Your current corporate job title is something like Product Manager, Cloud. Or Senior Software Engineer, or Marketing Director. The title seems broadly applicable to other companies and industries, but what you actually do is very niche. And your company has decided it doesn’t need that niche anymore. AI! They holler, it means we can do more with fewer of you! Plus, the economy, they mumble.
Once you leave your job, can you do the same thing at another place, or will you have to pivot completely?
Why the Job Market Is So Flooded Right Now
Corporate employees, especially in tech, are getting laid off by the thousands. That means every job opening gets inundated with resumes. People are applying to jobs for months and never getting a reply, because AI bots filter out applications before a human ever sees them. If you’re in that boat, you know the feeling of unacknowledged effort and constant rejection. You keep trying, worrying the whole time that your skills are fading.
But wasn’t the whole point to get out of corporate?
You were always going to have several careers in your lifetime. You’ve probably shifted a few times already. What’s different now is that the pivot is happening on a timeline you didn’t choose. This might be the moment to change careers.
The Normalcy Bias
A mindset I see all the time is called The Normalcy Bias. It makes us assume that despite warnings, things will probably revert to the norm quickly. A layoff? I’ll probably get another job because I did last time. Even when we catalogue the huge and havoc-causing events in our lives before now, we’re pretty sure it won’t happen next time.
The Normalcy Bias was at play in the summer of 2020 in South Dakota when the City Council voted to go ahead with the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that August. They received warnings about Covid and dismissed the one-million-signature petition to cancel the rally. On it went, with over 450,000 attendees, and it became a super-spreader event. Remember this was before vaccines even existed. Organizers thought it would be fine. It wasn’t.
The employment situation today is compounded by ageism and political turmoil. Your very human and deep desire for everything to stay the same makes you crawl under your desk and wait for it all to go away.
Let’s say the hurricane is actually coming and that it’s going to be as disruptive as people warn. Now what?
What casting a wide net actually includes
If the workforce in big companies continues to shrink (CEO salaries won’t decrease, of course, only the number of people who work there), it means a lot of people will need to find something else to do. Everyone will have to get scrappier because the big companies aren’t hanging out waiting to absorb displaced employees.
And employees are also getting wiser. You want me to move across the country to show up every day for a company that is barely profitable? No thanks.
What if you could cast a very wide net as you think about what comes next? You could bring in every possibility. Retraining, going back to school, making your side hustle the main thing. Taking a portfolio approach to your career means that you don’t have to sell every waking hour to one corporate entity. Doing several things at once is a real option. It doesn’t have to feel like a panicky backup plan.
One note that can be really hard to hear: your pay is likely to drop. I knew someone who was so intent on replacing his $300K salary that he turned down opportunities and stayed unemployed for four years. If the market gives you a hint, consider taking that hint.
The consulting option, and its ceiling
You might, on the other hand, have skills that are in demand. While you’re absolutely fried on managing people and then suffering the moral injury of laying them off by the dozens, you’re good at what you do and yearn to get back to doing it.
Consulting could be a path. You leave your company then turn around and consult right back to them, or to other big companies with deep pockets. It’s a legitimate path and you can charge according to your experience. It can work especially well at companies who got rid of a lot of talent and then realized they no longer have the in-house capacity to complete their projects. Walk through the halls of many large companies and you’ll bump into a ton of consultants who are doing real work. Some people end up earning more than they did as full-time employees.
But there’s a catch: consulting is a temporary fix. It puts you back in the room with the same ineffective management, the same poor decisions, and instead of a performance review, the contract can end at any moment. I recall several consulting engagements where I was hired to come up with a solution to a problem, I did, and then the company couldn’t get past their own politics to actually implement it.
If you have in-demand skills, this can be a good bridge option while you figure out what will truly make you happy.
The Projection Bias
Let’s say you have an exit date approaching, either because of a looming layoff or your crispy interior. You might be anticipating a crushing job search, of finding a new company whose dysfunction won’t be revealed until after you get there.
You toy with going to a startup, then quickly cast that idea aside because you don’t want the grind of startup life. And here’s where another cognitive bias springs to life. The Projection Bias is the tendency to assume that the next thing is going to feel exactly like the current thing. Going to another company will put you right back in burnout. Going to a startup will mean working 100 hours a week alongside a crew of over-caffeinated workaholics.
You project your current state on to a future state that hasn’t happened yet. That you don’t even know about.
Could something different be true? Lots of companies are being founded right now by people in their 40s and 50s who are just as burned out as you are. But they have a good idea they believe in.
You’re in good company. Nobody wants to go work for another face-eating tiger. At the same time, healthcare and income are still real constraints that everyone has to address. If you’re in the US, let part of your investigation be about alternate ways to get healthcare. The tie between full-time employment and healthcare is keeping a lot of people miserable.
The paths that stretch before you
I bet you’ve already reinvented yourself a few times. Some of your reinventions came out of necessity, some came because you chose them. Each time, you built resilience and learned that you’re more capable than you assumed.
When your back is against the wall, the paths in front of you widen. You took one of an infinite number of routes to get to this moment in time, and you have many options to choose from next. But you might not get to keep doing what you’ve been doing.
If that’s the case, what is the first idea you’ll let yourself consider?
Burn the map. Build what fits.
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Don’t Build the Same Box You Just Escaped
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