Job Search, Promotion, and Career Clarity: The Mid-Career GPS Podcast · John Neral

326: Why People-First Cultures Win in 2026 with Kat Ortiz

December 9, 2025·34 min·2 clips

Kat says a stuck mid-career professional needs to ask, “What do I do now?”

Look for the helpers. John Nerrell starts there, then turns the phrase toward the people in our networks and workplaces who make things easier for others. Kat Ortiz is one of them. She is an industrial organizational psychologist, and John says he has known and worked with her for six years. Her path started early: at 13, she knew she wanted to become a psychologist because she wanted to help people. John keeps the setup plain, giving listeners room to understand what an IO psychologist does inside an organization and why that work matters when teams are trying to work better. The conversation also looks toward 2026, with Kat set up to name the biggest trend she sees affecting how people work. Then John brings it back to a real office moment. While working at an educational nonprofit in Georgetown, a broken coffee machine sent him to another floor. He held a door, said hello, and later got an email from Sarah, who recognized him as her sixth grade math teacher from Valley Middle School in Oakland, New Jersey. She was now one of the organization's IO psychologists. Suddenly, the old teacher-student frame had to make room for a colleague-to-colleague one. John handles that part with care. When he needed help with a team issue, he asked Sarah as a respected colleague and named the possible awkwardness instead of pretending it was not there. That becomes the useful coaching point: work gets better when people ask clearly, respect expertise, and let old roles loosen their grip. He closes by returning to responsibility, reminding listeners that a mid-career GPS is built one mile, or one step, at a time, and how they show up counts.

As heard by us

A grounded look at helpers, career paths, and how work may change in 2026.

This episode stays focused on making work feel more humane in a year of change. Kat Ortiz comes across as an industrial-organizational psychologist who explains her role clearly, without getting lost in jargon.

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Why you'd press play

Why helpers matter when work gets messy.

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