Master proven techniques to navigate workplace obstacles, rebuild your confidence, and use past failures as a launchpad for your most successful career chapter yet.
This course helps professionals recover from career setbacks such as job loss, missed promotions, workplace conflict, failed projects, stalled growth, or organizational change. Learners examine setbacks objectively, identify contributing factors and warning signs, and separate the event from judgments about their long-term competence or potential.
The course also explores the emotional impact of setbacks and teaches learners to distinguish facts from assumptions, focus on controllable factors, and turn lessons learned into practical actions. Participants assess their strengths and transferable skills, consider market trends and support resources, and identify realistic recovery opportunities.
A 30-day framework—reflect, learn, connect, and contribute—helps learners rebuild confidence and momentum. The course also introduces five pillars of long-term career success: competence, character, connections, contribution, and resilience.
By the end of the lesson, participants should be able to:
Define common career setbacks and their causes.
Recognize early warning signs and emotional impacts.
Separate setbacks from judgments about professional value or potential.
Identify controllable factors and practical recovery actions.
Evaluate strengths and transferable skills.
Use market trends, mentors, networks, and learning resources to identify opportunities.
Apply the five pillars of career success to future planning.
Use the 30-day reflect, learn, connect, and contribute model to rebuild confidence and prepare for Part 2.
Lynn Fountain has over 45 years of experience spanning public accounting, corporate accounting and consulting. 24 years of her experience has been working in the areas of internal and external auditing. She is a subject matter expert in multiple fields including internal audit, ethics, fraud evaluations, Sarbanes-Oxley, enterprise risk management, governance, financial management and compliance. Ms. Fountain has held two Chief Audit Executive positions for international companies. In 2011, as the Chief Audit Executive for an international construction/ engineering firm, she was involved in the active investigation of a joint venture fraud. The investigation included work with the FBI and ultimately led to indictment of the perpetrators and recovery of $13M. Ms. Fountain is currently engaged in her own training and consulting business and is a regular trainer for the AICPA. Ms. Fountain is the author of three separate technical books. “Raise the Red Flag – The Internal Auditors Guide to Fraud Evaluations” was published by the Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation. -“Leading The Internal Audit Function” and -“Ethics and The Internal Auditor Political Dilemma” were published by Taylor & Francis In addition Ms. Fountain was a contributing author to the certification program exam for the National Association of Accountants. She also has certificate programs on various on-line platforms. Ms. Fountain has performed as an adjunct instructor for the School of Business for Grantham University and developed the first internal audit curriculum for the School of Business at the University of Kansas. Ms. Fountain obtained her BSBA from Pittsburg State University and her MBA from Washburn University in Kansas. She has her CGMA, CRMA credentials and CPA certificate (non-active).
