We recently connected with Caroline Ceniza-Levine and have shared our conversation below.

Caroline, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

I’m a career coach who specializes in career change. Too many people, including coaches, treat career change in a stepwise fashion — Step 1, figure out what you want to change to; Step 2 execute that change. In my experience as a multiple time career changer (classical piano to banking, consulting, executive search, acting, corporate HR, and finally entrepreneurship) and in coaching others through a pivot, Steps 1 and 2 happen simultaneously. In fact, you need to be in Step 2 — doing something that gets you closer to your change — to really confirm that what you think your Step 1 target is is actually correct.
Many times, you just won’t know what you really want without taking small actions in the general direction of the change you want to make.
For example, I had a client who came to me after she had worked for 2 years with 2 different coaches and got nowhere trying to change careers. She had been working in investment banking for almost 2 decades at the time and wasn’t quite sure what she wanted except that she wanted a change. Her Step 1 was too fuzzy to really be actionable, so we just picked whatever the closest vision was — in her case, she loved mentoring and professional development so we guessed an HR career might be a close enough target. She ended up as Director of Community Outreach and Fundraising for a k-12 public school system in a major metro, and she made that change within a few months. Even though her Step 1 was wrong, it was enough to go to Step 2 — and it was the doing that brought the clarity, not vice versa.

Caroline, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My career has always been about careers. Even in college, my work study job was in the Office of Career Services! My first job out of college was giving advice (as a management consultant in the financial services industry), and this understanding of businesses deepened my understanding of different careers.
From there, I worked in recruiting and HR, so I saw the employer’s side of career decisions in hiring, promoting, restructuring, etc.
Finally, I started DreamCareerClub.com, my own career coaching business after 15 years in traditional employment. I have worked in and around careers from many different angles – my own career and multiple pivots, as a coach to my clients’ career transitions, as a recruiter representing the employer side, as a longtime career advice columnist (currently at Forbes.com, formerly at Money/Time, CNBC and Portfolio), and as a teacher (adjunct at Columbia University).
My philosophy is that you can make a great living doing work you love.
I help people do that via my career change book, Jump Ship: 10 Steps To Starting A New Career, online courses such as Behind the Scenes in the Hiring Process and Making FIRE Possible, both of which I designed and led, live keynotes and workshops which I deliver to companies, associations, universities and other groups (popular topics include negotiation, personal branding, networking and resilience), and 1:1 coaching which is available to members of my Dream Career Club and to organizations that retain me to work with their staff. Some of my clients have pivoted from soulless jobs to careers that fulfill them, some have more than doubled their salaries. Money and meaning are not mutually exclusive!

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Since I specialize in career pivots, I’ll share a recent one of my own. I had already made several career pivots throughout my career, so when I ended up running my own company, I felt like I had arrived. Four years into my business, profits had exceeded my corporate revenue, and I was feeling very fulfilled in what I was doing. However, I also felt like I was burning out, and since my work is professional services, I essentially trade time for money.
I tried multiple ways to scale – hiring subcontractors, productizing my services – and these helped take some of the pressure off. I still collaborate with others on big projects, and I still offer products. However, these conventional ways to scale are also different businesses entirely – i.e., managing teams and marketing products. I actually didn’t enjoy these business activities as much so have kept them to a minimum.
This still left me with a problem of how to scale my revenues without giving up even more of my time. The solution ended up being something entirely different from my coaching business – real estate. For several years, while my company was growing, I funneled profits into rental real estate, which then produced an income apart from my trading time for money. I could scale without scaling my actual business.
The solution seems obvious to me now but at the time, I was caught up in the conventional ways of scaling a business. Even someone who coaches others on their careers can also have blind spots!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

What helped me is what I coach my clients to do in order to grow their personal brand – writing, speaking and media. I do all three, but you don’t need to – going deep in one area you enjoy will suffice. In my case, I write career advice columns for top media (Forbes, Money, Time, CNBC), which enables me to reach their audience, as well as gives me the halo effect of their brand recognition. I also speak at conferences, which puts me out in front of every other attendee and also brands me as an expert in the topic. Finally, I get quoted by major media on career issues, which gives me audience reach, halo effect and expert credibility. My clients have done the same. One pharma VP appeared on a panel at his business school alma mater, and members of the audience were VC investors who then tapped him to run one of their portfolio companies. Another client wrote original content on LinkedIn, which led to consulting assignments in her area of expertise. Finally, one aspiring career changer wanted to go from big company to startup and from operations to biz dev, so he focused on startup conferences, which led to pro bono advisory assignments, which led to a robust network in his new field an a reputation for being a startup, biz dev guy – completing his reputation pivot even while he kept his day job (ultimately he left his day job for one of his startup connections).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cenizalevine.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinecenizalevine/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cenizalevine/