Detour Stories: Five Career Pivots, Five Stories

Every career pivot on LinkedIn is an after photo. New title, new company, congratulations in the comments. What's missing is the part you need: what it cost, how long it took, and how close they came to turning back.

That's this session. Five people who changed direction answer those questions. Hearing one pivot story is inspiring. All of us love a good reinvention. Hearing five in a single evening is useful. Different experiences, different viewpoints, and enough range that some of it will map to where you actually are.

Part 1 was the analysis or the what of detour stories: six kinds of pivots, the gut check, eleven tools. Free to read, linked below.

Meet the Moderator & Panelists for Session 2

TehShan Lee
Moderator · Co-Founder, JobNet 2.0
Co-founded JobNet 2.0 and co-leads it as a volunteer. She also serves pro bono as an employment counselor at the City of San Mateo's Job Seeker Center, and spent more than a decade on the board of a regional HR association, most of it as chair.

Teresa Abrahamsohn
HR Consultant and Coach
Started out as an electrical engineer designing physical security systems. After an MBA she found her way into HR and stayed. She has worked in both the private and public sector and now consults and coaches, bringing project management and talent development together with how organizations actually run.

Ginny Conboy
HR Generalist · Volunteer, California State Parks
More than forty years in HR: talent acquisition, employee relations, shared services, compliance, most recently at Applied Materials. Alongside all of it, more than twenty years volunteering with California State Parks.

Teresa Solis
HR Leader and Performance Coach
Has built HR functions from nothing twice, most notably scaling Tercica from launch past three hundred employees. She's currently the entire HR function at ViaBot and coaches leaders through Landmark Worldwide's two-year program.

Michelle Miller, PHR
Director of Human Resources
Two decades improving employee experience by building better workplace processes, across high tech, bio-device, education, and nonprofits. She currently works part time as an HR director at an educational organization.

Triparna Chakraborty
HR Business Partner
A founding HR Business Partner at an AI infrastructure and connectivity company. An engineer who became an HR professional, she has worked across talent insights, learning and organizational development, recruiting, and business partnering in five countries.