When Your Career Coach Lives Out of Her Car

Sociologist Patrick Sheehan on the dubious services offered to the unemployed.

Photo credit: Kyle Szegedi on Unsplash.

When people are laid off from their jobs, they invariably confront certain types of career advice. Some of it is straightforward and practical—learn how to use LinkedIn, network with your contacts. But a lot of job-hunting advice is psychological in nature. Finding a job, the logic goes, requires adjusting your attitude and discovering your passions. A layoff does not have to be your darkest hour—it can be the best thing that ever happened to you! But first, you need to re-orient your mindset and find your true purpose.

This advice is so ubiquitous that even those who have never consulted a career coach or read a business self-help book—or even experienced a layoff—can recite it pretty much by heart. But once you start to poke at it, this logic has some pretty obvious flaws. Even if you love knitting and hate auditing, your chances of recouping your financial-analyst salary with your Etsy store are slim at best.

So if this advice really isn’t true, where did it come from?

Patrick Sheehan is a sociologist and post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University who studies the shifting meaning of work in the contemporary economy. When he was in graduate school, Sheehan heard a lot about how technology was displacing scores of jobs, and he wanted to find out what retraining services were available to the people who lost their jobs during these upheavals.

That's when he entered the strange world of job clubs. These organizations, which receive government funding, are regular gatherings where mostly middle-aged professionals are taught to make vision boards and practice power poses. Career coaches lead them in chants and visualization exercises. The weirdest part: Many of the speakers telling participants how to get jobs are unemployed themselves.

I learned about Patrick’s research through Jane Marie’s terrific podcast, The Dream, and he was kind to share it with me and talk to me about it. We had a great conversation.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Paid subscribers can listen to the full conversation.

SE: Starting in 2017, you started attending job clubs that are basically places where the unemployed meet to figure out their next step. Can you tell me a little bit about what was going on that got you interested in these job clubs?

PS: When I started this research, the current moment was a time with a lot of hand-wringing about supposedly radical changes to the labor market; workers are going to need to rescale and retrain because their jobs and their industries are going to be reinvented by technology. It was also a big AI-hype moment, as well. The story essentially was that workers are going to be obsolete, and they need to do everything they can to try to grab the last few remaining good jobs and prove their relevance.

I wanted to find out what people do when they get laid off. And how do they retrain or reskill? And where do they actually land? Do they go down? Do they train up, as it was often sold?

I found out in Austin, Texas, where I was doing this research, that people go to these things called job clubs that are essentially extensions of the unemployment offices run by the state. They run weekly meetings, mostly for white-collar professional people who have lost their jobs.

And these meetings are places where they all come together. They share in some of the pains of unemployment. And they all sit down to listen to a guest speaker who is a career coach of some sort. This person gets up at the front of the room and gives people some tips, usually connects with them about what it’s like to be unemployed, and then provides a series of tips about what they can do to find a job.

SE: And what struck you about the people you saw?

PS: The first time I attended one of these clubs, the guest speaker was a woman who called herself Absolutely Amy. She’s wearing a corporate power suit, has long, dark hair, and really knows how to run one of these meetings.

So I entered the job club. And it’s about 50 people, mostly professionals in their 50s. They’re all grabbing cups of crappy coffee and sitting in these folding chairs waiting for Amy’s presentation.

The presentation that day was about how to interview for a job that you might be overqualified for. This is a really hot topic for this group, I learned, because these are people who face late-career layoffs and are just trying to figure out how to get back in the labor market.

And so, the presentation tells us all how we can signal that we still want these jobs, even if we’re overqualified for them. How do we tell them that, “we actually maybe don’t need so much money,” that “we’re not actually so old?” How do we impress hiring managers who are the age of our children? She’s got us chanting in the meeting to get pumped up about it. We have these chants where she says, “Repeat after me, ‘I’m not overqualified. I’m absolutely qualified.’” And people get pumped up.

And she tells us that she knows all this, and can give us all these tips, because she has this long, fabulously successful career in corporate recruiting. And I thought, “OK, that sounds like a legitimate credential.” But then later in the meeting Absolutely Amy mentions, as an aside, that she is living currently out of an RV. She frames this as a PR stunt: “I’m traveling the country in an RV to bring the good word to the unemployed to help people find jobs.” But when I interviewed Amy after this, I learned that this wasn’t exactly a choice. She, too, was recently laid off from a corporate job, just like the people she’s preaching to. And she’s been trying to find her next move. And she’s trying to figure out this entrepreneurial career-coaching thing as an answer.

This is a pattern that I realized over time: The people who come and speak at the front of these rooms are not very different than the people they are speaking to. They also just recently lost a job at Dell, or IBM, or Intel—which were big employers in the area at the time. And they’re trying to flip their unemployment entrepreneurially into a new hustle and presenting themselves as experts in finding a job. Of course, we can see the irony in it; they’re struggling to find their own job. And yet they somehow become—by stepping to the front of this room, being given the podium and the mic, putting on that blazer—they can present themselves as experts in finding jobs and, amazingly, people listen. I guess that’s what shocked me. Once I figured this out, I thought, “Wow, is this all bogus.” But people stand there, and they really listen. They ask questions. They take notes. They treat these people as experts.

SE: Did you get a sense that the people in the room understood that the people who were speaking in front of them were either unemployed themselves or precariously employed?

PS: Some coaches come through town like Amy, and they can have this air of professionalism. But then there are other people like this woman Dianna, who I came to know as an attendee of these clubs. We sat in the back and chatted. She was trying to figure out how to respond to her layoff. She’s in her 50s, trying to figure out if she should go into a different career. I met Dianna over several weeks. Then I find out one day that Dianna is not sitting next to me in the back anymore, but she’s actually the guest speaker today. And now she’s dressed up a little more; her hair’s put up a little professionally. And she’s giving a talk about how to stay motivated in the job search and blah, blah, blah.

So there were often these times when attendees would show up one day, and they would be the guest speaker. I think attendees, for the most part, know this—although how they read these people is really interesting, because they want to believe in these people’s expertise. These people also are just like them. They used to work with people just like this. And so in some ways, in going to these clubs and listening and taking notes and validating the expertise of these speakers, they’re also validating their own expertise in working life. So I find that they really do take them seriously.

SE: So, “Since you have been through this, in some ways you are an expert as well.”

PS: Yeah. They’re supporting people who are trying to figure out an entrepreneurial hustle themselves, which is something that the attendees are thinking about doing, too—and are often taking cues from the front of the room about that. They’re figuring out, “Maybe this is the way I need to move forward. Maybe I don’t try to find another job. Maybe I try to start my own business”—which is a main point of advice in these places.

Sometimes this stuff gets pretty dire. Most of the people I studied are middle-class professionals, and they have varying degrees of savings when they lose their jobs late in their careers. But some people really struggle, like Dianna, who I followed for a few months. We had several interviews. At the end of it, she was trying to get a coaching practice started but was struggling. And she kept telling me that her savings was running out, but her mortgage bills weren’t stopping. And in our last interview, we’re sitting at a diner, and she’s picking through old fries. And she mentioned that she’s been watching some videos about how people learn to live out of vans—van life—and how maybe that’s kind of appealing. Maybe she does want to see the country.

SE: Was she saying it in a positive way? Or was she saying, “Yeah, this is dire”?

PS: I was really shocked at that moment. She was presenting it as one learns in these sorts of clubs, and in the broader self-help culture we’ll talk about. She was presenting this optimistically: “Hey, I saw this video. And maybe it’s actually really kind of cool. Maybe you don’t need that much stuff. Maybe I do have too much stuff in my garage. And maybe I could get free from that and launch a new chapter in my life.” So really putting a positive spin on what looks to me like a really sad story of downward mobility. But having that positive, optimistic attitude is something that you learn in these places, and that Dianna clearly internalized.

SE: You identified three basic categories of advice that people got at these job clubs. Would you tell me a little bit about that?

PS: One type of coach is what I’ll call a job coach. This person is essentially diagnosing the problem of the attendees, and their struggle in the job market. They’re saying that the problem is essentially that you don’t know how to find a job today; you don’t understand the job-search system today. And so, they give lessons on how to navigate LinkedIn. They teach people how to strategically network to find their way into new jobs. They practice interviewing tips. Essentially, what they’re saying is, “You just don’t know these kinds of hacks and tips and tricks and techniques that you need to navigate the job market today, and I can give them to you.” So this is what I call a technical diagnosis.

The second and biggest group is what I’ll call self-help gurus. These are coaches who suggest that the reason you’re struggling in the job market is because you don’t have the right attitude. And this is really a much more moralized diagnosis of the problem. They say essentially that winning in today’s labor market is not like winning in the past. You can’t just call up a firm and ask for a job like we did in the ’70s, as people would often say in these things. To win in today’s labor market, they say, you have to be zeroed in and focused on finding your passion and finding a job that’s going to let you express your passion and find self-actualization at work. You need to be pursuing your calling at work, not just a paycheck.

And so, they often diagnosed people’s problems as having the wrong attitude: “Oh, you just want a job. What you really need is a calling, and I’m going to show you how you can do that. I’ll take you through personality tests, and all kinds of vision-boarding and things like this to help you find your passion. And if you find your passion, and you truly know yourself, there’s no way you can fail. You will land your dream job.” And so, those are the self-help gurus, who are the most interesting to me. They’re the biggest group and give the main message you get at these places.

Then there’s a third one, which I’ll call skill certifiers. And these are coaches who are coming with a little bit more rationalized approaches that are perhaps less exciting. They say, essentially, “The reason you can’t get a job is probably because you don’t have the right skills to fit a shifting labor market. I’m an expert in the kinds of skills and certificates that will help you get a job. Either I run a certification school, or I can point you to places where you can find a coding boot camp, and you can land one of these new tech jobs. And so, that third diagnosis is more about productive skills in the labor market.

But when attendees go to the clubs, they’ll get shades of all three of these diagnoses. And they all could sound reasonable. And people can feel that they apply to them: “Now, maybe my skills are out of date. I’ve been doing the same job for 15 years. That could be real.”

But while they offer different diagnoses, these three different types of coaches all suggest that in the end your unemployment is a personal problem. It is a result of a personal failing of some sort. Either you don’t know how to find a job, you don’t have the right attitude, or you don’t have the right skills. So in the end, all of them point to individual deficiencies as the reason that you’re struggling right now. And in doing so they obfuscate other explanations for why unemployment happens. They point us away from political explanations about why employer power has risen over the last few decades and how that’s been exacted on the workforce. And they instead focus you inward, saying, “Look inside yourself for the answer to your problems.”

SE: Did people accept that? Even if, say, someone’s department had been shipped to India? Did they accept that the real issue was that they weren’t passionate about their job as a project manager or whatever they did?

PS: What people truly believe is hard to get at scientifically. You can ask people on surveys what they thought the problem was. I interviewed people to ask them what they thought the problem was. And for the most part, they repeat the discourses that they’re learning at these clubs; they are pretty good students in that way. They’ll say, “Maybe my department was shipped to India” when I would point that out—a big group of people that I interviewed had exactly that problem. “But maybe if I had loved my job more, I would have found a next step more easily.” They’ll pivot into these other diagnoses and make sense of them alongside those inconvenient facts.

But my broader point is, if you ask people in these job clubs, right after them, what they need to do and what the problem is, they’ll say, "Motivation. I just need to find that passion and do it.” Because they’re pumped up off this meeting and the possibilities that coaches are selling them. But I’m sure also that if and when you talk to these people when they’re at the dinner table trying to keep a child happy and the bills are piling up, they will probably say something a little bit different.

I think people’s beliefs are a little bit changing and moldable; in different situations and contexts people will say different things. But for the most part, I was surprised at how receptive they were to this kind of language. And I think it particularly has to do with the upside promises that coaches offer.

These coaches are offering a positive, optimistic energy in this room. They’re saying, “Yes, you’re down right now. Yes, this has been really bad. But maybe you’re going to look back on this as the best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe you actually didn’t like your job.” And most people really didn’t like their jobs in some ways. “And maybe, if you follow this path I’m offering to you, you’re going to find a job in which you’re going to make more money than ever before. You’re going to love what you’re doing. And you’re going to finally be self-actualized and satisfied with work.” So it’s that positive, optimistic thing that I find people have a hard time turning down. Especially when you’re in the doldrums and in the darkness of unemployment, someone saying, “Hey, you can do it. You can get back on your feet, and it’ll be great”—they gravitate toward that.

SE: In your research, you take a step back and help show how we got here. I hadn’t quite realized until I read your research that mass layoffs were relatively rare until the 1980s. Would you talk a little bit about that, and what impact that had on the relationship between employees and employers?

PS: This is a huge transformation of employment. To give you a rough sketch of how scholars look at this: They talk often about a period of the golden decades after World War II—the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s even—that is often called the Fordist era of employment, based on the model of Henry Ford, which was an economy that was driven by manufacturing and dominated by large bureaucratic firms that offered career-long jobs and employment. We’re talking here about the middle and upper classes—not as much the working classes—although those who were unionized in manufacturing firms created this standard employment relationship during those years that involved a sense of security and longevity for workers. Employers were made to feel responsible for their employees in a way that now seems quite foreign.

Around the 1980s, a number of things change that lead to rising power for employers and declining power for workers as a class. One of these big things is the decline of union power. So the shift away from manufacturing into services and the globalization of various industries undermine union power. This sets wages and standards for job security well beyond actual union places. Those effects rippled out at other workplaces.

The rise in the power of Wall Street and finance put a squeeze on workplaces. Layoffs became normalized, as leaders of firms needed to prove things to shareholders now. And so, they would start doing layoffs just to please shareholders. And you get this phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s when a lot of huge companies are doing mass layoffs, and their stock price goes up. So they’re incentives for employers.

And there’s a bunch of other stuff—technological changes that have in some ways undermined worker power, the rise of other countries around the world. All these different things have made it such that employers have a stronger footing now than employees do. Job markets are looser generally, although we’ve got a pretty tight one now. And the avenues for worker power and for the improvement of jobs, the institutional avenues like labor unions, have been disempowered.

SE: How did that give rise to the outplacement industry?

PS: The normalization of layoffs in corporate America created this steady stream of people getting kicked out of jobs that used to be not the kind of jobs you get kicked out of. I’m talking about white-collar work for the most part. And the outplacement industry popped up in the ’70s, ’80s, really took off in the ’90s. The outplacement firm would get hired on a contract, and it would come coach the employer on how to conduct layoffs. And then, more importantly, maybe offer job-search services to the dismissed.

So the company that’s firing a bunch of people can say, “Hey, we’re firing you. But we paid Lee Hecht Harrison, which is a big one, who’s going to coach you to find your next job.” So it’s kind of this soft hand on the back as they push them out.

And there are a couple of intentions behind this at the beginning of the outplacement industry. One is to do right by employees—just a moral sense that, “Hey, these people work for us. We should help them out as we fire them even.” But the other one is also to protect the company from liability to keep workers from complaining and agitating when they lose their job by giving them the softer landing—or at least, something else to do rather than turn on them and file a grievance or legal action. So the outplacement industry helped create a safety-valve function for these layoffs to make them more normalized and acceptable to workers.

But over time, the outplacement industry grew a ton. Over these decades, when there were more and more layoffs, it incubated a lot of the discourses we hear in job clubs today—the career self-help stuff that we know.

These ideas served to protect companies originally. They sound like they’re there to help workers, but the more important part is to keep workers from complaining and helping them quietly exit out of the way.

SE: I’ve been thinking a lot about how one takes both an accurate view of things in a way that lets a person off the hook and makes a person realize, “OK, my department was shipped to India, so I don’t have to wake up every morning feeling horrible about myself. On the other hand, I still have to find a job.”

PS: If you asked me, what advice I would give job seekers, in some ways it would not be that different from coaches. I would say, “Yeah, you should figure out how to use LinkedIn; that probably matters. Yes, you should network with people, because that does seem to be the way people find jobs. Maybe you should take a certification class if it’ll help your resume or whatever.”

All of that makes sense to me. What I want people to also understand is what you mentioned there: You’re not alone. This is not your fault. And that’s where I think the job clubs and this career self-help discourse are less helpful. The job club is good on the question of “you are not alone.” It actually brings these super-isolated people who’ve just been torn out of their main social worlds—which was their work—together in a room once a week. They get to rub shoulders and chat, and it has a little bit of an office vibe, reenacting office social life. It does create this sense that you are not alone.

But you also really need to know that this is not your fault. And this career self-help discourse is less good on that one. It continues to tell you, “Actually, it kind of is your fault.”

These individual strategies can help you individually, but if we really want to change the way the labor market works, and remedy the deep fallout that comes from unemployment in America, we need to also orient ourselves toward a set of political solutions and ways of organizing and relating to one another that can help put pressure on the economy in such a way that will deliver those kinds of changes. When you spend all your time scrambling to find your dream and passion and self-actualization, I think that is good and great. But I think in some ways, it takes time and energy consciousness away from those other sets of needs.

And then the role of the leaders in the room, the coaches in this case, is really important. They are translating your interests for you. When they tell you that the problem is all individual, and the solutions are all individual, you’re going to move yourself there. But if they also said, “And here are the laws and regulations in the state of Texas that are allowing employers to do this,” that would bring some consciousness that could lead to voting, at the very least, or other forms of solidarity that I think could produce political changes and collective solutions.

SE: They’re only getting half the story.

PS: This is a collective project. We’re all together in a room here. It’s just directed at individual projects. And that’s where that self-help culture directs us. “What are we supposed to be doing here together? Oh, helping each other find ourselves so that we can start our new life of entrepreneurship and ultimate, transcendent success.”

It’s a different goal than saying, “Hey, let’s figure out a world in which we can all work and have some stability and not be terrified of losing our jobs.” And that second goal is, in many ways, less exciting. It’s much more exciting to say, “You’ve always loved painting? You can be a painter and do it on Etsy, and I know how you’re going make money, and it’s going to come together.” That is personally riveting, at least in the way that coaches sell it.

But you can also make that broader collective vision exciting and interesting and attractive and desirable, and something people want to move toward. It just takes a different kind of leadership to speak in that register and move people that way. And places like job clubs and career self-help discourse are certainly not going to do it.

SE: You mentioned that these job clubs are in a certain way funded by the government. Would you talk a little bit about how that works?

PS: The federal, state and local governments to some degree put money toward unemployment and helping people through it. … When the ’80s and ’90s brought this big flood of white-collar workers into unemployment and into these unemployment offices, often state governments started spinning off these kinds of job clubs that they would subsidize.

So a lot of the job clubs that are all over the country today, thousands of them, are spin-offs of unemployment offices. Sometimes they’re directly subsidized by those unemployment offices. Sometimes those offices just provide the space for people to start them. Another way that they’re supported is that to get unemployment insurance, depending on the state, you need to prove that you are searching for a job. One thing they allow, generally, is if you attend these clubs that can count as a job-search activity. It’s just another way that the state, local and federal governments all help channel people into these places—which as my research shows, gets pretty weird for a government-subsidized program. There is vision-boarding; there are visualization practices where we stand up, close our eyes, and imagine our dream jobs.

And from an outsider's perspective, you would often think that state-run unemployment services would really be trying to do this retraining thing that’s often being talked about, “OK, we really need more software developers, then maybe the money should be going to train people to do software development.”

But instead, they offer self-help. To me, that’s another betrayal of American workers. These are people who have put tons of time and effort into their jobs. They get laid off, and the unemployment insurance and the unemployment services that they’ve paid into through taxes just offer a bunch of tropes about picking your head up, and dreaming big, and getting rid of limiting beliefs and thinking in an abundance mindset. That feels like a betrayal.

SE: Thinking of the implications of all of your research beyond unemployment, have you thought about what all this says about the ways that our view of ourselves has changed? And the ways that we face various challenges in our life, be it with health or parenting or family?

PS: I see the rise of the self-help discourse across all kinds of arenas of social life. As we have all been scattered to individually find our own entrepreneurial hustles, self-help culture has risen as what feels to me like the secular gospel that animates and legitimates and motivates people through that individual hustle.

I used to teach elementary school in a quite poor school on the east side of Detroit. And at that time, the big self-help discourse in education was about grit—essentially teaching kids to persevere through difficult circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with that—of course, that is good. We want to teach perseverance. But this was being sold, when I was teaching, as the way to promote upward mobility for these poor kids. And you want to teach perseverance, but you spend a day in those classrooms and you can just see and feel the weight of so many other structural problems pressing down on the school and these kids’ lives—about their parents’ employment, and housing insecurity, and all that. So many issues that are very material and serious and foundational. But self-help culture and education have been like, “Yeah, that’s all true. But let’s look at the kids and see what we can do to this little individual mind to see if we can help them navigate this crazy obstacle course that sits in front of them.”

That can help individual people to some degree, but it’s not a structural solution. Those kids are still going to have housing insecurity problems. Their parents are still not going to have enough money to provide them the kind of things that are going to really accelerate their education. That just also feels like a distraction and an obfuscation of real problems.

You see this kind of language everywhere these days. This a culture that focuses our attention and intention inward on projects of self-realization and self-actualization.

SE: How would you suggest we think about all this?

PS: I think that individual projects—finding yourself and living your best life—are wonderful. I just also believe that we live together fundamentally. This is a sociologist speaking—fundamentally, who we are, and how successful we feel is about our relationships with other people. I’m personally very invested in the idea of solidarity between people. We can pursue our individual projects but still have that sense that we are in this together—that we share a set of structural conditions that we can work on together, that we share some of the same pains, and hopes and promises. Dwelling more on what we hold in common, rather than just scurrying off to chase our own personal dreams.

It’s powerful to know that we share these experiences with other people. I think people feel a different type of way when they know that they’re not alone in this and have people around them who they can talk to about it. And I think there are so many possibilities that can emerge about how we can change ourselves and our social world when we really focus on developing those connections with one another.

To hear more of this conversation, including Patrick’s thoughts on how to think about collective solutions while—ahem—hustling one’s Substack, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Have your ever joined a job club or received career-coaching after a layoff? What was your experience with that, or with career self-help in general?

GUEST BIO: Patrick Sheehan is a sociologist and post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. His research examines the shifting meaning of work in the contemporary economy and has included studies of unemployment, professional career coaching, and—most recently— “hype” culture in Silicon Valley.