I finally have a career I love. It feels like it took a lifetime to get there. Learn from my lessons.

The worst of it was during the Great Recession. At one point, my savings were gone and we were surviving on credit cards and my husband’s disability insurance. He had four surgeries in one year while we lived in a basement apartment. I was perfectly healthy and couldn’t find permanent work. By the time I was earning enough to cover my bills again, I was $26,000 in credit card debt.

I wasn’t a recruiter by trade. I fell into it, or maybe it was a career that chose me and not the other way around. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was helping other people find jobs while I was in a career that I wasn’t made for.

The work I was doing for other people (evaluating candidates, searching databases, positioning people for roles) was the work I needed to do for myself. The tools I was building as a recruiter could be turned inward. I could use them to remake my own career.

That is what I did. I moved from recruiting into sales engineering, a job that combines technical skills, interpersonal skills, and deep knowledge of the customer’s industry. For the first time, I felt like I was running on all four cylinders. Others say being a sales engineer is hard. For me, it was easy. I was built for it.

Today I’m Director of Global Sales Enablement at a supply chain technology company. I am finally on fertile ground. I continue to work the tools of the book even though I am not searching externally. The results: I have been promoted four times in four years and I get to split my time between our offices in Massachusetts and in Barcelona. My CEO has called me the best enablement person they have ever had.

I had an MBA and an MS in Information Systems Management before recruiting. The certifications came later, during the transformation: three from the American Society for Quality, certificates in good manufacturing and good clinical practices, and most recently two more in supply chain. Each was earned while I was applying the framework to my own career. Proof that it works.

After finding the right career, people continued asking me for help. Universities invited me to speak about job hunting. Professional associations asked me to lead workshops. Friends of friends asked me to rewrite their résumés. I kept saying yes because I remembered how painful it was being stuck.

Eventually I put everything into 33 Tools to Remake Your Career. The book I wish someone had handed me in that basement apartment.

The reality is that career change is teachable. It needs a system. That is why I am continuing by building on the book, with the Career Remake Assessment and the companion workbook as the action layer. The whole framework lives here, and For Organizations shows how it fits institutional contexts.