In their recent Inside Higher Ed article, Derek Attig shares four things they learned by supporting workers in 2025. Attig is the assistant dean for career and professional development in the Graduate College and has years of experience helping graduate students explore career paths and prepare for job searches.
A little over a year ago, in February 2025, I worked with colleagues to launch an initiative to support fired federal workers and others impacted by wide-ranging federal cuts and policy changes.
It started with a conversation with my colleague Aurora Cruz-Torres, immediately after the Trump administration started firing people at the United States Agency for International Development, about how we could use our skills in career advising to help. And then, as federal firings expanded and grants were cut across the nonprofit and research ecosystems, it grew. Ultimately, the program involved more than 100 volunteers and offered support to more than 1,000 impacted workers. That support was always free and took the form of one-on-one advising sessions, asynchronous résumé reviews and a series of workshops on career transitions.
More than half of the volunteers were members of the Graduate Career Consortium, the leading professional organization in graduate-level career and professional development, and we formed the GCC Public Service Committee to facilitate the work. GCC members were a particularly good fit for this project because the needs of impacted workers often resembled those of graduate students and postdocs transitioning to new careers after years of specialized work.
My role was pretty simple. As requests for support came in through an online form, I read the requester’s narrative of what had happened to them, the description of the help they needed and their background. Then I matched them with an adviser who could help. A straightforward job, but one that gave me a broad perspective on what was happening in the DOGE era and its individual and collective reverberations. As request after request after request came in, I heard stories of disruption, confusion and resilience. And through facilitating meetings with volunteers to support one another, I heard even more about ongoing struggles and emerging needs.
In this article, I use that experience to share four things my collaborators and I learned by supporting workers in the chaotic year of 2025. As chaos continues in 2026, I hope these lessons help us all figure out how to continue showing up for one another.
To read about Derek's lessons, check out the full article on the Inside Higher Ed website.