By Tamara Yakaboski, PhD

Bio: Tamara Yakaboski, PhD, spent almost 20 years as a professor and administrator before confronting the reality that academia, for many, is no longer sustainable. Whether due to burnout, institutional dysfunction, or forced career pivots, she knows that leaving can feel like a loss of identity and purpose. Integrating her expertise as a scholar of higher education, she serves as a resilience Mentorship Coach and leadership consultant, to help academics and professionals bridge the gap between what was and what’s next, individually and within teams or organizations. Whether you’re reimagining your career, rebuilding after burnout, or struggling with identity loss, Tamara provides practical tools and guidance to help you navigate the transition with confidence and clarity. Discover more about her work at www.tamarayakaboski.com.

~~~

Sign up for Tamara’s workshop: Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy

NEXT WEEK! May 19 at 6 PM EST

You get the recording even if you can’t attend live.

---

The difficulty concentrating, the cynicism, and existential exhaustion are back. You assume it’s burnout again. You try the “usual” fixes: a long weekend, saying no to committees, canceling meetings, and telling yourself you just need to rest and build better boundaries until summer. When you try to pause, you feel heavier, more hopeless, and less motivated than the last time you burned out, which is confusing and a tad concerning, if you’re honest.

If it’s not burnout, why the resentment, the rage, the instability, and the constant anxiety about what’s next?

Looking around, you realize how much feels off: the institution is dysfunctional and hollowed out of its purpose. The mission you believed in has been swapped for “innovate at all costs.” The Dean keeps asking for another budget scenario from a department that’s already dry, and politicians now call your field “evil” which has quietly eroded how you see yourself as a professional.

Who am I now? 

What does this mean for a career I’ve poured into? 

Can I stay and will there even be anything to stay in, with layoffs, early retirement pressure, or closures looming? 

Should I pivot? (To what, when alt-ac roles and funding have dried up too.)

How do I keep doing meaningful work and still pay the bills? 

What is Career Grief?

Career grief is the natural response to disruptions that occur when you experience a significant shift, setback, or ending in your career, whether by choice, change, or circumstance. This is especially disruptive for academics, who have been in institutions and professionalized roles that once provided meaning, purpose, structure, or identity. The grieving process can feel confusing because it may hit at cognitive, emotional, physical, and deeply existential levels with both internal and external catalysts.

Career grief emerges when your relationship to your work changes in ways that are difficult to name. This internal shift can come from shifts that impact your interest in or capacities to work at the levels you’re used to, such as injuries, illnesses, or menopause, parenting responsibilities, or other caregiving expectations. Sometimes it comes when your priorities and values change, which can be common in midcareer. You can be grieving both positive or negative experiences, including lost dreams and nostalgia. At times, grief unfolds over time, and for others, it is an acute experience of grieving.

When grief hits after a career shock or job loss, it feels fairly acute and disruptive to life. It may show up in physical stress symptoms, feelings of anger and betrayal, and lowered motivation for tasks that may have once been enjoyed or tolerable. It doesn’t “go away” with burnout, job change, or therapy/coaching work only; one must intervene. Without intervention, career grief becomes prolonged, compounded, and interferes with growth, keeping you from the clarity and courage to move forward.

As a coach and consultant focused on supporting professionals with their career grief, I see a wide range of experiences that are deeply human and often quite painful until folks experience a deep, resonating validation and develop strategies for processing the wisdom that comes from grief. It’s difficult to make aligned career decisions if you’re disconnected from the grief and its embodied and felt sensations. You can read more about how to cope with the shifts to your professional identity from career grief at https://www.tamarayakaboski.com/career-grief

Collapse is in the Design, and It’s Greedy

The academic path you were trained for, encouraged to pursue, and dreamed of is no longer predictable or coherent. Whether named as decline, disruption, or collapse, the impact on humans is the same: GRIEF.  There are versions of the same issues across myriad institutions, geographical regions, levels of tenure, students, mid-level leaders, and administrative professionals. For some, grief is compounded with a sense of betrayal when they learn that the Golden Age of US higher education has been in decline since the 1970s, with the help of rampant academic capitalism and drastic funding shifts through the 1980-90s. All to say, even before the 2016 election, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and AI, the system was in trouble and outsourcing that trouble onto its humans to make you believe it was personal.

Graduate students (and those interested in grad school) navigate the economic precarity of these times while hearing well-intentioned advice from mentors who want long-term stability for their future career trajectory, while proselytizing outdated advice built for the 1970-90s. Faculty and department chairs grapple with the complicity of administration demanding increased graduate level enrollment versus their own integrity– knowing the jobs aren’t there, the debt will be astronomical, and also not wanting to crush dreams.

My years spent consulting, coaching, and facilitating climate and career grief work reveal how humans handle (or more typically, do not) collapsing systems. Most academics are conditioned into a problematic normalcy within their systems when faced with one crisis after another, never able or willing to rebuild. Which is layered with the power, control, and abuse that creates a harmful relational paradigm between academia and its employees, as shared in last month’s blog on “The Higher Education Power and Control Wheel,” by Dr. Jennifer Preston and colleagues on their new research. While all the facts, data, and direct experience can be right there in front of us, massive physical disconnection and cognitive dissonance allow many academics to work from a place of denial and avoidance in order to maintain a business-as-usual composure. There is an attempt to reckon with the ways institutions create harm by “trying to keep its doors open.” That reckoning is often where the sense of betrayal comes in.

 

Maybe you ARE chronically burned out. AND ALSO, you’re most likely grieving the loss of the idea, the career potential, and the institution as a whole. Higher education is changing by design, and the old maps of career building no longer apply.

Grief Work is Future Proofing Your Resilience

What you have lost (or stand to lose) is more than a job. There is some version of a purpose-filled impact and way of working that no longer exists. The work landscape has changed, and the continued denial of these structural and systemic collapses is exacerbating the collective grieving process.

Most career advice is missing the critical work of grief and identity integration and reorientation, because it is scary to face fear. Career grief in a time of a collapsing academy can’t be solved by overthinking and carrying around unprocessed losses. Should I stay or leave academia? This is no longer the right or only question to ask, but it may be the entrance point for you.

Grief is an embodied response that does not disappear or “get solved.” It must be integrated. It informs our future decisions, and alchemizes us into the depth of ever-evolving identities so we must allow it the space and shape to become–to shift who we are. Integrating career grief is an active process of reconstructing identity and creating space for new roles and perspectives through experimentation, exploration, and building community with others.

If identities are tree rings of a trunk sliced across, the new growth is another layer of expansion, protection, and nourishment. Career grief integration feeds that growth. We may still grow without integration, but that growth will be thin; whereas, when we learn how to practice with our grief, that year’s growth is wider, stronger, and richer in color. The non-capitalist definition of resilience isn’t bounce back. Career resilience is a learned capacity to adapt and transform in response to and relationship with your environment.

If this resonates, it’s likely you’re not just facing a career decision but are actually at the cusp of a deeper transition. In the upcoming workshop, Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy, we slow this process down on May 19 at 6 PM EST. We look at how institutional changes impact your identity, work, and wellbeing, and I’ll share a structured, 4-step process to help you move out of overwhelm and overthinking towards clarity.

Sign up for Tamara’s workshop: Career Grief in a Collapsing Academy

NEXT WEEK! May 19 at 6 PM EST

You get the recording even if you can’t attend live.