Pivot Roadmap: Reinvent Your Career at Midlife and Finally Do Work That Matters

Michael Thomas is a career strategist, executive coach, and the founder of Second Act Career Design, a consultancy that helps mid-career professionals navigate the transition from established careers to work that aligns with their values, strengths, and life stage. Over the past fifteen years, he has guided more than eight hundred professionals through successful career pivots — from attorneys becoming nonprofit directors, to marketing executives launching boutique consumer brands, to engineers transitioning into education leadership.

Michael's approach draws on his own experience of reinvention. After spending the first twelve years of his career in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, he walked away from a partnership track to pursue work that felt more personally meaningful. That decision led him through a period of experimentation that included launching a failed startup, teaching business strategy as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and eventually building the coaching practice that became his life's work. He often tells clients that his own pivot took three years, several false starts, and one memorable moment of sitting in his car outside a client site, unable to make himself walk through the front door — the moment he knew the cost of staying had exceeded the fear of leaving.

His methodology integrates behavioral economics, design thinking, and practical business strategy into frameworks that are rigorous enough for analytically minded professionals and accessible enough to actually use. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Stanford University, though he is quick to note that his most valuable education came from the hundreds of conversations he has had with people standing at career crossroads and trying to find their way forward.

Michael lives in Chicago with his wife, a clinical psychologist, and their two teenage children. When he is not working with clients or writing, he can usually be found attempting to keep up with his son on the basketball court, experimenting with sourdough recipes with inconsistent results, or reading in the third-floor study of his hundred-year-old house, which he has been renovating slowly since 2014 and expects to finish sometime around 2030. He writes a monthly newsletter on career design and midlife reinvention at michaelthomas.co and speaks regularly at conferences and corporate events on the future of work, professional identity, and the art of the intentional career.