Career In Progress

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Career In Progress Coach for Career Coaches:
Earn internationally recognized credentials as a career services provider. A seasoned professional in the mist of transition?

Join my Facilitating Career Developments (FCD) Training or get 1-1 coaching on how to amplify your coaching practice! Are you a new graduate navigating the world of work for the first time? A job seeker looking to reinvent in your professional brand? A career practitioner interested in furthering your skills and abilities? Career In Progress is designed to provide assistance with all aspects of your career and professional development. Together we will work to clarify and reach your goals, and set in motion your career satisfaction. An award winning Career and Professional Development Instructor, providing career literacy training to career practitioners globally since 2002.

I’ve had a few different seats at the career-development table.I’ve worked directly with clients. I’ve led a career cent...
09/24/2026

I’ve had a few different seats at the career-development table.

I’ve worked directly with clients. I’ve led a career center. I’ve served in senior career-development leadership. I’ve taught future professionals. I’ve trained practitioners working in higher education, workforce development, private practice, and other career-support settings.

Each role gave me a different view of the same work.

Working with clients taught me how complicated and uncertain career decisions can be.
Leading programs taught me that good career services require much more than talented individual practitioners.

Teaching showed me how much confidence changes when people understand the reasoning behind what they’re doing.

And training career professionals showed me just how varied this field really is.

There isn’t one kind of career professional. There are coaches, advisors, counselors, workforce specialists, talent professionals, educators, nonprofit practitioners, and plenty of people whose titles don’t neatly describe the work they actually do.

That range is one of the reasons I enjoy this field so much!

My job now is to help connect some of those dots: to bring together theory, practice, professional judgment, and the realities of doing career work in very different settings.

09/23/2026

Some plans have an impressive shelf life of approximately two seconds.

Monday is my planning day.

Other than Pilates, I try not to schedule anything on my calendar.

Mondays are for writing, creating, setting my goals for the week, and making some serious progress on the to-do list.

It’s probably my favorite workday because a good Monday sets up the rest of my week.

At least, that’s the plan.

Mondays also seem to attract long weekends, appointments, people wanting to catch up, and the occasional curveball.

I’ve found it can be surprisingly hard to protect a routine when life keeps introducing new variables.

I can prepare carefully, think through what needs to happen, and still watch the whole thing shift the moment reality gets involved.

Careers work like that too.

A role changes.
A manager leaves.
Funding gets cut.
A promotion disappears.
An industry shifts.
Personal priorities suddenly take over.

When people become too attached to a career plan, changing direction can start to feel like failure.

They keep trying to make the original path work long after the conditions around it have changed.

I prefer to think of career plans as working hypotheses.

Set a direction.
Pay attention to what happens.
Gather new information.
Adjust as needed.
Keep the parts that still make sense.

Good career planning creates direction without demanding certainty, and this is what our clients often need help sorting out.

Sometimes the smartest move is recognizing that the plan is no longer following the path you intended.

For years, my daughter had the same answer when people asked what she wanted to study: marine biology.As high school gra...
09/22/2026

For years, my daughter had the same answer when people asked what she wanted to study: marine biology.

As high school graduation loomed closer, people started responding to her intended course of study with some version of: “That’s a really competitive field.”

No one was trying to discourage her, but when you hear the same caution often enough, it starts to carry weight.

By spring, she had changed her intended course of study to psychology.

There was no single conversation that changed her mind. It was the accumulation of small comments that slowly turned a fact about a field into a conclusion about her future.

That distinction matters in career exploration.

“It’s competitive” is information.
“You probably won’t make it” is a prediction.

A more useful coaching move is to help them trace those beliefs back to their source and separate what is actually known about the field from what someone else assumed about their chances.

Sometimes the belief limiting a career option did not begin with the client at all.

Five years is a long time in a labor market that can change in five months.Five years ago, most of us weren’t planning o...
09/21/2026

Five years is a long time in a labor market that can change in five months.

Five years ago, most of us weren’t planning our careers around generative AI.

Today, it’s reshaping job responsibilities, hiring practices, skill expectations, and even how people think about the longevity of their roles.

Which makes the classic interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” feel a little difficult to answer.

Career planning still matters.

But I think we need to get much better at helping people plan without pretending they can predict.

That means shifting some of the focus away from choosing one precise destination and toward building the things that make someone more adaptable when the landscape changes:

→ transferable skills
→ a strong professional identity
→ awareness of emerging opportunities
→ the ability to learn and experiment
→ relationships and networks that create access
→ enough self-knowledge to recognize when it’s time to pivot

A five-year career plan can provide direction.

It probably shouldn’t require a crystal ball.

Your career doesn’t need to look linear to make sense.Most career professionals I know didn’t take one straight road int...
09/20/2026

Your career doesn’t need to look linear to make sense.

Most career professionals I know didn’t take one straight road into this work.

They came through higher education, recruiting, HR, workforce development, teaching, counseling, business.

Maybe several of those.

And when your background looks scattered on paper, the temptation is to clean it up.

We want to explain every transition, make every job relevant, or find transferable skills that connect everything.

But that’s usually not where the strongest professional story lives.

Instead, there are three questions to unpack:

➤ Career history
What have I done?

➤ Professional story
What do those experiences mean together?

➤ Positioning
Why does that combination matter to the people I serve?

Someone who has worked in recruiting, academic advising, and career coaching could simply say they have strong communication and relationship-building skills.

True.

But not particularly distinctive.

A stronger insight pulled from their career journey might be that they spent years watching people make career decisions while also seeing how institutions navigated hiring and selection.

That tells me something about the perspective they’ve developed.

The next time you question whether your career path makes sense, look at the role in your own background that seems least connected to what you do today.

What did it teach you that still affects how you work?

The answer may tell you much more about your professional story than the job title ever could.

09/19/2026

You’re working too hard at solving the wrong problem.


That’s an easy trap to fall into when you have a lean staff and a shoestring budget.

Something isn’t working, so we identify what seems like the obvious cause and immediately start fixing it.

A workshop has low attendance?
Promote it more.

Clients aren’t making progress?
Give them more resources.

A service is underused?
Revise the service.

People keep asking the same questions?
Build another handout.

Your team is overwhelmed?
Add another system.

Each response sounds reasonable but we can get so focused on the first explanation that we never stop to ask what else might be contributing.

Take low workshop attendance for example.

Maybe the timing was terrible
Maybe people didn’t know about it.
Maybe the title didn’t communicate the value.
Maybe the delivery format didn’t fit their preference.

Worse, maybe the marketing never made the problem clear enough for people to recognize that the workshop was relevant to them.

Those are very different problems.
And they require very different solutions.

When we put blinders on too early, we can spend an enormous amount of time improving a solution that was never addressing the real issue.

Working smarter starts by looking at the problem from several angles.

Gather a little evidence. Talk to the people involved. Look at where the process is actually breaking down. Test a small change before committing significant time, money, or staff capacity.

Career professionals are constantly being asked to do more with limited resources.

Bottom line: a good diagnosis can save you a lot of time and energy.
_____
The Confident Career Coach Systems course addresses many of these issues. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/eyycSY7G

09/18/2026

I spent a lot of my early career chasing the next gold star.


Awards. Recognitions. Credentials.

The next achievement that would somehow make me feel like I had finally arrived.

Maybe because I grew up low-income.
Maybe because I’m first gen.

Either way, I was good at it.

I knew how to set a goal, put in the work, and keep going until I got there.

The problem was that the feeling never lasted as long as I expected it to.

I would reach the milestone, feel proud for a minute, and then almost immediately start looking for the next thing.

Over time, I started to notice how much of my career I was experiencing from the finish line, measuring progress by what I had completed or achieved.

As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve learned to pay much more attention to the process itself.

The learning.
The people.
The growth.

The moments when I can see that I’m getting better at something now give me immense satisfaction.

That shift has helped me enjoy my career in a way I didn’t know how to earlier on.

I still care about goals of course.
I still like accomplishing things.

I’m just much better now at recognizing how much life happens between the milestones.

And these days, that part matters to me a whole lot more.

“Need experience to get a job.Need a job to get experience.”And somehow you’re supposed to make both happen at the same ...
09/17/2026

“Need experience to get a job.
Need a job to get experience.”

And somehow you’re supposed to make both happen at the same time. 😅

The transition nobody names is the one that never happened.We’re trained to notice the events, like a layoff or a promot...
09/16/2026

The transition nobody names is the one that never happened.

We’re trained to notice the events, like a layoff or a promotion. Schlossberg’s Transition Model (1981/2011) adds a third category most practitioners miss entirely: the non-event. The promotion that didn’t come. The role that was supposed to open up and didn’t. Expected, and then just... absent.

That’s often the client who can’t explain why they’re struggling. Nothing happened, so they don’t think they’re allowed to call it a transition.

Once you’ve named the transition type, the 4-S’s tell you where to actually intervene:

➤ Situation and Self are mostly fixed: what’s changing, and what the client brings to it.
➤ Support and Strategies are where coaching lives: who’s around them, and how they’re choosing to respond.

You can’t change the non-event but you can change what surrounds it and how it gets met.

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Westford, MA
01886

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Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm
Saturday 8am - 5pm
Sunday 7am - 5pm

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+16179255289

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