When Career Disruption Becomes Our Collective Teacher

November is National Career Development Month, and I refuse to give you the tired advice about AI skills or resume tweaks. Not now. Not when so many of you are choosing between groceries and rent, watching your life's work stall mid-mission, or questioning whether the institutions you serve still serve you back.

The current government shutdown—nearing a month—has displaced over 800,000 federal workers. Simultaneously, private sector layoffs continue mounting across tech, retail, and manufacturing as companies cite tariffs, restructuring, and AI investments. This isn't just about paychecks. It's about purpose colliding with political dysfunction, and people wondering if their commitment means anything anymore.

But here's what I know about disruption: "Response starts with the community and ends with the community," as emergency management expert Lourdes Gutierrez of the EIS Council reminds us. When systems fail us, we don't fail each other.

What's Actually Within Your Control

First, get help without shame. Community assistance programs, food banks, and unemployment benefits (where available for furloughed workers) exist precisely for moments like this. Organizations like FEEA offer micro-grants for federal employees earning under $60,000. Ask. Accept. Then pay it forward when you can.

Second, have deeper conversations. Talk with your neighbors, your teenagers, your community about what work actually means now. This shutdown isn't just interrupting paychecks—it's exposing that no single institution can guarantee your security. The future demands what career expert Nirit Cohen in a recent Forbes articles calls career resilience through optionality: multiple ways to use your skills, channel your values, and sustain yourself economically.

The Entrepreneurial Pivot

Consider what Cohen terms polyemployment—weaving together multiple roles across sectors. That dormant business idea, that consulting expertise, that creative practice you shelved? This disruption is permission to leverage it. This does not require leaving your day job, but cultivating your new role alongside it. Energy rumbles with uncertainty, you can utilize that to start small, start local, start now on an objective that fulfills you.

Build Across Aisles

Organize skill shares in your community. Trade services with neighbors via NextDoor. Create mutual aid networks not limited to transportation, food, housing and care among family, friends and co-workers via social media. The barista furloughed from TSA might help the laid-off Amazon engineer build their website. The Target worker can advise the federal analyst on retail strategy. The Paramount worker has a hydroponic garden and could teach you how to build one to supplement your food supply. Your talents don't disappear when your paycheck does.

This moment demands we stop waiting for systems to stabilize and start building our own. Not every career disruption is a catastrophe—sometimes it's the wake-up call that reminds us our employability depends on our adaptability, not our employer's promises.

For Organizations: Lead Through Disruption

If you're a business leader watching your teams navigate unprecedented anxiety—whether from external disruptions or internal transitions—this is your moment to model what people-centered leadership actually looks like. Your employees are asking hard questions about purpose, stability, and whether their work still matters. How you respond now will determine whether they stay, disengage, or start building their exit plan.

Our Workplace Empowerment Experience is designed for organizations ready to meet this moment with systemic, sustained cultural change. Through trauma-informed practices, psychological safety frameworks, and concrete accountability systems, we help you build the kind of workplace where people don't just survive disruption—they thrive through it. Because when work is People-Powered. Purpose-Driven. Profit for All, resilience becomes your competitive advantage.

Your resilience lives in community. Let's build the workplace your people deserve—especially now. Schedule a consultation today with our People, Culture and Workplace Empowerment Partner.