Licia Dewing

Career Strategist

My approach to career strategy is designed to help you cut through the noise, clarify what truly matters, and take confident action toward work that fits who you are now. I help you move forward with a strategy rooted in clarity, strength, and purpose.

Career Strategy that gets you unstuck, clear, and moving forward with purpose.

It's never too late to start and If you’re ready , Book a complimentary Career Strategy Connect.

How to Build a Career That Can Survive Change

Alana Sparrow built a business around one industry, one primary revenue stream, and one way of working. Corporate storytelling and documentary-style videography made up 60% of her agency's revenue, and it was some of the most respected work of its kind in the world.

Then the pandemic hit. Video was one of the first industries to shut down, and it was the last to reopen, nearly two years later. While her agency was still finding its footing, she lost her mother suddenly, and the business went quiet again for the better part of a year.

By the time she came up for air, in her words, she had "one shoe dropped, one shoe dangling." The revenue model she'd built her career on for 25 years no longer held.

What she did next is worth paying attention to, but not because it's a dramatic comeback story. It's because of what it reveals about how careers actually survive change: not through more effort in the same direction, but through capital she'd already been quietly building for years, her expertise, her reputation, her ability to position value clearly, repackaged for a different environment.

That's the real subject of this article. Not Alana specifically, but the question her story puts in front of all of us: what happens to your career when the environment it was built for disappears?

Most of us build our careers around a fairly narrow set of anchors:

your employer
your title
your industry
your current expertise
your existing network

Every one of those is useful. None of them is guaranteed. And when one shifts, a career built entirely on top of it shifts with it.

1. Experience isn't enough

Experience tells you how long someone has been doing something. It doesn't tell you whether that time has translated into strategic value, the kind that travels with you when the context changes.

You can spend fifteen years deepening expertise inside one system, one industry, one way of doing things, and still be caught flat-footed the moment that system changes.

That's not a failure of effort. It's what happens when experience stays purely operational, the doing of the work, rather than becoming something you can articulate, position and transfer elsewhere.

The people who move through disruption well aren't necessarily the most experienced people in the room. They're the ones who've turned experience into something portable.

2. Build portable Career Capital

This is where I want to introduce a framework I use with clients: Career Capital.

Career Capital is what actually travels with you when your employer, your industry or your role changes. It's the asset underneath your CV, built across six areas:

Knowledge Capital – what you know and can apply
Identity Capital – how clearly you understand and can articulate who you are professionally
Visibility Capital – whether the right people know what you're capable of
Social Capital – the strength and breadth of your professional relationships
Reputation Capital – what people say about you when you're not in the room
Opportunity Capital – your access to the roles, projects and rooms that move you forward

Alana didn't build a new career from nothing when her industry collapsed. She had decades of Knowledge and Reputation Capital in positioning and brand strategy, work she'd done for other businesses for years. What changed was the Visibility and Identity Capital: for the first time, she pointed all of that expertise at her own brand instead of only her clients'.

That's the pattern worth noticing.

The capital was already there. What made it usable was the decision to make it visible and applicable outside the one environment it had been built inside.

3. Work ON your career

There's a distinction I come back to constantly with clients, and it's one Alana draws too: the difference between working in your career and working on it.

Working in your career is the doing. The deliverables, the deadlines, the climbing of whatever ladder is in front of you. It's necessary, and most of us are good at it, because it's what we're trained and rewarded for.

Working on your career is different. It's the deliberate step back to ask what you're actually building, why, and whether the direction still makes sense. It's not something school teaches you, and it's rarely something your job asks of you either. Which means if it's going to happen, you have to build the space for it yourself.

The people who navigate change well tend to be the ones who were already doing this before the change forced the question.

4. Make your value visible

Visibility gets a bad reputation. People hear it and think self-promotion, and recoil a little.

That's not what it is.

Visibility is making your value easier for the right people to recognise. It's the difference between doing excellent work that only you and your direct manager know about, and doing excellent work that the right decision-makers can actually see and understand the impact of.

If you're the only one who knows what you're capable of, you're not being humble. You're making yourself easy to overlook.

5. Position before you need to pivot

One of the clearest lessons from Alana's story is timing. Across a 35-year career, through multiple recessions, the lesson she keeps repeating to clients is to prepare for volatility before it hits, not during.

Most people do the opposite.

They wait for redundancy, restructuring or a slow build of career dissatisfaction to force the question of what's next.

By then, you're making strategic decisions under pressure, with far less room to manoeuvre.

Positioning yourself well doesn't mean living braced for disaster. It means doing the work, understanding your value, knowing where your industry is heading, keeping your options live, before you ever need to use them.

6. Build a personal brand that supports your career

Not everyone needs to become a content creator or build a public following. That's not the point, and I don't want you walking away from this thinking it is.

What everyone benefits from is being able to clearly articulate:

What I know. What I do. What I care about. What I'm known for. What value I create.

That clarity is the personal brand, whether or not a single word of it ever appears on LinkedIn. It's what lets you walk into a conversation, an interview or a negotiation and represent your value accurately, instead of hoping someone else notices it for you.

7. Build a career with options

The goal here was never certainty.

There isn't a version of career planning that guarantees your industry won't shift, your role won't change, or your organisation won't restructure.

The goal is strategic flexibility: enough Career Capital, visibility and clarity about your own value that when change comes, and it will, you have real options rather than a single narrow path forward.