Career Grief Is Real. It's Time We Talked About It.

It's National Careers Week. And yes, I'm passionate about celebrating careers professionals. But this year, I'm sitting with something heavier.

The world is volatile, and that volatility doesn't just stay at the door once it’s closed. It walks straight into our working lives.

Redundancy. A role that quietly disappears. A promotion that never came. An underwhelming career change. There's a name for this: career shock. Akkermans et al. (2018) define it as a disruptive, extraordinary event, at least partly outside your control, that forces you to stop and rethink your entire career direction. Is this familiar?

What doesn't get named enough is what follows.

Grief.

Mourning the future you planned.

The version of yourself you were building toward.

Savickas (2005) reminds us that we construct our careers as ongoing personal narratives, so when a shock hits, it doesn't just disrupt a job. It disrupts the story you were telling about your life, and how we recover depends enormously on the resources around us: support, strategies, and a sense of self (Schlossberg, 1981). When those are stripped away, the road back feels impossibly long.

So this week, I want you to sit with three questions:

1. If you fast-forwarded your life, what would you hope to have explored in your career?

2. What do you want your career to say about your choices, 30 years from now?

3. What encouragement would you give someone completely overwhelmed about their career right now?

Someone in your life needs those words.

Life is too short to spend it in a career that costs you everything.

As a reminder, take the time to love yourself. Love those around you. And make the most of the career you have or bravely pursue the one you want.

-            Yinka

References

• Akkermans, J., Seibert, S. E., & Mol, S. T. (2018). Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 44, a1503. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v44i0.1503

  
  

• Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 42–70). John Wiley & Sons.

  
  

• Schlossberg, N. K. (1981). A model for analyzing human adaptation to transition. The Counseling Psychologist, 9(2), 2–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/001100008100900202