How can AI help you get your next job? But not the way you think with Julia Psitos.

The article "How clear are you about what you want next in life?" featured on Voice of Experts profiles Julia Psitos, a seasoned people operations leader and organizational coach who specializes in helping professionals and organizations navigate career clarity, purpose-driven decision-making, and personal development. Psitos identifies herself as a "builder"—someone who creates, fixes, and leaves lasting legacies within organizations—but her expertise extends far deeper into the psychology of workplace fulfillment, talent development, and strategic human capital management. This report examines Psitos's framework for achieving clarity around life direction, her professional philosophy, and the practical methodologies she employs to guide others toward intentional career choices.

A Career Profile

Julia Psitos brings more than 18 years of human resources, people operations, and organizational development experience across enterprise-scale and startup environments. Her career trajectory demonstrates a pattern of building scalable people systems: she began as an HR Coordinator at Bechtel Corporation in 2007, progressed through project management roles, and eventually became Sr. Director of People & Learning at WeWork, overseeing community and talent strategies across the United States and Canada during the company's expansion phase.

Currently, Psitos holds the position of VP of People & Talent at Alfred, a residential managed housing technology platform where she focuses on culture, employee engagement, and organizational design. Beyond her primary role, she serves as a founding mentor and advisor to multiple early-stage companies through initiatives like Her Workplace (founding mentor since February 2024), Salley (advisor since May 2023), Dextego (advisor since September 2023), and Fabrik (NYC Founding 50 Member since May 2024). Most notably, she founded LinkUp, an AI-powered platform designed to connect college alumni with hidden career opportunities and professional communities, launching it in 2025 as a mission-driven side venture.

Her educational background includes a Master's Degree in Management of Information Technology from Hood College and a Bachelor's in Business Management & Spanish, providing her with both technical and organizational acumen.

The Core Framework: Clarity as a Competitive Advantage

The central thesis of Psitos's work—reflected in the Voice of Experts article—revolves around a deceptively simple question: How clear are you about what you want next in your life? This isn't a rhetorical flourish; it's a diagnostic tool that reveals why many talented professionals remain stalled, overextended, or perpetually reactive.

In a podcast conversation with David Murray on "Break The Wheel: An HR Podcast," Psitos outlined what she calls the Employee Hierarchy of Needs, a framework that parallels Maslow's hierarchy but is specifically calibrated for workplace fulfillment. The hierarchy includes:

• Compensation and Financial Security – The foundational layer; when misaligned, nothing else matters

• Trust and Psychological Safety – Necessary for employees to be vulnerable and take ownership

• Community and Belonging – The human need to feel connected to something larger than individual contribution

• Skill Mastery and Growth – The drive to improve and develop professionally

• Job Fulfillment and Purpose – Alignment between personal values and organizational mission

The insight here is critical: organizations often jump to the "shiny new thing"—career pathing, learning platforms, mentorship programs—while neglecting the foundational layers. Psitos's observation: "A lot of times we jump to the shiny new thing or the thing that everybody's talking about. And maybe that's career pathing right now, if you're so far down the path on career pathing, but then you're not communicating, you're not responsive, you've messed up, people's pay. It really doesn't matter."

Three Pillars of Career Clarity

1. Radical Self-Honesty About Values and Wants

Achieving clarity requires moving past prescriptive career narratives—what you "should" do—and confronting what you actually want. This is particularly difficult in high-performing cultures where individuals internalize external expectations and mistake them for personal desires.

Psitos emphasizes that clarity comes from:

• Identifying core values – Understanding what you genuinely care about, not what Instagram or your peer group suggests you should value

• Recognizing natural skill sets and inclinations – Moving beyond credentials to what energizes vs. depletes you

• Admitting happiness honestly – Acknowledging what actually makes you happy, even if it contradicts your career trajectory or professional identity

The practical implication: people operating without clarity tend to optimize for the wrong metrics—titles, compensation increments, resume prestige—rather than alignment.

2. Viewing Clarity as a Dynamic Process, Not a Destination

One of Psitos's most important contributions is challenging the false urgency around "figuring it all out." In a world that pressures 18-year-olds to commit to life direction, she advocates for what developmental psychologists call "adaptive exploration."

Key principles:

• Life is a process of discovery – You're never finished evolving, and expecting yourself to have perfect clarity is counterproductive

• Wants evolve with life stages – What felt true at 25 may feel hollow at 35, and that's exactly how it should be

• Stay curious and experimental – The pressure to commit perfectly often prevents the experimentation necessary to genuinely understand yourself

This reframing is particularly important for professionals in mid-career transitions who feel they "should have figured it out by now."

3. Making Clarity a Public and Collaborative Act

Perhaps one of Psitos's most counterintuitive recommendations: the more people who know what you want to do, the more likely it is to happen. This principle underpins her entire approach to mentorship and community-building.

The mechanism is twofold:

• Accountability and visibility – External awareness creates gentle pressure and opportunity for serendipitous connections

• Expanding your network's capacity to help – When your aspirations are known, others can introduce opportunities, resources, and collaborators you wouldn't have accessed alone

Psitos demonstrated this principle in launching LinkUp: she publicly shared her vision with her professional network, sought feedback from specialists (product managers, brand strategists, higher education experts), and built support structures while maintaining her primary employment. Her LinkedIn post celebrating the launch explicitly named 8+ individuals and organizations who contributed.

Practical Applications: The "Psitos Methodology"

Removing Organizational Barriers to Clarity

In her people operations role, Psitos focuses on creating systems that enable clarity rather than obscure it. Her priorities include:

• Clear role definition and expectations – Ambiguity about what success looks like prevents employees from making conscious choices about fit

• Responsive communication – Leaders who don't respond or address concerns undermine trust, making it impossible for employees to evaluate their actual satisfaction

• Transparent compensation – Pay equity and fair compensation are prerequisite to other engagement initiatives

• Skill mastery pathways – Explicit, achievable growth opportunities allow people to test their development hypotheses

The "Negotiating for the Invisible Option" Framework

Drawing on insights from author Raúl Rio, Psitos highlights that when presented with Option A vs. Option B, the highest leverage move is identifying and negotiating for the unspoken third option.

In career contexts, this means:

• When deciding between roles, companies, or paths, don't accept the binary choice

• Ask what's not being discussed (flexibility, purpose, team composition, growth structure)

• Negotiate toward the solution that addresses your real values, not the presented options

Integration of People Ops Across the Organization

Psitos's work at Alfred exemplifies how clarity cascades through an organization:

• Company-wide alignment – When leadership articulates why the organization exists and what problems it solves, individual role clarity becomes possible

• Removing role barriers – Actively identifying and eliminating organizational friction that prevents people from understanding their impact

• Investing in learning and development – Not as a trend but as infrastructure that enables continuous clarity-refinement

The Four-Day Work Week: A Case Study in Organizational Clarity

During the Break The Wheel discussion, Psitos reflected on the emerging four-day work week trend not as a labor savings initiative, but as a clarity tool. When employees have protected time for reflection, community, and personal development, they gain psychological space to evaluate their actual fit and desires.

Her observation: organizations that genuinely embrace flexible work structures aren't being soft—they're enabling the thinking space necessary for employees to make conscious career decisions, reducing turnover driven by burnout and disconnection.

Beyond the Individual: Building Communities of Clarity

Perhaps Psitos's most ambitious initiative is LinkUp, which operationalizes her belief that clarity happens in community. The platform doesn't just match individuals with jobs; it:

• Creates visibility around hidden career pathways and non-traditional roles

• Builds communities of alumni and peers navigating similar transitions

• Leverages AI to surface opportunities aligned with individual values, not just resume keywords

This reflects her decade-plus of work building and stewarding the WeWork Alums community—an informal network that evolved into a resource with thousands of members supporting each other through career transitions.

Key Takeaways for Professionals

For individuals navigating career clarity:

• Question the binaries – Don't accept the "stable job vs. entrepreneurship" or "success vs. happiness" false choices

• Make clarity visible – Tell people what you're exploring; vulnerability attracts collaborators

• Invest in foundational needs first – Before optimizing for prestige, ensure compensation, trust, and belonging are addressed

• Treat clarity as an ongoing practice – Not a one-time life plan, but a quarterly or annual re-examination

• Create space for thinking – Protect time away from constant productivity to actually evaluate your life and work

For organizations building clarity-enabling cultures:

• Define roles with precision – Ambiguity about expectations is the enemy of conscious career choices

• Lead with values – Communicate not just what you do, but why it matters and how you treat people

• Make compensation transparent – Pay equity removes this as a distractor from deeper career questions

• Invest in growth infrastructure – Learning and development aren't nice-to-haves; they're clarity tools

• Protect white space – Employees can't think strategically while firefighting; provide time for reflection

Conclusion

Julia Psitos's central question—"How clear are you about what you want next in life?"—serves as both a personal diagnostic and an organizational accountability measure. In an era of rapid change, perpetual optimization, and competing demands, clarity has become a scarce and competitive resource.

Her framework rejects both passive drift and rigid prescriptivism. Instead, it offers a middle path: intentional exploration informed by honest self-assessment, supported by clear organizational systems and collaborative communities. For professionals at any career stage, her work suggests that the most important skill isn't optimization—it's the capacity to repeatedly ask, answer, and act on the question of what you genuinely want.

The Voice of Experts article presents not just a profile of an accomplished leader, but an invitation to examine your own clarity, and to build the personal and professional systems that make such clarity possible.

More on: https://www.voiceofexperts.com/p/how-clear-are-you-about-what-you

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