What Comes After the Corner Office?

Midway through a conversation about how he chose his next career move, Peter Kim’s new work computer arrived at his door.

That knock completed a circle nearly two decades in the making. Kim (MBA ’00) was preparing to return to Forrester Research as a vice president and principal analyst focused on AI-enabled marketing organizations. He had worked at the firm from 2005 to 2008.

The laptop made the outcome tangible. The route there was anything but straight.

This is not a story about an alumnus landing a job through a well-placed contact. It is about something harder to measure and, for Kim, more useful: a Darden community that helped him question the job he thought he was supposed to want, then test what might fit better.

An Obvious Next Move He Did Not Want

Career change is now less an interruption than a recurring condition. In January 2024, the median U.S. worker had been with a current employer for 3.9 years, the lowest figure since 2002. Longer careers increasingly contain multiple points at which the familiar answer no longer fits.

Kim reached one after nine years in London. He and his partner Barbara (MBA ’00) were ready to return to the United States, closer to aging parents on both coasts. When a buyout from his employer gave him room to step away, he knew the geography of his next chapter. Almost everything else was open.

His résumé invited an obvious answer. Kim had served as a chief marketing officer for five years and held CEO, chief strategy and chief digital roles. He had worked on three continents and led teams as large as 1,600. Another senior marketing post would have been legible, prestigious and familiar. That was precisely the problem.

“I felt like I’d done a lot,” Kim said. “I wasn’t up for doing the same thing again. It was: Let’s be deliberate. What is next?”

He had been working on that question in public, too. In a 2025 LinkedIn essay, “Inflection Points,” Kim argued that a useful career review has to reach beyond title and pay. But naming the right question is not the same as answering it.

The first nudge came at Kim’s 25th reunion in 2025, his first trip back to the University of Virginia Darden School of Business since his fifth. At an alumni session, he discovered the Armstrong Center for Alumni Career Services (ACS) wasn’t reserved for job-search emergencies or early-career questions. During the weekend, he also found himself advising another alumnus about living and working in the United Kingdom. The exchange captured both sides of the network: help received and help returned.

Months later, Kim learned about another ACS program, the Darden Life Design Lab, and signed up. The timing, he said, was ideal.

Three Lives on Paper

The lab applies design thinking to help alumni at any career stage step back and ask what might come next in their lives. Over six weeks, a small cohort meets for three facilitated workshops, with exercises and conversation designed to surface motivations, reframe assumptions and explore possible futures.

One assignment asks participants to draft three “Odyssey Plans”: a five-year path built on the current course, an alternative if that path disappeared, and a third version with practical constraints removed. Kim’s plans included the conservative, the plausible and the wild card. Putting them side by side made tradeoffs visible that a list of job titles could not.

The plans were not predictions. They were hypotheses to test. Kim prototyped possibilities by teaching a class, exploring doctoral study and speaking with people inside organizations and fields that interested him. The goal was not to choose a perfect future on paper. It was to gather evidence before committing to one.

The Forrester role became what he called a “happy medium.” It returned him to the research and analysis he had enjoyed earlier in his career, but with a new subject: how artificial intelligence is changing the way marketing organizations work. It also carried a less conspicuous distinction. After decades in senior management, Kim chose a role with no direct reports.

Titles, team size and compensation can become proxies for progress. Kim decided that the nature of the work and the subject itself should carry more weight. AI appealed because, unlike passing waves of technology hype, he saw it altering core processes inside real organizations.

Forrester’s research likewise argues that AI is forcing a redesign of how marketers and agencies operate. For Kim, the work also revived a habit he associates with Darden Professor Emerita Jeanne Liedtka: begin not with a claim to expertise, but with a better framing of the problem. “How should we think about AI?” was a question he wanted to spend his days answering.

The Cohort was the Method

Stacey Milne (MBA ’87), an ACS career consultant who coached Kim and facilitated his cohort, spent three decades at Marriott in strategy, marketing and global leadership. Moving into coaching required a change in instinct.

“As a coach, you have to train yourself, because it’s very easy to give advice,” Milne said. “But that’s not our job. It’s: What question can I craft to help someone think through this on their own?”

That posture shaped a cohort of eight alumni from different industries, class years and stages of life. Milne placed a question on the table, then let the group work on it together. The structure felt familiar to Kim: not a lecture, but a Darden classroom after the classroom, where other people’s experiences sharpened his own thinking.

“I call it Darden alums helping Darden alums,” Milne said. “It’s igniting that magic.”

The exchange continued after the lab. Kim joined the monthly Odyssey Circle, a group for program graduates facilitated by ACS career consultant Marty Speight (MBA ’96), and a biweekly networking group for alumni in active job searches. In an update to the career services team, he described exchanging leads, preparing one alumnus for an offer negotiation and helping another think through opportunities in Europe. He was both a client of the network and a contributor.

Kim invoked the power of “weak ties,” the connections beyond a person’s closest circle. Large-scale research on job mobility has found that moderately weak ties can be especially useful in opening paths to new employment. In Kim’s experience, the Darden advantage was not simply access to more contacts. It was a shared expectation that alumni across years and industries would take one another seriously.

Before the Emergency

Kim admits that he once saw career services mainly as an urgent-care function. Yet ACS offers complimentary coaching to degree-holding alumni throughout their careers, including for leadership, transition and questions that begin before a job search. Awareness is one obstacle. Pride can be another.

Successful professionals can read a request for help as evidence that something has gone wrong. Kim now uses a health analogy: the best time to see a doctor is not necessarily in the emergency room. A regular checkup can surface an issue while there is still time to act.

“I should have dropped my ego and explored further, sooner,” he said. “Network before you need it.”

Milne sees that openness as part of what makes the network useful. Beneath résumés and titles, alumni arrive with unfinished questions. When someone is willing to test an imperfect idea in public, the group gains more than the person in the hot seat. One alumnus’s experiment can become another’s permission.

The value of an alumni network is easy to reduce to a count of people, events or introductions. Kim’s career journey suggests a more demanding measure: whether the network is strong enough to hold a question before its owner knows the answer.

His laptop arrived on schedule. The journey had also given him a table full of people willing to help him test a future, and a standing expectation that he would pull up a chair for someone else.