696: Laid Off, Forced to Pivot, or Starting Over: How to Change Careers, Switch Industries, and Create a Role Built for You In 5 Months

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: She gave 13 years to a career she expected to retire from. And one morning, it was all gone.

[00:00:05] Kara Cochran: An announcement came out that 60% of the people who work in the DC area, which is where I live, we were going to be relocated somewhere in the country. Location to be determined at some point in the future. And we had a week to make a decision.

[00:00:23] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Kara Cochran. 13 year federal employee, program manager, the person her team leaned on. And in the span of one week, she had to decide whether to walk away from everything she had built or stay and hand someone else the controls. She had no new job, no clear direction, and five months before her savings ran out.

[00:00:44] The average job search at her level takes 12 months. Kara had five in an industry she had never worked in, with a network she wasn't sure she could access, and a job title. She didn't even know how to look for yet.

[00:00:56] Kara Cochran: The risk of staying and giving away the control of my future, that was even scarier. And so we went with what was scary, but actually less risky.

[00:01:08] Scott Anthony Barlow: This is Happen To Your Career, and in this episode you'll hear what happens when someone who loses everything only has five months to build it back. Now, before we get into the decision that changed everything, I wanna make sure we understand what Kara built because this is not a story about someone who was failing or miserable.

[00:01:27] For most of her career, she was engaged, valued, and genuinely liked where she worked. She had a supervisor she trusted, a team she felt responsible for, a sense of stability that had no intention of giving up. What happened to Kara happened to a lot of federal workers in early 2025, and the way she navigated it says everything about how she thinks about risk, about herself, and about what a career is actually for.

[00:01:54] Kara Cochran: I was a federal employee for 13 years, and I expected to finish my career as a federal employee. I was comfortable with what I did. I liked the people I worked with, and then the new administration came in. And the work environment really changed. It became very hostile to the people who were doing the work every day.

[00:02:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: And then came the announcement. Not a rumor, not a possibility. An official announcement that gave Kara and thousands of other federal workers in the Washington DC area, exactly one week to make a decision that would affect the rest of their careers. Take the severance package and leave or stay and wait to find out, would you be relocated somewhere in the country?

[00:02:37] Kara Cochran: And so I decided to take the leap and it was scary. We talked about whether or not those could be translated, how long it would really take to find a job. The average job search time is 12 months, and I had five months of paychecks left.

[00:02:51] I think we focused on risk and knowing that I was managing the risk of the situation and that even though the decision at the moment was scary, the risk of staying and giving away the control of my future, that was even scarier. And so we went with what was scary, but actually less risky.

[00:03:13] Scott Anthony Barlow: One week, and she said yes to leaving. What I wanted to understand was not the logic of that decision. The logic is clear in hindsight.

[00:03:20] What I really wanted to understand was what it actually felt like inside of that week. Because logic and emotion, those are two very different experiences.

[00:03:29] Kara Cochran: I had butterflies in my stomach. I had some panicky feelings. I felt guilty about leaving my team because I felt like I was abandoning my team behind me when I left.

[00:03:40] And I had moments of helplessness where I didn't know what the next steps were going to be. I was changing industries, I was changing roles. I didn't feel like I had a strong network. It turns out I did but, I feel like I did. And I felt alone.

[00:03:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so here's where Kara's story becomes something more than a circumstance that happened to her. It's also the point where our team got to meet her and start working with her on her career goals. She had this five months of runway, which sounds like a lot until you remember that the average job search at her level takes 12 months.

[00:04:17] The math was already uncomfortable. And now, she had to do something that sounds straightforward, but is actually one of the hardest things to a high achieving person can do.

[00:04:26] Sit down, get honest, and figure out not just what she was good at, but what she actually wanted. Not what sounded noble, but what she genuinely, non-negotiable-y, must have to thrive in her work and to have her work support the life she was building. Now the tool we use for this is called the Ideal Career Profile.

[00:04:43] It's a living document that captures everything from salary requirements to work environment, values, your strengths. How you best contribute both your aspirations and those hard non-negotiables. But I want you to think about that in this case as a decision filter that you build for yourself and for Kara, it cracked something wide open.

[00:05:03] Kara Cochran: My job was to find a job, so I treated the job search like a minimum of four hours a day, sometimes six hours a day, "What am I gonna do? How am I going to go figure it out?" I didn't really have a clear direction. I knew what I was good at. But again, a lot of that over the last 13 years had been very specific to the federal government.

[00:05:23] Parts of my network were even cut off, so there was a lot of time sitting in front of Google and going, "What do I do next?" So I started doing things like, what are my signature strengths, finding the eight day course, signing up for Career Change Bootcamp. I took different personality tests and then came up with, "This is what I'm really good at."

[00:05:44] Which honestly wasn't that surprising for me in terms of what is my sweet spot, because when I looked back through my career, I realized that those are the types of things I had been gravitating to. I just didn't know how to translate that into a position.

[00:06:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's the gap that trips up almost everyone. Knowing your strengths is not the same as knowing where to take them or what to do with them.

[00:06:07] Saying, "I'm good at synthesizing complex information" and leading teams is very different from walking into a conversation and saying, "I'm exploring chief of staff roles in the federal contracting space. That gap between self knowledge and actionable direction is exactly where people stall. Here's how Kara bridged it and the tool that she used that she absolutely did not expect to work at all.

[00:06:30] Kara Cochran: I took my Ideal Career Profile and I uploaded it into AI, into chat GPT, and I said, "Tell me some positions that are going to line up with this Ideal Career Profile." And it came back and it gave me five or seven different options. And a couple of 'em I went, "huh, that sounds really good." That gave me a starting point. That gave me the ability to have focus as I was going out and setting up informational interviews. It helped me know what to go do desk research on and what to go ask more about this type of position.

[00:07:06] The irony is that one of the positions that ChatGPT gave me is Chief of Staff, and I went, "There's no way that anyone's gonna hire me as the chief of staff." And it turns out a few months later, that's exactly what I was hired for, is being a chief of staff.

[00:07:23] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, I wanna pause here because Kara said something during our conversation that deserves its own moment. When she first started building her Ideal Career Profile, she told herself that making a difference in the world was her number one priority.

[00:07:37] It wasn't though. And the moment that she admitted that to herself, to her husband, to our team, the entire search became more focused, more real, more achievable, and this is one of the most common and most consequential places where people get stuck. And Kara walked through it with a level of honesty that I find genuinely rare.

[00:07:58] Kara Cochran: When I started doing searches based purely on the, "I want to change the world", which is what I told myself was most important to me. The salaries were just not even in the ballpark. When we were talking about compensation ranges, it wasn't going to be feasible or realistic. So that was a bit of a snag in the face.

[00:08:17] I have to give my husband so much credit for being a partner through this process because he was at times a mirror for me to say, "That's really nice, but how are we going to handle this, this, and this." And so it really, through repeated conversations with him, conversations were with my coach, where she helped me understand that I wasn't a bad person if I was putting money first.

[00:08:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, I want to underline one specific thing she said here, "Define the minimum, write it down. Because when you're deep in negotiation, four months into a search, you'll be tempted to move that line. And if you've not written down why you drew it there in the first place, you'll be tempted to accept something that is less. You'll settle.

[00:08:58] Kara Cochran: Take in the data, look for data points that are going to help you realize what is possible. Defining the minimum that I could accept was really, really important because when I got to the negotiations later on, it helped me understand, "Hey, I can't go below this and if I can't go below this, I have to keep looking."

[00:09:20] And so putting that guardrail in place, I would say, be honest with yourself, even when it's hard, and write things down so that you can go back to them because you will be tempted to change them as you go along.

[00:09:33] Scott Anthony Barlow: With a clearer picture of what she needed, Kara started doing what we call career experimentation, designing career experiments, actively investigating potential directions, not just thinking about them.

[00:09:43] She looked at nonprofits, she looked at clean energy, management consulting. Each one taught her something. Each one sharpened what she actually wanted, and each one fell in the moment like it might be a dead end.

[00:09:56] But I wanna push back on that word, "dead end." Because what Kara actually did during this stretch was far more valuable than it looked well it was actually happening.

[00:10:06] Kara Cochran: Fighting hunger has always been important to me. Fighting climate change is important to me, and I went down some paths where I was looking at nonprofits. I was looking at what would it take to jump industries to go work in the power industry, specifically in clean energy. What types of experience would they need. Were my strengths and my skills and my experience translatable. Again, that would bring me in at a level that I would be getting the salary that I needed to maintain.

[00:10:37] I went down a path of potentially being a management consultant and opening my own business. And had a very forthright conversation with someone that I trust who had been a coach for me before about what it really took to be a management consultant, and she dropped the little nugget on me that owning your own business and doing that meant two thirds of your time, was maintaining the relationships that you need for that next piece of work, because you always had to plan that whatever you were working on now would come to an end, and so you needed your next job.

[00:11:10] Well, I hate networking. The dead ends weren't really dead ends because they helped me refine what I really wanted so that I could then narrow in on what I did want and be ready when the moment came up.

[00:11:27] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's the thing about doing all that internal work before the moment arrives, when the moment finally comes, you're actually not starting from zero. You've already built something.

[00:11:36] Kara, in her case, had spent months doing the work. She knew what she wanted. She had validated that, she knew what she was not going to accept, she had started doing part-time consulting work over the summer, not because it was strategic, but because she needed to build a financial cushion.

[00:11:52] But what she did not know was that letting her work speak for her in a low pressure temporary context, actually ended up being a very useful strategy, a way in, she just didn't recognize it yet.

[00:12:04] Kara Cochran: I recognized about myself that I don't like to go sell myself in terms of talking, but I like my work to speak for me.

[00:12:13] And I had been looking through the various options and approaches to going out and investigating different roles and positions and what a fit would look like. And I saw one that was like, well, go try the work. And I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. And then when I looked back and I realized that this part-time consulting work that I was doing over the summer, that's exactly what I was doing, is I was getting in there and I was letting my work speak for me.

[00:12:40] And I made what I thought was a throwaway comment, and I was like, well, you know what they really need. They need a chief of staff. And the next thing I know, I'm at a dinner with the senior leadership and one of them turns to me and says, "So what's your vision for a chief of staff?"

[00:12:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: I wanna sit with what Kara just described for a moment.

[00:13:00] She didn't go and apply for jobs here. What she did was she walked into a company, let her work be visible, and had an honest conversation, set of conversations, about what they needed and helped create a role that was literally built around her.

[00:13:16] This chief of staff position at this organization did not exist before Kara. It exists now. Because she was there, doing the work, engineering the situation in which they could trust her, and then she was being clear about what she saw, what she could offer, and what came next, it was a first for both her and the company.

[00:13:36] Kara Cochran: It's my first time being a chief of staff. It's their first time having a chief of staff. So we're both figuring it out together. As much as I'm enjoying it and I am, I love my new job. There's also that little bit of nervousness and growth that is happening every day. I think it's healthy, but I am learning something new every day.

[00:13:57] So my current position definitely has that right mix. There are days that I spend almost entirely alone. There are days that are stacked with meetings. There are days that are good mix.

[00:14:06] A lot of what I am doing now as a chief of staff is I am helping different areas of the company understand each other and understand how they fit into the big picture. And so that is also feeding into that first area that you talked about where I can see that big picture, understand how the pieces are fitting together, but then translate to the person I'm talking to, "Here's what it means to you."

[00:14:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: Kara started this role at the end of September, and by the time we recorded this conversation, she was about six months in.

[00:14:37] And I think this is important because, you know, we've had lots of people in different places on the podcast in the past, and sometimes we'll get glimpses right after people start, but Kara was past that honeymoon stage, past the 'everything is new and exciting stage' into the part where the real shape of the work starts to reveal itself.

[00:14:55] I asked her to compare what this feels like, this intentional ground up built for you path to the way opportunities had found her in the past. Her answer gets at something important.

[00:15:07] Kara Cochran: I had only ever worked in an industry where I had come in either as entry level or in the middle of my career. I did not have the self-confidence to believe that I could walk in someplace and have value as a senior leader in a company on day one, and truly shape where that company was going.

[00:15:28] I just didn't think I had that type of experience. And when I looked at my resume, I couldn't see how I could pull that together and tell that story. I have a background in program management and so I viewed myself as a middle level program manager, even a senior program manager.

[00:15:48] But not someone who could go in and run huge programs. I wasn't looking at the fact that I was actually running a $1 billion portfolio in my job. I just wasn't calling myself a program manager. And so it took a little while for me to pick up the seeds and go, "Wait a minute, even though this work is being called something different, i'm doing the same things every day. I'm still bringing the same experiences and the same skillset, the same strengths to the job."

[00:16:19] The narrower approach felt a little bit safer because I knew that I was coming in and someone else had almost made that choice first and then offered it to me. In some ways, I went after this role. I helped define the role that I'm in now. And I like to laugh because it's my first time being a chief of staff. It's their first time having a chief of staff. I had settled into my [00:16:40] old job and I had kind of given up on some of that growth and said, "Well, I'm just gonna, not that I was coasting, but I was comfortable, you know, "I know how to do this job.

[00:16:51] I'm gonna do it well." Every day I have something on my desk that I'm like, "okay, how am I gonna do this? Let's figure it out. So it's much more fulfilling for me to be, like you said, learning like that, because that's part of what I need.

[00:17:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: After well over a decade as a federal employee, Kara Cochran is now the chief of staff at a federal IT contractor outside of Washington dc, a role that did not exist before she walked in the door.

[00:17:16] She helped define it. She's still figuring it out. She wouldn't have it any other way. When she describes what work feels like now, she says it's already making a difference. And if you're listening to this and something in Kara's story felt familiar or resonates with you, maybe you recognize your strengths, but you aren't quite sure how to translate them into something new, or you've been telling yourself you are not senior enough or experienced enough in the right ways.

[00:17:40] The starting point is not having all the answers. The starting point is actually deciding that the version of your career you're currently living is not the only version available to you. If you want help with that, drop me an email, Scott at happened to your career.com. Put conversation in the subject line and I'll introduce you to my team who can have that conversation with you, understand your goals, what you're trying to accomplish, and help you make transitions like the ones you've heard here on the podcast for years and years and years.