The career ladder promised stability in exchange for loyalty. For a growing number of professionals, the math stopped adding up, so they started building something else
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Allison Rossi got laid off on a Tuesday. She had crushed every OKR, exceeded every KPI, led a marketing team that was, by all measurable accounts, performing. The layoff was a financial decision, she was told. Not personal. But when you’re told something isn’t personal while it’s happening to you: it seems VERY personal.
Within hours, she was on LinkedIn, scrolling job listings, doing what she’d been trained (and most of us have been trained to do) to do her entire professional life: bounce back, find the next rung, climb. But the interviews didn’t come. And when they did, she bombed them. “I had completely lost self-confidence,” Rossi told me during a video call. “I knew it wasn’t my fault. But I still took it as me.”
What happened next wasn’t a breakdown. It was a redesign.
Rossi had been freelancing alongside her corporate roles for years, picking up marketing projects through friends and former colleagues. She’d been pet sitting since her first son was born 15 years ago. She’d always worked multiple jobs, partly because of how her brain works (she has ADHD), partly because that’s just who she is. She didn’t call it a portfolio career at the time. She called it making it work.
But when the corporate floor dropped out from under her, like the Tower of Terror at Disney World, those side streams became the foundation. Today, Rossi runs her own fractional CMO practice, operates a pet-sitting business and has built a prolific online following advising founders on content strategy. Family members still ask when she’s getting a “real job.” She tells them in no uncertain terms that this is the real job.
Most of us were handed the same career script very early on: do well in school, get a good job, stay loyal, move up. Loyalty meant staying put. Focus meant having one title. Success meant the ladder. And for a long time, the system at least appeared to hold up its end of the deal. You gave the years, you got the stability.
That deal is breaking. In 2025, U.S. employers announced about 1.17 million job cuts through November, the highest year-to-date total since 2020, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Gartner also projects that by 2026, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions. The middle of the corporate ladder is becoming harder to climb, and in some sectors, AI and restructuring are eroding it quickly.
Meanwhile, independent work has become a major part of the U.S. labor market. MBO Partners’ 2025 State of Independence report counts about 72.9 million independent workers, and Upwork says 37% of skilled freelancers hold postgraduate degrees, nearly double the rate of full-time employees. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has said that a five-year career plan can be “a little bit foolish” in a market shaped by rapid technological change. And McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s Women in the Workplace report shows women still remain underrepresented at every level, including 29% of C-suite roles
The system isn’t just stalling for women. It’s asking them to keep waiting in a line that isn’t moving. So when someone like Rossi steps out of line, she’s not actually opting out. She’s drawing a new line.
Brea Starmer didn’t set out to start a company. She set out to pay her bills.
Starmer spent years in enterprise tech, starting at Microsoft, where she pictured herself becoming a VP one day. She left to be employee number one at a staffing firm, then ran a digital marketing agency, then joined an IPO-bound startup. When that company laid off 20% of its workforce, Starmer was seven months pregnant. She faced pregnancy discrimination while trying to find her next role. So she turned to freelance consulting as Plan B, billing 60 hours a week to self-fund her own maternity leave.
That Plan B became the business. After her first child, she returned as a fractional consultant, working 25 hours a week while figuring out what caregiving and ambition looked like in the same sentence. When she got pregnant again, she had what she calls a shot clock: she oversold her contracts, backfilled herself with five consultants and went on leave. Five months postpartum, she sold a million-dollar contract to Microsoft and built a team of 12. That became the foundation of Lions & Tigers, the fractional talent firm she now runs.
In seven years, Lions & Tigers has provided $52 million in economic access across more than 360 professionals. Nine out of 10 of them are women. The company places mid-to-senior talent, averaging 10 to 12 years of experience, at organizations including Microsoft, Amazon, Smartsheet and SAP. They’ve become a self-insured company offering benefits at 20 hours a week, an incredible rarity in the independent workforce.
“We think everything is a project,” Starmer told me. “People can come for a season or stay for a career. It’s up to them to choose how much and when they want to work, and then we match them with clients that need their exact skill.”
What she hears from the people who land at her company is consistent: the traditional deal stopped making sense. Raises weren’t keeping up. The travel was too hard. The promise of growth had stalled. Many come from traumatic workplace experiences. One consultant told Starmer that Lions & Tigers felt like “the aloe to my workplace burns.”
“I often think what we’re doing is the bare minimum,” Starmer said. “We’re just being normal humans. We’re just telling the truth, and we’re doing good by people. And that feels really counterculture to where they’re coming from.”
When I asked Rossi about loyalty, she didn’t hesitate. “There’s no real loyalty,” she said. “Companies are there to make money. Employees are also there to make money. I wouldn’t continue working at a company that wasn’t paying me. So why should a company keep paying me if they can’t afford to?”
It sounds blunt, and it is blunt. It’s also true, and it names something a lot of professionals are feeling and few are able to articulate: the emotional contract we signed with corporate work was never really mutual. We were trained to see a steady paycheck as proof of safety and a single employer as the proper container for ambition. Meanwhile, that same employer could restructure you out of a job on any given Tuesday, regardless of performance, and call it a “business decision.”
Paula Gorman, a fractional operations leader and founder of The Consultants Room, a community for fractional and consulting professionals, put it in sharper structural terms. “A lot of people confuse predictability with stability,” Gorman told me. “A salary is predictable, but it is still concentrated risk.” She described her own view of loyalty not as permanence, but as integrity, stewardship and judgment, qualities she now directs across multiple client relationships rather than investing them in a single employer.
Rossi framed it from the other side: “We’ve been trained to think that a real job is stable and freelancing is unstable. But really, I think they’re both quite unstable.”
To be clear, this isn’t cynicism. It’s clarity. And that clarity is what’s propelling a growing number of professionals toward building career structures that don’t depend on a single point of failure. When Rossi’s family asks when she’s getting a real job, the question reveals less about her career and more about a generational assumption that one employer equals security. She’s been working nonstop. She’s just doing it differently.
Starmer sees this tension from the enterprise side. When she started Lions & Tigers seven years ago, there were roughly 30 million freelancers in the U.S. Now there are more than 70 million. The people arriving at her firm are getting younger and more senior at the same time: experienced professionals in their late 30s and 40s who’ve put in 10, 15, 20 years and can’t reconcile the deal anymore.
“I think right now, especially for women, it is imperative that you go as fast as you possibly can to box out against the idea that you do not have agency over that one 9-to-5 job,” Starmer said. “The clock is changing.”
Both Rossi and Starmer are candid about what this path actually costs. Rossi was transparent that going fractional was a pay cut, at least initially. She has a husband with a full-time job and health insurance. She has rental income. She has savings she has maintained obsessively. “I don’t encourage anyone to just quit their job and become fractional,” she said. “It doesn’t work out for everyone, and it can be a huge risk.”
Starmer echoed the pragmatism. She has been the breadwinner in her family. She is responsible for the mortgage, the light bill and the literal procurement of shoes for her children. “There are times at which you can take bigger risks and there’s times when you can’t,” she said. “I want to recognize the incredible privilege that I have and have built for myself over doing this for many years.”
Gorman, who coaches consultants on the operational side of going independent, pointed to a common stumbling block. “The biggest mistake is treating fractional like a job title instead of a business model,” she said. Talented operators leave corporate and underestimate how much infrastructure they just left behind. Now they have to define the offer, scope the work, price it, sell it and manage expectations themselves. The ones who struggle, Gorman said, are usually too general and too anchored to their old salary.
This honesty is incredibly important because the narrative around nonlinear careers can easily tip into aspirational gloss. The reality involves health insurance calculations, irregular income and the particular vulnerability of building something without a corporate safety net.
Rossi said something that helps remove the rose colored glasses for those peering into the fractional world and wondering if it’s for them: “I’m still scared. I still get worried, like, what if everyone just decides they don’t need me anymore? That’s never happened. But what if it does?” And then, almost immediately: “But that can also happen with a real job.”
The fear doesn’t go away. You just learn to build around it. And increasingly, building around it means having more than one thing holding you up.
We were taught that loyalty to an employer was a virtue, that staying in one place for a long time demonstrated character. How many of us have had conversations in interviews about short spurts of time at certain jobs, insinuating we were job hoppers? In a labor market shaped by restructuring, AI displacement and return-to-office mandates that have pushed hundreds of thousands of women out of the workforce, those old behaviors don’t signal character. They signal compliance with a system that is no longer holding up its end.
Professionals are redefining loyalty, not as allegiance to a single employer, but as commitment to their own growth, stability and lives. The behaviors we were trained to see as risky are increasingly the strategic ones.
Starmer borrows a term from real estate to describe what she coaches her consultants toward: highest and best use. It’s the principle that a plot of land should be developed to return the most value. She applies it to human potential. What if every professional asked themselves not “what’s the next rung?” but “what’s my highest and best use in this season of my life?”
But for this shift to hold, the systems around it need to catch up. Gorman made the case super simple: benefits and protections need to become more portable. “If more people are building careers across multiple clients and income streams, the systems that provide stability cannot stay tied so tightly to one traditional employer,” she said. “We need to stop talking about fractional or consulting work like it is a temporary workaround. For many people and many companies, it is already a legitimate and strategic part of how work gets done.”
Rossi’s family still sees her career as in-between. She doesn’t. And she’s stopped waiting for them to catch up. “People don’t think it counts,” she said. “But I do. That’s what matters.”
The plot didn’t disappear. It just changed. And the people paying attention are the ones rewriting it.
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