What If the Layoff Was Actually a Career Reset?
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
An ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) who empowers stressed, busy women execs, tackling impostor syndrome, self-criticism, and doubt to alleviate their stress so that they can find peace of mind and focus on excelling in their careers.
In eighteen months of coaching senior Black women through tech layoffs, I've seen the same unexpected pattern emerge, what felt like an ending was actually a recalibration. Here's why the redirect you didn't ask for may be the one your career actually needed.
I have been having the same conversation with senior Black women in tech for the past eighteen months. It starts in a place of shock and disorientation. A layoff. A restructuring. A department eliminated with the kind of speed that makes you wonder if the work you spent years building ever mattered at all.
And then, somewhere between grief and strategy, something unexpected happens. Women who came to me convinced their careers were over begin to discover that what felt like an ending was actually a redirect. Not a consolation prize version of what they had, but something more aligned, more sustainable, and, in several cases, more financially rewarding than anything they had been pursuing inside tech.
This pattern is not accidental. And it is not luck. It is what happens when a forced recalculation creates the conditions to finally ask the question that career momentum usually prevents, "Where does everything I have built actually belong?"
The story we tell ourselves after a tech layoff
The default story sounds like this, I need to get back in. I need to find the equivalent of what I just lost, in the same industry, at the same level, as quickly as possible. That story is understandable. It is driven by financial pressure, professional identity, and the very human instinct to restore what was disrupted back to its previous state.
But for many senior Black women in tech, that story leads back into the same environment that required them to prove their worth constantly, where advancement came slower than their results warranted, and where the invisible labor of being the only one, or one of very few, at their level added a cost that never appeared on a balance sheet.
Recovery, in this context, does not always mean return. Sometimes it means recalibration.
What I observe in my coaching practice
When women arrive at a coaching conversation after a tech layoff, two things are almost always present simultaneously. The grief is real. Losing a senior-level role in an industry you have devoted years to is not a minor disruption. It is an identity event. The title, the team, the particular set of problems you had mastered solving, the professional community you had built over years of shared experience, all of that is genuinely lost, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than bypassed in the rush to update a resume.
And alongside the grief, almost without exception, there is something else, a quiet awareness that the career they are grieving was never quite the right fit. That the environment required too much performance and offered too little recognition. That something was not working even before the layoff made it undeniable.
That awareness is not a betrayal of the career you built. It is the beginning of clarity. And clarity is the foundation of every successful transition.
For a deeper look at building that clarity strategically, explore my work on career pivot strategies for Black women.
The question that actually moves the needle
The most productive pivot in my coaching conversations is rarely "How do I get back into tech?" It is almost always, "Where do the capabilities I have built for the past fifteen years actually create the most value?"
That question opens a completely different landscape. Your analytical rigor, your systems thinking, your ability to lead cross-functional teams through complex, high-stakes challenges, these are not tech skills. Tech was the industry that recognized and hired them first. But healthcare, financial services, government digital transformation, higher education, and consulting are all operating in the middle of technology-driven change that they urgently need experienced leaders to navigate.
The transferable skills you have built inside tech are not limited by the walls of the industry that developed them. They travel. And in many cases, they travel into industries where the compensation is competitive and the mission alignment is something Big Tech rarely offers.
Three things worth knowing right now
If you are a senior Black woman in tech navigating a layoff or seriously contemplating a pivot, here is what I want you to carry into whatever conversation you have next:
Your expertise does not expire because your employment did. The depth of knowledge, leadership experience, and problem-solving capability you have accumulated belongs to you. It is not a credential that an employer issues and retrieves. It is yours, and it moves with you.
The layoff removed a ceiling, not your capability. For many of the women I work with, the organization that let them go was also the organization that had been limiting their visibility, undervaluing their contributions, and creating barriers to the kind of advancement their results warranted.
Data-backed direction outperforms gut-driven decisions in high-stakes moments. This is not the moment for intuition alone. This is the moment for a strategic career mapping process that gives you objective information about where your profile is most naturally positioned before you commit to a direction, retool your narrative, and invest your energy in a new pursuit.
The recalculation has already begun
You did not choose this redirect. But you are in it now.
And the women who emerge from transitions like this with careers that are more fulfilling and more financially rewarding than what they left are not extraordinary. They are not uniquely resilient or unusually fortunate. They are the ones who stopped trying to restore the previous version and started asking better questions about what comes next.
In my work with senior Black women executives navigating disruption, I have seen this pattern repeatedly, the moment everything feels uncertain is often the exact moment their leadership sharpens, their voice clarifies, and their next level begins to take shape.
The shift is not about starting over. It is about repositioning what has always been there, with intention, precision, and authority.
The redirect is not the end. It is the recalculation. And the destination is ahead of you, not behind.
Twanna Carter, Ph.D., Career Transition Coach, Hypnotherapist
An ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) who empowers stressed, busy women execs, tackling impostor syndrome, self-criticism, and doubt to alleviate their stress so that they can find peace of mind and focus on excelling in their careers.
Rather than coaching symptoms, she leverages her coaching so that women work on the root causes that threaten to sabotage their careers and lives. Which means clients see immediate change resulting in decreased stress, increased confidence, and shifting from overwhelm to relaxation.
Recognized as an Office of Personnel Management Presidential Management Fellow, Twanna left full-time federal employment to be an entrepreneur. She is currently the CEO of Twanna Carter Professional & Personal Coaching, LLC.
