What used to be a bad stretch is starting to look permanent for a lot of workers. Hiring is slow, layoffs keep hitting, and AI keeps changing the skills employers want.
So people are pivoting. They are switching fields, learning new tools, or starting businesses.
Douglas Craig knows this from the inside. He lost his media executive job in June 2025, and when no other media role turned up, he took a pay cut.
Now he works at a Colorado aerial-adventure park. His job includes rescuing people from trees, and not long after training, he had to belay a family down from a ropes course during a sudden lightning storm.
"I didn't feel like I was starting over; I just kind of feel like I was shifting to something that just brought more happiness and joy," Craig said.
Kevin Hannegan's director job at a publishing company ended in 2024, and full-time work never came back. He earned money delivering for DoorDash and doing odd jobs.
He repaired deck boards, swapped out ceiling fans, and joined the Raleigh crew that switches the Lenovo Center over between events. That work was technically with the Carolina Hurricanes, so Hannegan was part of the organization when the team claimed the Stanley Cup in June.
"I've accepted that part-time opportunities might be the best fit for me," Hannegan said.
Jon McCarty's contract as a software engineer ended in 2022, and after searching for more than a year, he took a part-time job ringing up customers at Home Depot.
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He also used construction skills from decades earlier to take on handyman jobs.
"I started coming to grips with the idea that I will probably never get another software job," McCarty said.
Tanvi Pisal, a 29-year-old product designer in San Jose, worried AI would replace her. A startup cut her last fall, and the layoff notice pointed to how quickly the company was adopting AI.
Even after she took a contract role with a large tech firm, she kept learning. Pisal spends up to 15 hours a week testing AI tools and showing up at workshops.
"I don't want to be in a position a few years from now where I realize the industry moved forward and I didn't make the effort to keep learning alongside it," Pisal said.
Robin Peppers Daniel lost a management job at Wells Fargo and could not land another full-time position. She earned income by substitute teaching, weighed going into teaching full time, and took a shot at a web design company with her husband.
Bonnie Chiurazzi turned a dead end into a business. After a layoff and an unsuccessful job search, she founded Vibe Insights Lab, a market research firm.
She calls the path from employee to unemployed person to business owner an experiment that improved her health. The corporate stress and layoff risk were too much, and she says even a new corporate job would have left her fearing another cut.
She does not plan to return to corporate work for now. She is learning to handle hard decisions, likes controlling outcomes, and values choosing clients and helping them earn income.
"I didn't realize how much work it was going to be," she said. "I went into it really confident, and I came out humbled, but it was worth it."
"It feels like the best time to continue to experiment because I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything," Chiurazzi said.
The ones who found income did not wait for their old jobs back. They added skills, accepted part-time work, or built something of their own.
That pattern matters for anyone with a paycheck, and for anyone with money in the stock market. Companies are betting big on AI and cutting costs, and that keeps pushing workers into new roles.
The bottom line: Skills travel better than job titles. A career built around what you can do survives a layoff better than one built around where you sit, and that logic holds for a resume or a portfolio.
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