Women in midlife who still need to or want to work, often find themselves stuck in limbo and confusion trying to figure out their next career move.
If this sounds like you or someone you know, check out “EvolveMe”. It’s an innovative midlife coaching community to help you relaunch, pivot or level up your career whether you’re in your 40s. 50s, 60s or beyond.
Founders Judy Schoenberg and Linda Lautenberg have been there, done that, and realized through their own experiences that many others in the same boat must need help.
They created the community, structure, and tools to help you make whatever is next for you … happen!
They can help with professional resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and even teach you transferable skills.
These gals are the real deal. They help make midlife career reinvention fun enjoyable and REWARDING.
They and others involved with EvolveMe provide a much-needed resource to women in midlife, who are underrepresented in leadership roles in the workforce and often face barriers due to ageism, gender discrimination, racism, pay inequity and as mothers and caregivers.
Linda who re-invented her career after 3 kids and a 16 year break and knows how isolating reviving your professional career can feel. Before founding EvolveMe, she was the Director of Outreach at Inspiring Capital, supporting women transitioning back to the workforce. She’s a founding member and Regional Facilitator Lead for Harvard Business School Alumni Circles and a leader of Impact 100 Jersey Coast, a women’s philanthropic investment nonprofit. Before that she had a successful finance career at the Prudential Investment Corporation and Nomura Securities. She’s a Chartered Financial Analyst and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Judy Schoenberg has another big Harvard brain. She left her role as Chief Research Executive at Girl Scouts of the USA after a fifteen-year tenure to pivot and start her own next chapter. She honed her skills at national organizations like Girl Scouts of the USA and the Ms. Foundation for Women as well as at Pace University’s women’s leadership initiative and community-based and start-up ventures. Her work has been featured at the White House, MAKERS, npr.com, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. She holds leadership roles at several nonprofit educational institutions and a Master of Education in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Both Judy and Linda emphasize the importance of helping women regain confidence, reassess their skills, and understand their value in the marketplace. The impact of the pandemic on women was loud, with many leaving the workforce, and launching their company coincided with this timeline, and they began offering support for women returning to work.
EvolveMe also works with companies invested in attracting and retaining top female talent. At the heart of EvolveMe is a belief that when companies understand women’s needs, they’re better able to attract and retain them.
Meet the EvolveMe Founders in this podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you’d rather read, the transcript is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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I was talking about the heating pads for your back that are making me really happy these days, that are making me feel good. But there’s some girls who got your back, they’re going to make you feel really good if you’re in your 40s, 50s, 60s or beyond and you’re a woman who’s been a professional and is trying to figure out what next, how to make the move, how to reinvent, how to pivot, how to risk the next really wild and bold move in your life. So hey guys, I’m Debbie Nigro, welcome back. Back to introduce you to two really cool girls who I met by accident from somebody else who contacted
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me on LinkedIn who I was reading about and saw she was involved with an organization called Evolve Me. I was like, what is Evolve Me? I love this thing. So founders Judy Schoenberg and Linda Lautenberg are going to join me in just a second. They have been there, done that. I just want to tell you a little bit about them and realize through their own experiences that many others in the same boat must need help. They can help you relaunch or pivot or level up your career, no matter how old you are,
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and they created the community and the structure and the tools to make whatever your next thing is happen. So, hello girls. Hi Judy. Hi Linda. Welcome.
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Hi Debbie.
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Hi, Debbie.
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This is Judy.
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Good to be here.
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Hi, Judy. Whenever I have two people and I’m not seeing you, I have to get to know the voices a little bit. So, Judy, let’s talk first, right? Sure. This is a big story you guys are putting out there about what you’re doing for women. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? I know you’re special and you’re smart, and I told people earlier, but you tell us what led you to this moment.
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Sure.
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This is Judy. I was a non-profit executive for my whole career and I, several years ago, was looking down the pike and I saw 50 coming. I was in my mid-40s and I said, you know, I’ve been at this one organization where I had a great career for 15 years and I knew that I had a next chapter in me and I just didn’t know what that looked like at the time, so I took a leap and I left my role of 15 years and then went through kind of an identity crisis like who am I now without this role, this title, this office.
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Very tough. When you step out of what the typical thing people know you for is, and who are you? It’s weird.
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Exactly.
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And, you know, it rattled people. You know, they knew me as somebody who worked with girls and youth. I worked at the Girl Scouts of the USA for all that time, so it was a household name. And who was I now without that identity? And but I knew that that’s what I needed to do to get to the next stage for my own professional growth. And I, you know, I actually, after some time, I was a freelancer and then after some time, I felt like, you know, this is really isolating.
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It’s hard to figure out what you want to do next. And you can Google and Google your way, you know, and find a lot of resources on the topic of career change and career pivots, as you said. I knew that there had to be other women like me, you know, in their 40s, in their 50s, who also had maybe, you know, been in one industry or area for a long time and were yearning for something different.
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And I stumbled upon you.
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Yeah, I just want to get over to Linda, who’s one of those other people, for a second, and then we’ll talk about what you guys are doing for other people. Linda Lautenberg, also been there, done that, reinvented after what, three kids and a 16-year break from your career Linda?
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Yeah I had a long break. I was in finance and we when I had my first child and we moved out of the city I couldn’t quite do those 15-hour days anymore and I really thought that I was taking a break for a year or two and that something would just fall into my lap. 15 years later, I realized I’ve been doing a lot of work outside the house but none of it paid. My oldest was getting ready to go to college and that I had forgotten my own career and that I was quickly working my way out of my parent job. So, like Judy, I started Googling and trying to figure out like what should I do next and
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the problem was I knew I didn’t want to go back into finance again because I was a different person 16 years ago. I had done a lot of different things.
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I wanted a little more meaning for my career but I had no idea where to start. I think it’s amazing how 15 years can fly by and you still have no idea what just happened. So as time goes on, you realize time is really valuable and you want to make the best of it and you have all these women in the world and there are plenty who are talented and brilliant and yet we’re in a kind of weird still world of ageism and gender discrimination and you pointed out racism and pay inequity and so many mothers and caregivers. What’s the number of women who have left the workforce recently. You had something interesting, Judy, on your website
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about how many women have left because they just can’t deal with what’s going on out there in the world of business.
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Yeah, I mean, I think we saw during the last few years during the pandemic, you know, and that’s when we started Evolve Me, just by coincidence, when all these women were leaving the workforce. I think at the time it was like up to 40%, you know, four years ago. And now women have made a great comeback, but still need support once they get there because
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we’ve seen remote work and hybrid work happen. I think that those circumstances and that flexibility is really amazing for women and we want it to stay that way for them. We’re actually also working with companies to help them attract and retain top talent.
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So what’s the opportunity out there for women of all these ages? Plenty or is the opportunity easier to attain with the right steering which I think what you guys are trying to show that you have?
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Yeah, I mean we help women get ready for the right opportunities. So many women as you said like talented, accomplished women who’ve had success, you know, in their their former careers come to us with really low self-confidence because of ageism, because of, you know, they feel like they’re outdated or not relevant or not up, you know, with the latest technology. And we help them kind of, you know, do that inner work, like take stock of their skills, their talents, their accomplishments, really to own their value so that they go in to opportunities with their best self, putting their best self forward.
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So we help them come up with, once they kind of get that confidence, the elevator pitch that really tells a compelling career story to really come out and be loud and proud about what they’ve done. We also talk about transferable skills a lot, the skills that you got, whether you were caregiving and not in the paid workforce or skills that you got from one industry can be transferred to the next. So what are the skills that you really want to lift up? Communication skills, leadership skills, conflict resolution skills, like women are great at
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all, you know, so many of these things. A lot of these things take years and years kind of like on the job to train to. So when you think about being in competition with the younger generation, like women in their 40s and 50s have a competitive edge because they put in the time to gain those kind of leadership skills.
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Okay, and you said 60s and beyond. You know, I just did a little tidbit about how many people are going to be turning 60 or over 60 by the year 2030. It’s like one in six. Wow. Yeah, it’s loud. And I imagine that there are a lot of companies who are going to have to not only acknowledge this in terms of services but also acknowledge that people need to work and they’re going to be working longer years.
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So women who already have just been through so many challenges now need to really get sharp and I think what I understand what you guys do is offer, is it one-on-one or you have a 12-week course? What is it that is the opportunity?
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Yeah, so we have a couple of things. We definitely work with people one-on-one to either do an audit so they can just get started. A lot of times women are just trying to figure out what it would be that they even want to do next. So to do some of that inner work and we have packages of coaching. We also have a training called the Reinvention Collective that is a 12-week experience. We’ve run nine cohorts of that now so far that takes women through our method of queer reinvention. So it starts with all that inner work of figuring out what you want to do next, getting your
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confidence back and then all your professional tool kit like your resume, your LinkedIn, networking strategies, interview skills. So it’s very soup to nuts.
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Oh, that’s great. I know you also work with the companies who would like to attract and retain top female talent? Because you and I and all the other smart women know that balance of talents and having women on your team is always good for the bottom line, no matter what company it is. It’s just amazing, right? So do you have an insight as to what companies are looking for to help guide some of these women to where the opportunity exists?
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I think especially coming out of the pandemic, all those kind of people call them soft skills, transferable skills, we call them power skills, are increasingly in demand. So people are, companies are looking for people that are agile, that are resilient, people that are quick learners, that love to learn, that have a growth mindset. All of these things that people with perspective and wisdom, all these skills that women in midlife have in abundance.
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That is great. That’s great. What about money? Obviously, if you’re working, you’d like to be rewarded. Do you have a way of steering women to their value? I think women don’t even know what their value in the workplace is anymore if they’ve been out of it for a while. Yeah, we help women, you know, kind of, you know, first it takes like owning
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their value, like internally and owning their accomplishments and, you know, putting together like we help them have a refresh resume and LinkedIn profile so that they’re really being able to communicate their value in the marketplace. And only then can they, you know, start to think about like, what, you know, what, what jobs can I really align my skill set to and what can I demand? You know, what kind of salary can I demand in the marketplace?
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So often we see women kind of aiming, you know, for too low, especially if they’ve been out of the workplace but once they go through this process, you know, we have a whole method for that in the training that you had mentioned, that 12-week training and we also take our one-on-one clients through this process. They come out feeling so much more in control
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of their career and able to ask for what they’re worth.
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Got it. A lot of times women who are coming back in, you know, worry about money. So is your service affordable? We have, oh go ahead, Judy.
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No, go ahead, Linda. We have a different price points and ranges. So anything from doing a full 12-week program to doing one-off consulting, everything in between. Okay, awesome. So you’re open and easy.
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And we all know that this is an overwhelming topic. And I was looking – as you both were talking, I was imagining you both sitting there with your computers, Googling like, who am I what is that? Where are we going and throwing in a little laundry like screw it for today? Let’s try again tomorrow it sometimes takes a little bit of You know follow up to or a spark, you know this conversation might just spark one person to go You know what? I’m doing this because I can’t do this myself It’s very hard to be but we always say if you can’t see it
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You can’t be it and a lot of times women that are in this space, whether they’ve been in the same role for 20 years because it works for their family, and so they’ve just stayed even if they haven’t really liked it for the last 10, or if you’re, you know, like me, you’ve just been at home for a long time and now you feel like it’s too
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late for you, you know, once you see, it’s very isolating, as Judy said, and you feel
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So if you see other women that are getting out there and having success and you do this work together with other women, it’s so much more empowering and confidence building and you really see that you can have a next chapter and a next and a next
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and it really is never too late. Oh, I love it. That’s exactly my theme here on the show. Thank you girls. Anybody listening, evolveme.work is the website and a lot of the graduates from their collective said they described the Evolve Me programming as life-changing and the best professional investment they’ve ever made. Thank you, Judy and Linda. Have a great rest of your day. I’m so glad we met.
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Best of luck.
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Thanks, Debbie. This is great.
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Okay, guys.
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Thank you, Debbie. This was fun. Thank you, Debbie. This was fun.
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Okay, great. Good to have you. I hope everybody finds out about you.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
