People sometimes ask why I left full-time roles for consulting and contract work. The honest answer is that I followed the work more than the title.
How it actually went
After five years at HBO, I wanted to see how other companies ran talent. Consulting let me do that fast.
At Sony Pictures it was leadership recruiting, plus DEI work that lifted diverse hiring 18%. At Flowserve it was building satisfaction and retention dashboards. At Roadr it was predictive staffing models in Python and SQL, and helping onboard 50 to 70 contractors a quarter.
Each one pulled me a little further from filling roles and a little closer to building the systems behind them. By Roadr I was building in Python and SQL every week. I didn’t set out to become a builder. The work kept handing me bigger versions of the same problem until building was the obvious next step.
When the Roadr engagement wrapped at the end of 2024, I had a choice. I could look for the next HR role, or I could build the thing I kept wishing existed: a place to practice the conversations that matter before they happen. I chose to build. ReflectivAI came out of that in January 2025, then CareerPaver and Lumira.
You’re in big company
Independent work isn’t the fringe it used to be. MBO Partners’ 2025 State of Independence study counted 72.9 million Americans doing independent work, including 27.6 million who do it full time.
And the skills side keeps moving. LinkedIn’s Work Change Report projects that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, with AI as a major catalyst. A path built around learning the next skill, rather than holding the next title, starts to look less like a detour and more like the plan.
A filter that helped me
The fair counterpoint: contract work trades some stability for range, and it isn’t the right call for everyone at every stage. If you’re weighing a contract role against a full-time one, here’s the question I’d ask:
Which one teaches me the skill I’ll need two jobs from now?
Titles are easy to compare. What you’ll learn is harder to see, and it usually matters more. Looking back, every contract I took taught me one piece of what I build today. I couldn’t have drawn that line in advance. It was frustrating at times. It was worth trusting anyway.
What’s the skill you’re quietly building right now that your title doesn’t show?