When the Playbook Breaks: Erica Rivera on Rebuilding Your Career After a Layoff

Erica Rivera

What happens when you do everything right (the degrees, the promotions, the glowing reviews) and the career you built still stops feeling like yours? In this episode of Her Career Unplugged, Joanne and Vimala sit down with Erica Rivera, a career coach who spent years reading resumes inside Indeed and Google, until a November 2023 email told her she no longer worked there. Erica gets honest about the shock of that moment, why so many women internalize a layoff as a personal failure, and the "career story walkthrough" she uses to help clients separate what actually happened from the story they're telling themselves. She shares how getting rejected from job after job pushed her to finally go all in on coaching, how she moved her family abroad, and why getting comfortable being seen is now non-negotiable. A layoff is an event, not an identity, and sometimes it's the push to burn down the old playbook and write a new one.