What happens when the career you thought you wanted starts costing too much of yourself?
In this episode, I’m joined by Kelly Wuest, founder of Kelly Wuest Consulting and one of my closest grad school friends, for a conversation about burnout, career pivots, transferable skills, and building work that actually fits your life.
Kelly shares how she moved from higher ed to nonprofit work, then from nonprofit leadership into entrepreneurship. We talk about the identity hit that comes with leaving a field you thought would be your forever home, why your skills transfer more than you think, and what it really takes to start over without starting from scratch.
We also get into why so many organizations treat training like a checkbox, what quality learning and development actually requires, and how running your own business changes your relationship with time, work, and balance.
If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to make a move, this conversation will give you language, perspective, and a little proof that a big pivot doesn’t have to mean blowing up your whole life.
Resources:
- Kelly Wuest Consulting: https://www.kellywuestconsulting.com/
- Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkellywuest
There’s a specific kind of panic that hits when you realize the career you built might not be the career you want anymore.
Because it’s not just about the job. It’s the degree. The years. The identity. The version of yourself who was so sure this was the plan.
And then one day you’re sitting there thinking, “Cool. So what am I supposed to do now?”
That’s the part of career pivots people skip over.
They make it sound clean. Like one day you wake up, realize you’re burned out, update your resume, and confidently march into your next chapter.
Adorable.
What actually happens is usually messier. You start questioning everything. You wonder if you wasted your time. You look at job descriptions outside your field and somehow convince yourself you’re qualified for nothing, despite having spent years solving problems, leading projects, managing people, communicating under pressure, learning fast, making decisions, and holding entire systems together with duct tape and caffeine.
Kelly and I talked about this in our conversation on The Balanced Badass Podcast®, especially through the lens of leaving higher ed and nonprofit work.
And if you’ve ever worked in a mission-driven field, you probably know this feeling.
You don’t just leave a job. You feel like you’re leaving a whole identity.
The trap is thinking your skills only count in the place where you learned them
Kelly said something that matters for anyone thinking about a career change:
Your skills do transfer.
That sounds simple, but when you’re burned out or stuck in a field you’ve been in for years, it can be weirdly hard to believe. Because you’ve gotten used to seeing your skills through the language of your current industry.
If you work in higher ed, you might say you advise students, run programs, manage events, support leadership development, or build community partnerships.
If you work in nonprofit, you might say you manage volunteers, coordinate services, write grants, train staff, or run outreach.
If you work in corporate, you might say you manage stakeholders, lead projects, create processes, support teams, or handle client needs.
Different labels. Same deeper skills.
The problem is that when you’re inside one professional world for long enough, you start confusing the setting with the skill.
You think, “I know how to do higher ed.”
But what you may actually know how to do is:
- Build trust with people who are overwhelmed
- Translate complicated information into something usable
- Manage competing priorities without losing the plot
- Train people who don’t all learn the same way
- Design programs from scratch
- Handle conflict without making everything worse
- Communicate across different levels of power
- Keep things moving when the system is under-resourced
That’s not “just higher ed,” or “just nonprofit,” or “just this one company.”
That’s real skill.
Burnout makes your skill set harder to see
When you’re burned out, your confidence gets distorted.
You’re not looking at your experience with a clear brain and a full tank. You’re looking at it through exhaustion, cynicism, stress, and that lovely little voice that says, “Maybe I’m just not as good as I thought I was.”
Burnout does that. It makes capable people feel weirdly incompetent.
So when you start thinking about leaving, you don’t just ask, “What else could I do?” You ask, “Can I even do anything else?”
That’s a very different question. And it’s usually not an accurate one.
If you’ve been performing inside a broken or draining system for a long time, you may have been building skills the whole time. You just stopped recognizing them as skills because they became survival.
You got good at calming people down because your workplace was chaotic. You can the room because your boss was unpredictable. You’re a pro at doing more with less because the organization was always under-resourced. And you’re damn good at translating mess into a plan because nobody else would.
Those things count. They may have cost you too much in the environment where you learned them, but they still count.
You’re probably asking the wrong question
Most people start a career pivot by asking, “What jobs can I get with my background?”
That question is fine, but it’s not the first one I’d ask.
I’d start here: “What problems do I already know how to solve?”
Because that gets you out of job-title panic.
Your title is one version of your work. It’s not the whole story.
If you were a program director, what problems did you solve? If you were an educator, what did people come to you for? If you were a volunteer manager, what did you understand about people, motivation, systems, and follow-through? If you were the person everyone depended on when things got messy, what does that tell you?
This is where transferable skills start to become visible as actual career data.
You’re not just listing tasks. You’re identifying patterns.
- What do you repeatedly know how to figure out?
- What do people trust you with?
- What breaks when you’re not there?
- What kind of mess do you know how to make sense of?
That’s the good stuff.
The street, neighborhood, and state version of a pivot
In the episode, I talked about career pivots like moving through a neighborhood.
Sometimes you don’t need to blow everything up. You may just need to cross the street.
That’s an adjacent pivot. Same core skills, similar environment, slightly different role or industry. For someone leaving higher ed, that might look like moving into learning and development, student success tech, nonprofit training, academic program management, or customer education.
Then there’s the different-neighborhood pivot.
That’s a bigger move. You’re still using your skills, but in a more noticeably different context.
Maybe you go from volunteer management to employee engagement. From student leadership development to corporate training. From nonprofit programming to instructional design. From advising to coaching or client success.
Then there’s the full “different state” move.
That’s the wildcard. Bigger identity shift. Bigger learning curve. More risk. Sometimes still the right move.
Entrepreneurship can fall here, although even that may not be as random as it looks from the outside.
Kelly didn’t wake up one day with no relevant experience and decide to start a consulting business. She had years of training, education, program development, leadership, and purpose-driven work behind her.
The container changed. The skill set came with her.
That’s the part to pay attention to.
Starting over still requires grief
Even when the pivot makes sense, it can still hurt.
You may grieve the version of your career you thought you were building or the title you worked so hard to earn. You may even grieve the community, the structure, the identity, or the imagined future you had attached to that field.
That doesn’t mean you’re making the wrong decision. It means you’re a human person and not a LinkedIn carousel.
You can be ready to leave and still feel sad about it. You can know a field burned you out and still love parts of the work. You can be grateful for what a career gave you and still admit it doesn’t fit anymore.
That tension is allowed. Actually, it’s useful.
Because the goal is not to pretend the last chapter didn’t matter. It’s to figure out what comes with you.
Try this before you decide you’re stuck
If you’re thinking about a pivot, don’t start by rewriting your whole resume. Start with a skill translation audit.
Pick one role you’ve had and write down the work you actually did. Not the official job description. The real work.
Then sort it into these buckets:
- Problems I solved: What kept coming across your desk?
- People I supported: Who depended on you, and what did they need from you?
- Systems I improved: What did you build, clean up, organize, or make easier?
- Decisions I made: Where did people trust your judgment?
- Patterns I noticed: What were you always the first to see?
Once you’ve got that list, look at it without your current industry language.
That’s where the transferable skills are.
Not buried under your title or hidden in your degree, but right there in the work you’ve already been doing.
You’re not starting from nothing
If you’re in the messy middle of a career pivot, I want you to hold onto this:
You may be new to the next field. You may need new language, new connections, or a different kind of proof. You may have to learn how to tell your story in a way that makes sense outside the world you came from.
But you’re not empty-handed.
You’re bringing years of judgment, pattern recognition, problem-solving, communication, emotional labor, project management, leadership, and lived experience with you.
Some of those skills were built in systems that asked too much of you. That doesn’t make the skills less valuable.
It just means the next move needs to honor what you can do without recreating the conditions that burned you out in the first place.
That’s the real work.
Not starting over. Starting from the truth of what you already know.
I’m Tara Kermiet — career coach, burnout strategist, and host of The Balanced Badass Podcast®. I help high-achievers and corporate leaders design careers that are successful and sustainable.
Here, you’ll find tactical tools, leadership lessons, and burnout education that just makes sense.
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