By Hailee Shah, Sr. Specialist, Avid Core 

When America’s foreign assistance programs were cut, I felt like I had lost the skills I spent almost the last ten years building alongside the job, whether that was the confidence to facilitate cross-team sessions in war zones or the ability to pull together a budget for an international agreement that couldn’t wait. The loss felt big, and every time someone used the word “pivot,” it made that decade of work sound like an afterthought and something I couldn’t easily carry over somewhere new.  

Most of what I read about career transitions is written for people who are either just starting out or moving into something more senior, and there is surprisingly little for the people in the middle. Mid-career is its own kind of hard, because you have spent years getting good at one specific thing. And since you are not exactly starting from zero, you also have real skills tied to a world you might be leaving, and no one can tell you whether any of it will mean anything anywhere else. 

For most of my professional experience, my job was to manage complicated international programs, which is a simple way of saying the work wasn’t all that simple. I was responsible for budgets and compliance for partners and staff spread across different countries and time zones, and the job demanded that I be fast and flexible, because a program couldn’t wait for the situation on the ground to settle before it needed to keep moving. I learned to find the gaps no one had planned for, whether that was a grant that needed managing or a piece of reporting that had slipped, and to step into them without waiting to be asked. And I picked up what I would describe as a “one-team” mentality, the habit you develop in places where the mission matters more than your title or whether your badge says government employee or contractor. 

What I did not expect was how directly all of that would carry into my work at Avid Core, a women-owned small business that provides professional services for federal agencies, where I support a client at CBP. Even though I am now a consultant, my role still involves working with emerging and changing priorities, and the years I spent staying fast and flexible to keep programs on track turned out to be good preparation. That same flexibility now goes into adjusting our work as priorities shift, drafting briefers that get leadership what they need quickly, and moving interagency agreements through approvals without the timelines slipping. The compliance habits I built keeping programs auditable became the knowledge repositories we use, so institutional memory holds through transitions. The facilitation skills I relied on overseas translate just as well to running team-wide events here.  

So if you are mid-career and going through a transition like this, as a former federal employee or contractor trying to assess what your experience is worth and how to leverage it once you step outside the place you built it, I invite you to lean on your knowledge and trust that the skills you developed there will advance with you, whether or not the job does.