Peter Sherer helps people discover the work they love to do and helps them transition successfully into meaningful new assignments or into a new phase of life.

Have you had a gut feeling lately that you’ve outgrown your job? Perhaps you are dragging your feet when Monday rolls around. You want to be loyal to your organization and stay. However, your gut is telling you that this just isn’t the right place for you anymore. Or maybe it’s the right place, but you need some new responsibilities and challenges to help you get your mojo back.

Everyone has bad days. It’s normal to feel frustrated and bored from time to time, especially given how life and work changed with the pandemic. For example, many experienced burnouts due to all the stress and changes that took place. So, how do you know if these things are just temporary or if they indicate a bigger problem?

The problem is that it can be hard to determine when the right time is to leave. Often people stay for far too long when they no longer have anything left to gain by waiting.

If you have already experienced career success and want to get clear about your next professional steps, this session can help you envision your future and the next steps you want to take. This session will help you get a better mental picture of what the next phase of your work life could look like if it were perfectly suited to you.

The people who will benefit most from this session are ready to make a transition to a new assignment but are unsure of two things:

  • how to describe an ideal job specifically enough so that people in their network can refer them to people who can be helpful
  • how to implement a low-risk approach to finding an ideal job

About the Presenter: Peter Sherer, CEO and Founder, Experience Matters

After college in the Midwest and stints at the divinity and business schools at Harvard, Peter Sherer arrived in Washington, DC and spent the next 12 years working in federal government. He sensed another transition coming when it became clear to him that he was out of place in an Administration with which I did not entirely share a worldview.

Ironically, he transitioned to a job in the White House as the Deputy Director of The President’s Commission on Executive Exchange. This job played a pivotal role in shaping his own career transition story. The Executive Exchange created one-year “exchange” assignments that allowed senior executives from both the public and private sectors to experience one-year assignments working in the other sector. He was responsible for finding one-year assignments in the private sector for senior federal executives. It turned out that he loved career counseling and helping the senior feds to identify work that was both useful to their future federal career and personally satisfying.

Over the next 20 years, he served in various senior executive positions within the nonprofit sector, never losing his passion for understanding and facilitating the human experience of transition. He did meaningful work with The National AIDS Fund, the Washington National Cathedral, and Make-A-Wish Foundation of America. But it was at Experience Corps, the mission of which was to create volunteer opportunities for Boomers in retirement, that he started thinking even more deeply, again, about what he wanted to do next.

Peter started to rethink each of his professional transitions and how he was forced to rethink “what I really wanted to do.” The process was both very exciting and somewhat uncomfortable. He knew that he wanted to transition but was unsure of the details of the direction he wanted to take. Over time he learned that creating a new professional identity was well worth the hard work because ultimately it would be very satisfying to combine his skills and experience with his new interest.

After completing a number of assessments that he had created to help him discover his next step he decided to become a professional career coach. He started by interviewing the best executive career coaches in the world and asking for advice about his next steps. They all said three things: read extensively, go to an accredited coach training program, and get a mentor coach yourself. He took their advice and after an intensive course, he became certified by the International Coach Federation.

In 2006 Peter created “Experience Matters – providing clarity, confidence and concrete tools for executives in transition” based in Washington, DC.   www.expmatters.com