When the Workforce Gets Brutal – Your Guide to Reclaiming Your Career Path
- Brainz Magazine
- Oct 30
- 5 min read
Written by Sher Downing, Entrepreneur
Most entrepreneurs face an invisible challenge, building a business while caring for an aging family. After 30 years in edtech and her own entrepreneurial journey, she helps others master both.
The workforce is brutal right now. There is no sugarcoating it. Waves of layoffs continue to reshape industries, leaving even the most experienced professionals questioning their next move. But here is what I have learned from studying the workforce from multiple angles, the impact of mass layoffs, the unique challenges facing caregivers, and the paths people forge in the aftermath. This moment of disruption is also a moment of rare possibility.
The crisis no one asked for
If you are reading this, chances are you have felt the tremors. Maybe you have been laid off. Maybe you are watching colleagues disappear from Slack channels and wondering when your turn will come. Maybe you are a caregiver trying to balance impossible demands, realizing the traditional career ladder was never built for someone with your responsibilities.
The anxiety is real. The financial pressure is real. But so is the opportunity hiding within this chaos.
The fork in the road
Right now, you are standing at a critical juncture. The question is not just about survival, it is about direction. Are you simply going to slot yourself into another job that looks remarkably like the one you just left? Or is this the moment to pursue something more?
This is not about toxic positivity or pretending that losing your income is a blessing in disguise. It is about recognizing that disruption, however painful, breaks the inertia that keeps us stuck in patterns that no longer serve us.
The reckoning: What you have been doing vs. what you want
Here is your assignment. Take a brutally honest inventory.
What have you actually been doing with your professional life? Not what your LinkedIn profile says, not what sounds impressive at dinner parties, but what has your day-to-day reality been?
Now, what do you truly want to do? The gap between these two answers is where your next chapter lives.
This requires you to be truthful with yourself in ways that feel uncomfortable. Maybe you have been chasing prestige in an industry that drains you. Maybe you have been prioritizing salary over meaning for so long that you have forgotten what energizes you. Maybe caregiving responsibilities mean that the 60-hour workweek model was never going to work, and you need to design something different.
Taking the holistic view
This is the time to zoom out. Way out. You need to take a holistic look at your entire life, not just your career in isolation. Consider:
Your personal situation: What are your actual financial obligations? What flexibility do you have? What constraints are non-negotiable?
Your goals and dreams: What did you want before you learned to be realistic? What would you pursue if you knew you could not fail?
Your short-term needs: What has to happen in the next three to six months to keep you stable?
Your long-term vision: Where do you want to be in five years? Ten years? What kind of life are you building?
This is not about choosing between practicality and passion. It is about seeing the whole board so you can make strategic moves that honor both.
Your decision, your path
Here is what I cannot do. I cannot tell you what you should do next. Anyone who claims they can is selling you something.
Only you can make that distinction. Only you know the texture of your life, the responsibilities you carry, the risks you can absorb, the dreams that keep you up at night, the skills you have built, and the ones you want to build.
What you can do is be truthful. Be honest. Look clearly at how things can be different.
Ask yourself:
What would I do if I were starting over today, knowing what I know now?
What parts of my current path am I keeping out of fear rather than desire?
What would my life look like if I got my balance right?
The opportunity to start over
This might sound strange given the circumstances, but you are being handed something valuable, a forced reset.
The comfortable inertia has been disrupted. The path you were on has been interrupted. And while that is terrifying, it is also liberating.
This is your opportunity to start over. Not to pretend the past did not happen or that you do not have responsibilities, but to consciously choose what comes next rather than defaulting into it.
You can recalibrate your balance. You can refocus on your true priorities. You can design the next phase intentionally rather than letting it happen to you.
Meeting the next decade head on
We are at the threshold of a new decade in our professional lives. The old rules are being rewritten in real time. The organizations that promised stability are proving how fragile those promises were. The career paths that seemed inevitable are disappearing.
But that means you get to be an architect of what comes next, for yourself at least.
This does not mean the brutal parts disappear. The job market will still be challenging. The interviews will still be exhausting. The financial pressure will still keep you up at night.
But you will be moving forward with intention. You will be taking steps toward something you actually want, not just away from something you fear. You will be building a professional life that aligns with your whole life.
The next best step
So what is the next best step to keep moving forward? Only you can answer that. But here is how to find out.
Get truthful about where you are. Get clear about where you want to go. Get realistic about what the path between here and there looks like. Then take one step. Just one. And then another.
The workforce is brutal right now. But you do not have to be its passive victim. This is your moment to reevaluate, recalibrate, and rebuild, not into what you were, but into what you are choosing to become.
The question is not whether you will survive this disruption. It is whether you will use it to finally create the professional life you actually want.
The choice, as always, is yours.
Read more from Sher Downing
Sher Downing, Entrepreneur
With three decades of experience in academic and corporate training, she has been a driving force in the evolving edtech industry. After building extensive expertise in educational technology, she made a strategic pivot to entrepreneurship. Now working as a consultant and researcher, she specializes in helping entrepreneurs navigate the complex balance between building successful ventures and caring for elderly parents. Her unique perspective combines business acumen with real-world caregiving insights. She shares this expertise as the host of the Forward Thinking Experts podcast, where she explores innovative approaches to modern challenges.
