There’s a quiet comfort in routine. Show up, do the work, go home. Repeat. Somewhere between the routine and the passing years, a career that once felt full of possibility starts to feel…flat… fixed. Settled. Immovable. Automated. But what do you when your comfort is suddenly disrupted?

I spent twenty years in the Tourism / Hospitality industry. Then the pandemic brought the industry to its knees. An abrupt stop overnight. The week started well on Monday and by Friday I and many more of my colleagues were jobless. No performance review. No transition plan. Screeching halt!

Two decades is long enough to build expertise, earn credibility, weather uncertainty, and accumulate the kind of professional wisdom that only springs from tenure. It is long enough to understand the industry inside out. By most measures, it looked stable. Established. Successful enough.

This is not how most people imagine a career chapter closing. We expect a graceful exit: a promotion elsewhere, a deliberate pivot, a decision made on our own terms. It is hard planning for abruptness, especially a total industry shutdown. And hospitality wasn’t unique. I’ve seen professionals lose careers they spent decades building; affected by a single executive decision: restructuring, policy shift, an acquisition that made their entire department redundant. Twenty years of tenure and two weeks’ notice. It happens more than we care to talk about – as we are busy accumulating years.

It is worth noting: a career built entirely on tenure is a career built on borrowed time. Not because loyalty is wrong, but external forces: pandemics, layoffs, automation, reorganizations will not negotiate with one’s tenure.

Careers are not stagnant, unless we choose to make them so. The word choose is key. Stagnation is rarely forced on us. More often, it is the result of decisions we quietly stop making. We stop reflecting, questioning, desiring something different, growing. Career growth requires intentionality.

The Dilemma Nobody Prepares You For

What does twenty (20) years in one job quietly do to a person?

It makes leaving feel impossible.

More than being satisfying and engaging, we tend to stay with an organization because the longer the tenure, the more your professional identity fuses with the role. It is hard to separate your expertise from the surrounding context. Your network lives in the same space. Your high confidence built on from performance and achievements; which ought to be portable would decline with change.

Why? You haven’t needed to prove yourself to anyone new in years. And then something ends it. Or you finally admit to yourself that change is inevitable. Either way, you stand at a threshold most people aren’t prepared for: I have twenty years of experience. Now what?

If in the twenty years – there was internal mobility: switching departments or roles like I had, there is opportunity for skills mapping. There is growing, adapting, building transferable skills which is an extraordinary asset. But twenty years in one place: same company, same function, same way of positioning yourself; this can leave a professional with an empty feeling – everything and nothing at the same time. Rich in experience, uncertain about what it is worth outside the only place one is familiar with. This is the real dilemma which deserves more than a motivational push.

I often apply the ZIL-OEA way to many situations, this is not an exception:

 Observe: See What Actually Happened

When my hospitality career ended, the most important thing I used was perspective. The view: ‘the industry changed’ is different from ‘I have built skill, discipline, and social capital.’ None of that disappeared when the industry shut down. What disappeared was the familiar environment. The distinction matters enormously. The skills are transferrable. The job is static. Moving forward starts with learning to see the difference. I observed my own experience clearly enough to separate what I had built from where I had built it. Failing to make the difference delays the transition.

Examine: What Twenty Years Is Really Worth

I pivoted into my current profession with a sole focus on examining my transferrable skills. Skills capital. The transition allowed me to reflect on what happens when professionals with a long tenure stop growing.

Pursuing and maintaining a growth mindset is the antidote to career irrelevance. Career irrelevance happens when:

• skills become outdated.
• language and thinking stay static.
• professionals cling to only what they already know.
• professionals resist new tools, new expectations, or new ways of working. [that is the way we always do it 😊]

A growth mindset acts as the antidote because it allows for agility. It:

• keeps you curious instead of complacent. Take on adjacent projects, build visibility outside immediate role, keep asking what else is there to learn?
• pushes you to update your value.
• helps you pivot when the environment shifts.
• strengthens your confidence to keep trying – embraces failing forward.
• keeps your identity fluid instead of fixed.

Twenty years of experience examined honestly reveals one of two things: a professional who has been compounding their value across two decades, or one who has had the same year twenty times. The distinction is not always visible from the outside. It is the career plateau felt from the inside.

Act: Breaking the Stagnancy

Breaking twenty years of stagnancy doesn’t start with a resume update. It starts with deciding that what you have built is worth more than what you’ve been paid to use it for in one place. It starts with the uncomfortable acknowledgment that the career you’ve been protecting may actually be limiting you.

Then, develop the courage to explore and make small moves. Not all at once. One deliberate step at a time.

For me, a third profession (and hope my last) in career and workforce development is the place where everything I had accumulated over my career finally assembled into something coherent. Years of teaching – sharing knowledge. Years building people skills and learning to perform under pressure. Now building systems, strategy, and professional depth. It doesn’t feel like starting over. It feels like arriving. Identity Alignment!! I have finally found a space where I utilize all my strengths and the skills built over time. This is intentional mobility. It is not to say that I have ‘settled’ – it means I have more control on how to flex my personality, passion and potential. It is career agility. Ownership.

Your Career is Still Being Written

If you are ten years into a role and your conscience has started nudging – listen to it. If you are on the other side of a career end, not of your choosing – layoff, restructuring, industry that doesn’t need your skillset anymore – know that parting ways with a company is not an end to what you have built of yourself.  And if you have twenty years under your belt but are unsure of how your value translates outside the company walls – that clarity is available. It requires the same thing each career breakthrough requires: the willingness to be brutally honest, think carefully, and purpose to move.

Careers are not stagnant. Not unless we choose to make them so. Stagnation is a choice; but so is mobility. At times, more often than we’d like – the choice is made for us before we are ready.

The only thing that matters then; is what you do next. The professionals who grow are not always the most talented. They are often the most intentional; those who treat their career as something they are actively building, not passively experiencing.

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At ZIL Career Avenue, I help professionals close the positioning gap with careers they are capable of; not just what they’ve settled for.

If you’re not sure what your experience adds up to or where to position it next, a good place to start is knowing who you are professionally. The ZIL 5P Identity & Readiness Tool™ is a free assessment that helps you identify your career archetype, readiness tier, and next steps.  

Take the assessment at zilcav.com/knowledge-hub/resources – then let’s talk about what it means for your next move. | info@zilcav.com