A former EVP at a biotech company — nine years in the role, nearly three decades in the industry — wrote something with universal reverberation.
His career ended not with a dramatic firing but with an acquisition that made his role redundant.
"I didn't just lose a job," he shared. "I lost the scaffolding I'd built my professional identity on."
That word — scaffolding — is exactly right.
The institution answered the question of value for most of us. The title said what we were worth. The org chart made the case so we didn't have to.
This isn't weakness. It's just how the system was designed. You built the expertise. The institution provided the frame.
What's shifting now isn't the expertise. It's the frame.
And the gap that opens when the frame falls away, through a reorg, an AI rollout, a market that simply moves on, isn't a confidence crisis.
It's a language crisis.
This dissociative state is more common than we culturally acknowledge. Writing in Fortune this week, Geoff Curtis, former EVP at Horizon Therapeutics, describes what he calls "professional identity purgatory": the disorienting gap between losing an identity built over decades and not yet knowing what replaces it.
"For generations," he writes, "professional identity was durable — you built expertise, accumulated knowledge, climbed. Technology is disrupting that continuity in ways that are genuinely hard to sit with."
The disruption isn't just about jobs. It's about the structure that told you who you were at work. It's about identity.
When that structure shifts, the question that surfaces isn't what do I do next?
It's something most senior leaders have never had to answer from the inside: what was I, all along — before the title made it unnecessary to say?
That question is where positioning begins — not the brand refresh, not the LinkedIn headline. The internal work of finding language for what you've always been, before the institution made it unnecessary to say.
That's what replaces the scaffolding.