Building toward alignment
After more than 20 years in the healthcare sector, I am in the process of making a career pivot. The way I define success has changed, and what I want to build in this next chapter requires a different kind of alignment.
I spent that time working for two companies in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. I started in roles where performance was straightforward-ish: you hit your number, or you did not. Now, those who have built sales careers understand that the numbers are only the first page of the novel. Regardless of the pages of storytelling that leads to the conclusion, the conversation begins at a very clearly defined focal point. That foundation shaped how narratives were formed. Build the skills. Build the storyline. Build the proof. Build a portfolio that conveys your value.
As I moved through my career, I carved out my own version of a management development program. I took opportunities where they emerged, many of them lateral moves that gave me range rather than upward mobility. Over time, that created the ability to see problems from multiple angles, to translate across domains, and to orchestrate stakeholders inside complex systems.
Yet the work I am most proud of is not the promotions or the awards. It is the trench work. Being in offices during the most disruptive moments to healthcare operations: after GM plant closures in Dayton, during Ohio’s transition to a managed Medicaid program, supporting hospital systems through complex protocol changes for critically ill patients. The long hours holding someone's hand, bringing coffee, being the light in their day when they were doing the hard work of keeping people healthy and alive.
That work mattered a great deal. I know my presence made a difference in life-or-death situations. Somebody got their blood pressure medication. A grandma got a few more years with her family. The seeds I planted helped people, whether they ever knew my name or not.
But when I looked forward, I realized my career trajectory was not aligned with the legacy I want to build.
I want to bring more Black women into leadership roles. The Lean In data is stark: The Women in the Workplace 2025 Report highlights that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 60 Black women are promoted. The deficit starts at the first transition from entry level to management and compounds at every level after. Leadership is cultivated, not born. There are Black women who could be developed, but they are not getting the opportunities. While I initially considered how to build a practice to launch this work, I realized the magnitude of the work is too great. We must rally allies and partners around this movement. That is where my search began.
I wanted to find a place where the talent pool is still emerging. Blue ocean instead of red ocean. Where I can influence what a good candidate looks like before it solidifies into historical patterns. Where there is an open mindset instead of a fixed one. And I wanted to walk that journey in a way that opens doors for other non-traditional Black women and leaders of color.
That clarity led me to reframe how I think about work itself.
Stop Thinking Company and Employee. Start Thinking Partnership.
When I graduated from college, I looked for companies with good benefits, good growth potential, strong financials. I was pulling balance sheets and studying Wall Street performance. I thought those metrics mattered most.
But over 20 years, I’ve learned something different. The way I evaluate opportunities now has little to do with how the company is doing on Wall Street.
I think about where I see myself making a difference inside the day-to-day spaces of the company. Where who I am will be valued and treasured. Because you spend most of your waking hours inside your working relationships.
The shift I made was this: I stopped thinking of employment as a company-employee relationship. I started thinking about it as a collaborative partnership between me and a corporation.
Yes, I aim to be on their payroll. But the value I bring is deeper than a result tied to my salary. The decision-making criteria for this next chapter look more like this:
Who is this company? What are their values?
Who am I in this season of my life? What matters most? What is the legacy I want to leave behind?
Where can our combined identity do more for the people we serve than what we could do individually?
I want to find an ally where my work brings resources to the people I care about in a deep, meaningful way. Where the daily work aligns with the future-facing leadership identity I want to cultivate.
A career can be viewed in chapters. What defined success in early phases does not have to define success in future narratives. Former steps on the journey can be complex, with good and bad woven together. That is normal. That is human.
But this next arc of my story requires clarity about who matters most. And that internal work is not simple.
The Problem: Finding the Right Partnership Fit
My career path is wide and nonlinear. The rise of my career stage timing, against the run of product life cycles and regulatory shifts, limited upward pathways. I built my leadership lens by taking opportunities where they emerged. That created range, but it also created a challenge.
Finding support for a broad career path is difficult:
Most mentors and coaches know one version of me, anchored to one era or one role.
Executive recruiters are optimized for clean category matches, not sector translation.
Finding one human advisor who can connect the dots across regulated environments, enterprise change work, and leadership trajectory is possible, but not a fair expectation.
And when you are filtering for an alliance instead of just a job, the internal navigation work becomes even more critical. You have to clarify your values. Map what matters. Define the framework you will use to evaluate whether an opportunity aligns with who you are becoming.
The Tool: How the Executive Career Strategist GPT Helped Me Build the Plan
That was my inspiration for building the Executive Career Strategist custom GPT. I needed a thinking partner to help me navigate the internal work required to find the right fit.
I needed a tool that could:
Hold the full dataset of my career, not a simplified resume version
Surface throughlines across roles, sectors, and chapters
Help translate experiences into the language a new industry rewards
Support work that happens in layers, since memory and meaning surface over days and weeks
Resumes are compressive. They remove context. They leave out entire projects that were real capability builders. In a pivot, that missing information becomes costly. The next role may value parts of your experience you never had to emphasize before.
The GPT helped me go back to project-level truth, mine the unstructured data, and build a storyline with precision. But more importantly, it helped me map my values. It helped me define the framework I would use to evaluate opportunities. It helped me clarify the intersection between:
The identity of the organization
The role construct and what it rewards
The skills, knowledge, and network I bring
The values I will not compromise
The GPT did not replace human support. It made human support more effective by helping me arrive with clarity. When I work with a coach or advisor now, our interactions are far more impactful because I have already navigated my internal thinking.
This approach is not just for me. Many women of color build deeper layers of education, civic work, volunteer leadership, and professional associations. The effort is not accidental. Part of it is cultural. It is also one response to a system where advancement gaps persist. The result is often a career that contains more signal than a traditional narrative can carry.
An AI thinking partner can help capture that message, translate it, and make it usable. Especially when the goal is not just to find any job, but to find the right partnership.
In this next chapter of my corporate resume, I am looking for a relationship that runs deeper than “employer”. I am searching for a co-conspirator. A company whose mission connects with mine. Where we can create better outcomes together versus what either of us could do alone. Where the daily work contributes to the legacy I want to build: bringing more Black women into executive leadership and opening doors in emerging spaces before hiring mindsets solidify.
That clarity changed everything about how I search. And the Executive Career Strategist GPT was the tool that helped me build the plan to get there. If you are navigating a career search, my hope is that you will find it useful in your journey, too. My mission is to continue learning, building bridges, and opening pathways through technology. I won’t stop championing for the future of our community until we are all the way…
UP.
