Best Practices Roundtable:
Massive Layoffs, Moral Injury & Existential Dread: How Career Counselors Cope & Support Clients
Presenters: Michele Martin and Amy Mazur
Location: Virtual (a Zoom link will be sent to you a few days before the event)
Date: Thursday, October 16th, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM EST
Program Overview
We have all read the headlines and see how the current political situation is affecting so many dimensions of our lives, including our professional lives. We can’t keep calling it unprecedented and chaotic. We are in it and we need to talk to each other about how we are doing and how we are helping our clients.
Join this CCC Roundtable where we will
- Come together as a community
- Check in and offer support to one another; and
- Discuss the impact of what is happening "out there" on our work with clients and in our own lives.
This informal conversation will not be about gathering resources (although if individuals have resources to share, we will collect and share them with all who participate).
We do not have answers. The purpose of this Roundtable is to create a space to acknowledge where we are, share what we and our clients are going through, and get some sense of grounding through supporting each other "in community".
Thank you to the CCC for providing the opportunity for all who wish to participate. We are in this together.
More About Our Speakers
Michele Martin is the founder of The Bamboo Project, where she bridges over two decades of experience in career and workforce development with a present-day focus on wayfinding—supporting individuals and organizations in navigating transition, uncertainty, and emergence with presence, creativity, and care.
A Certified Career Development Instructor, Michele has worked extensively with national and state workforce systems, including the U.S. Department of Labor, Job Corps, the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, and local workforce agencies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Her expertise spans training, program design, and organizational and leadership development, with a focus on helping job seekers, solopreneurs, and frontline professionals adapt to an ever-changing world of work.
She is the author of several Heldrich Center briefs on workforce strategy and systems reform, including the Strategically Virtual series on delivering effective career services online. She also previously directed the Center’s New Start Career Network, a comprehensive initiative supporting job seekers over the age of 45 who had been unemployed for six months or more.
Today, Michele’s work turns toward the deeper questions beneath change, inviting a new relationship to uncertainty—not as something to fix or control, but as a space to listen, attune, and move with what is emerging. Through her facilitation, teaching, and the creation of the Wayfinding Deck, she supports individuals and teams in stepping out of default responses and into regenerative practice.
Michele continues to facilitate Leadership Delaware County and the Youth Leadership Academy for the Delaware County Chamber of Commerce. Her work—past and present—reflects a steady commitment to helping people and organizations find their way by grounding in clarity, sovereignty, and aliveness, especially in times of great change. She sees wayfinding as an essential practice for career professionals and clients alike, especially in a world where traditional maps no longer match the terrain.
Amy Mazur is a Career Development Specialist and Counselor Educator who has been working in the field for over 20 years. Amy assists individuals to begin, renew and advance their careers, and her relational approach helps clients to overcome obstacles, real or imagined, that may inhibit them at any point in the career planning and job search process. Through assessment, counseling, managing transitions and exploring realistic options, Amy assists individuals to reflect on the meaning of work and how they want it represented in their lives, and is committed to recognizing how contexts and systems in which clients locate themselves are critical to understanding how an individual develops beliefs and generates options.
In addition to her individual and group counseling, Amy trains, supervises, and mentors career and workforce development professionals locally, regionally, and nationally on using counseling skills to foster growth and change. Serving on the Coach Advisory Committee at the Institute of Career Transitions, and as Project Coordinator of the Work Intervention Network (WIN), Amy’s continues to forefront the effect that psychosocial/emotional and systemic factors have on those navigating a job search/career transition.
Prior to her current work, Amy was Lead Career Counselor at JVS for over 18 years. She was Career Counselor/Assistant Director of Career Services at the Women’s Educational & Industrial Union. Amy developed and coordinated the Professional Development Seminars Series for the Career Counselors’ Consortium. And as adjunct faculty at Lesley University’s Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Amy taught Vocational Development & Career Counseling for over ten years, and guest lectured at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.
Amy received her Master of Education from Harvard University in Counseling & Consulting Psychology, and her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Michigan. She is a National Board-Certified Counselor (NBCC) and is a member of the National Career Development Association (NCDA), the association from which she earned the Master Career Development Professional (MCDP) designation.
