled transitions happen because professionals leave HR without a clear thesis for their next role, leading to lateral moves that replicate the same frustrations.

Internal Transition Opportunities to Explore

If you are currently employed, internal transitions are often the lowest risk path. Many organizations prefer to fill operations, strategy, and transformation roles with people who already understand the business. Internal mobility improves retention and performance when employees are supported in making deliberate transitions. [10] 

Roles to watch for include business operations manager, transformation lead, operating model consultant, people strategy partner, or chief of staff. These roles often sit at the intersection of execution and strategy and can serve as bridges into more senior positions.

For guidance on navigating internal moves, you can reference How to Speak to Your Manager About an Internal Transfer on careertransitionwithclaire.com, which outlines how to position your request strategically rather than emotionally.

Long-Term Career Growth and Compensation Considerations

Compensation and growth trajectories vary across these paths. Strategy and operations roles often have clearer pathways into executive leadership, particularly in larger organizations. Organizational development roles can lead to senior leadership positions, but growth is often slower unless paired with strong business exposure.

According to Payscale data, operations and strategy roles typically command higher median salaries than HR program management roles, particularly at the senior level, due to broader business accountability. [11] 

However, long-term satisfaction depends on alignment, not just compensation. A role that leverages your strengths and interests is more likely to compound over time. [12] 

If you’re drawn to shaping organizations rather than just running programs, learn how to transition into more strategic people roles.

Learn How to Transition Strategically

Frequently Asked Questions

Can HR program managers realistically move into strategy roles?

Yes, but success depends on building financial and market fluency. Strategy teams expect strong analytical and commercial skills, which may require targeted upskilling beyond traditional HR experience.

Is operations a step down from strategy?

No. Operations roles often carry significant influence and responsibility. McKinsey notes that operational excellence is a primary driver of sustainable performance, not a support function. 

How is organizational development different from HR business partnering?

Organizational development focuses on systems, structure, and large-scale change rather than day-to-day people management. It operates at the organizational level rather than the individual manager level. [13] 

Do I need a new degree to transition?

In most cases, no. Employers prioritize demonstrated impact and relevant skills. Targeted learning and practical experience are often more effective than formal degrees. [9] 

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Career paths beyond HR program management are not about leaving HR because something is wrong. They are about recognizing when your skills, interests, and ambitions have outgrown the role as it currently exists. Strategy, operations, and organizational development each offer different forms of leverage, influence, and growth.

The key is to move with intention. Define the type of problems you want to solve, the level of influence you want to hold, and the tradeoffs you are willing to accept. From there, your experience becomes an asset rather than a constraint.

If you are evaluating a broader transition, you may also find value in reading Life After Tech: How to Navigate a Career Transition Without Starting Over, which explores how experienced professionals reposition their careers without discarding years of hard-earned expertise.

Get practical guidance on repositioning your experience and navigating a career pivot. Start Your Career Transition With Claire.

References:
1. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2024/human-capital-strategy-boundaryless-organization.html
2. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/services/consulting/services/hr-transformation-strategy-and-planning.html
3. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/common-pitfalls-in-transformations-a-conversation-with-jon-garcia
4. https://archive.is/20250227161423/https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/the-how-of-transformation#selection-563.64-563.492
5.https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/services/consulting/services/key-skills-for-hr-business-partners.html
6. https://lumsa.it/sites/default/files/UTENTI/u95/LM51_ITA
7. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/how-we-help-clients/organize-to-value
8. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-03-20-gartner-finds-46-percent-employees-are-satisified-with-career-development
9. https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/learning-and-development/takeaways-from-global-talent-trends-reportDo I need a new degree to transition?
10. https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-management/why-internal-mobility-needs-to-be-part-of-your-talent-strategyInternal Transition Opportunities to Explore
11. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Strategy_Manager/Salary
12. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-03-20-gartner-finds-46-percent-employees-are-satisified-with-career-development
13. https://www.selectsoftwarereviews.com/blog/strategic-hr-and-organizational-development