A Recipe for Career Resilience: How Professionals Can Manage Ever-Changing Careers

From switching roles and industries to jumping into entirely new career paths, no two professional experiences are the same.  This uncertainty requires individuals to remain flexible and build resilience to cope with shifting job markets and industry demands. 

Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design alumni Meredith McDermott and Integrated Innovation Institute faculty Susanna Zlotnikov discussed how to navigate ever-changing professional experiences, offering examples from their own careers. In a recent webinar, they offered a set of guiding principles for practicing resilience in a professional context.

What is Career Resilience?

Career resilience is the ability to navigate the uncertainty and discomfort encountered throughout one's career. According to Meredith and Susanna, resilience is developed by knowing yourself and being flexible as your career inevitably shifts. Whether it’s being promoted into a leadership position or experiencing a lack of fulfillment, change is a hallmark of a professional’s life.

To overcome career obstacles, Meredith described needing to assemble the ingredients for a recipe for resilience. With these ingredients or skills in one’s toolbox, uncertainty is easier to face. Sitting with discomfort, defining your personal values, and articulating your professional value were all ingredients discussed during the webinar. Both speakers reinforced that these skills are essential to resilience, as they force individuals to examine themselves and how their professional and personal lives intersect.

“Resilience is what makes reinvention even possible.” - Meredith McDermott

Meredith is familiar with career resilience, having held many roles, some of which varied dramatically. She described careers as more of a jungle gym than a ladder, as they can be nonlinear and differ vastly from original expectations. From being an art historian and designer to a UX researcher, and currently the Human Experience Lead at Gray Swan AI, she knows what ingredients are needed to reinvent yourself and how to navigate changing paths.

Susanna is also no stranger to reinvention and resilience, having undergone a career change. With a background in political science and a past as a grant writer, Susanna found she was experiencing discomfort in her former role. She was not fulfilled by the work she was doing and yearned for a way to express her creativity, while simultaneously making an impactful contribution. This led her to earn a Master’s degree in Design, which has given her the opportunity to take on a teaching and research role that aligns with the values she once craved.

Finding Comfort With Discomfort

Discomfort is a key ingredient of resilience, as it is an emotion that needs to be navigated rather than ignored. Although discomfort is typically regarded as negative and can even induce panic, Meredith and Susanna agree that it is not always a bad thing. During the webinar, Meredith stated that “discomfort is not a sign that something's actually wrong with you or your career. It's just a sign that something is happening.” A change in responsibilities, emerging technologies like AI, or simply needing a change can cause discomfort, but are not necessarily bad; instead, they might be the effects of something shifting.

 To build career resilience, the goal should not be to eliminate discomfort entirely, but to sit with it and move through the feeling. 

“Things are nebulous. Things are ambiguous. It's hard, and there's never a concrete, correct answer, and as a leader, you have to be able to operate in those uncomfortable situations.” - Susanna Zlotnikov

Being able to find comfort in the inevitable discomfort that professionals experience during their careers is the main ingredient in Meredith McDermott’s recipe for resilience. Weathering discomfort is key to career growth, as it signals flexibility and, ultimately, resilience.

Your Personal Values

The next ingredient that Susanna and Meredith discussed during the webinar was identifying personal values. By conducting internal self-reflection and anchoring on what matters most to you personally, decision-making becomes easier, and actions that enact change are done with clarity.

While value-defining exercises are very popular, Meredith encourages individuals to narrow in on just two values that are the most important to you personally. While these personal values might not have a business and career relation on the surface, they are factors that affect job performance and overall satisfaction. 

To demonstrate the importance of values, Meredith recounted an experience in which she applied her personal values when changing roles and how, ultimately, they helped her decide between two offers. She chose family and health as her two personal values, which guided her in the job search. 

She was leaving her role at LinkedIn, which was based in California, and wanted to be close to her family on the East Coast. She received two offers: one from Spotify, based in New York, where she was raised, and the other from Duolingo, based in Pittsburgh, where she went to graduate school. While picking Spotify based on geographic location may have been the choice on paper, Meredith ultimately chose Duolingo because of her personal value of family. When meeting the Duolingo team, she found the culture fit to be more aligned with what she wanted. The team was small enough for everyone to be close and feel like a family, which was what she was looking for after working at a large company. She said that the Duolingo job “was in line with my own values, and really helped me feel better about making the decision and moving to Pittsburgh.”

The Value You Bring To Employers

Understanding your personal values is crucial, but it's equally important to recognize the value you can offer to potential employers. This leads to the final point that Susanna and Meredith highlighted: knowing the value you bring to the table. They acknowledged that this can be challenging, as professionals need to identify which skills are most valuable, which ones they should develop, and, most importantly, how to effectively communicate these skills to future employers. To assist with this, they recommended reframing your evaluation. Instead of focusing solely on which skills benefit you as an individual, consider which skills would be advantageous to the potential employer.

Demonstrating value to potential employers helped Meredith land her current role at Gray Swan AI. While she is not an engineer by trade and has no prior experience in AI, she still brings value to the company. When interviewing, she honed in on her skills in UI design, cross-functional bridge building, and experimentation with craft, while articulating how she would translate these skills into the new space of AI security in which the company operates. 

The value a professional contributes to the workplace is determined by the skills they have developed from past experiences, as well as how they present themselves to potential employers. While it's impossible for anyone to possess every skill, adaptability and flexibility are essential for expanding one's skill set throughout a career.

Career resilience emerges from experiencing the challenges professionals face throughout their careers. By learning to sit with discomfort, being confident in your values, and having a strong sense of the strengths you could offer employers, professionals can rest assured that they have the capacity to navigate any career change, no matter its size or severity.

“Career resilience isn't about perfection, the perfectly laid plan. It's about developing ingredients, skills that transfer across contexts, and learning with time to trust yourself to combine them in new ways." - Meredith McDermott