Your Experience Doesn't Translate. Now What?

Some of you noticed I went quiet.

No announcement. No goodbye. I just stopped writing On Leading Well — and I’ve been thinking about how to explain that ever since.

Here’s my honest attempt.

A year or so ago, something shifted in many of the conversations I was having. The professionals I work with — smart, experienced people who’d spent their careers building something real — weren’t asking the questions I’d started this newsletter to answer.

They weren’t asking how to lead better.

They were asking something harder: what do I do now, when the career I built doesn’t exist the way it used to?

Most of that thinking moved into my other newsletter, Human + AI Edge, where I've spent the past year writing about how experienced professionals stay relevant when everything shifts. That work is ongoing.

I kept hearing versions of the same story.

Someone who’d spent 10 or 15 years inside international systems — doing genuinely important work, leading teams, managing complexity that most people couldn’t fathom. And then, restructuring. Funding cuts.

The whole architecture, suddenly rearranged or dismantled.

These weren’t people who’d failed. They were people the system had failed.

And the career advice available to them? Mostly useless.

Not because it was wrong, but because it was built for a completely different situation.

“Update your LinkedIn” is good advice for someone who just left a marketing job at a tech company.

It is not a strategy for someone whose professional identity was forged inside institutions that the outside world doesn’t fully understand and whose résumé reads like a foreign language to most private sector hiring managers.

A Familiar Story

I spent over a decade in the UN system before circumstances I hadn’t planned for — caregiving, health, the things that don’t show up in any career books — forced me to rethink life.

When I tried to figure out what came next, I discovered that the guide I needed didn’t exist.

So I made one, messily, over several years, through caregiving, getting hit by a car, COVID and an AI wave that changed what “relevant” even means.

The Career Reset is a newsletter for experienced professionals — especially those navigating disruption in the international development world — who are trying to figure out what’s next.

Not recycled frameworks.

Not LinkedIn hustle culture.

Just honest, practical thinking about how to move forward when the system stops working the way it was supposed to.

On Leading Well isn’t completely disappearing. But I won’t be writing it anymore — and I’d rather be honest with you about that than let it sit there quietly going stale.

If you’ve been here for a while: thank you. It truly appreciate your support.

If what I’m describing now connects to where you are, or where someone you know is; then I hope you’ll subscribe.

→ Subscribe to The Career Reset

— Andrea J. Miller