Lessons learned from new book Build Your Table by Career Sistas Founder Beverly Vanterpool
Build Your Table by Beverly Vanterpool, ebook & hardcover release September 25 2025, available to order online and in all good bookshops: https://mybook.to/BuildYourTable
Redundancy is more than a career setback, let’s be honest, it can feel like grief. Shock, disbelief, and even questions of identity are common. Losing a role you’ve worked hard for is unsettling, even when you know change is part of professional life. Yet, with the right strategies, a career loss can be the turning point that unlocks resilience, adaptability, and unexpected opportunities.
Grieving the Loss
Redundancy has much in common with mourning. Like any loss, it needs to be acknowledged. For many professionals, work is more than income; it’s a key part of identity. When that role is taken away, it’s natural to feel destabilised. As Beverly Vanterpool reflects in her new book Build Your Table: Find Career Clarity, Make Bold Pivots and Thrive – Even When the System Isn’t Built for You, when her own role was made redundant, she instinctively focused on handovers and practical tasks – much as she had done when facing personal loss in her family. Only later did she allow space for the emotional impact.
Recognising the need to grieve before facing the world again is not weakness: it’s a step toward recovery.
Redefining Identity Beyond a Job Title
One of the most unsettling moments after redundancy comes when asked the simplest of questions: “What is your job title?” or “Who do you work for?” Losing the shorthand of identity that a title provides can trigger anxiety.
Vanterpool describes the disorientation she felt when confronted with this in her own journey. She had always gone straight from one role to another. For the first time, she faced the prospect of being “between jobs” with no clear label.
The lesson here is to separate who you are from what you do. Skills, values, and resilience remain intact even when an organisation or job is gone. A job can end, but the knowledge and experience you bring to the table endure.
Building Resilience
Resilience is often misunderstood as being endlessly strong. Vanterpool offers a more practical view: it is adaptability. It is not about being unshakeable, but about allowing yourself to fall, then choosing to get back up. It is about finding trusted circles for support, reframing setbacks, and taking incremental steps forward.
For her, volunteering has been one avenue to resilience. By giving time to charities, she gained perspective on her own situation; recognising both her challenges and her privileges. Whatever the outlet, resilience grows when you decide not to let what happened to you define you, but instead let your choices afterward define you.
Pivoting Toward New Opportunities
Redundancy can become a catalyst. At first, Vanterpool applied for roles that matched her skills, but soon realised they were not going to challenge her. Instead, she took the leap into entrepreneurship and authorship.
For others, the pivot may be into consultancy, a portfolio career, or a completely new sector. The key is intentionality: auditing transferable skills, being open to learning, and seeking opportunities that align with your values.
Moving From Loss to Power
Redundancy may feel like the end of the story, but it can be the beginning of reinvention. By grieving the loss, redefining identity, cultivating resilience, and being intentional about the next steps, professionals can turn a career setback into career power.
As Vanterpool writes reflecting on a key learning that she picked up years ago: ‘You cannot change what happens to you, but you can change how you respond to it… and that can change the outcome.’
About Beverly Vanterpool
Beverly Vanterpool is an author, businessperson and founder of Career Sistas (www.careersistas.com), a platform dedicated to empowering women – especially those who have ever felt like outsiders in traditional career spaces.
With over two decades of experience in roles in large multinational companies, Beverly brings a wealth of understanding from her personal career journey along with insights garnered from others through creating and leading groups within her former industry focused on diverse women.
Beverly holds an honours bachelor’s degree in economics/finance and management from Barry University in Miami, Florida, a UK accountancy qualification (ACCA), and an MBA from the University of Cambridge.
Originally from the British Virgin Islands, Beverly has successfully navigated the complexities of relocating as an immigrant, working in the UK over the last twenty years and professionally is known as a changemaker.
As the founder of Career Sistas, she empowers women through storytelling on her podcast, Stories by Career Sistas and plans a wider range of services targeted at supporting women in their careers.