Rethinking your relationship with work? So are a lot of people

Robert Brouillette is putting together a new recipe for his career.

The former executive chef is back in school at age 40, training for a new career in media.

He'd been thinking about making a move for a while but didn't take the plunge until the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which eventually put him out of work.

"[It] gave me that extra push," said Brouillette, who's now studying multimedia communication at Yukon University in Whitehorse.

The pandemic has altered most people's employment in one way or another as workplaces have made adjustments and workers have dealt with the ensuing consequences.

Yet experts say many of the broad changes occurring in the work world pre-date the pandemic, though they're now picking up speed.

"The pandemic has not created anything new," said Anil Verma, professor emeritus of industrial relations and human resources management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

"What the pandemic did do was that it magnified things ... [and] they got accelerated," Verma said, listing remote work, flexible schedules and workers rethinking what they want from their employment as issues that emerged well before COVID-19.

For Brouillette, the desire to make a career change built up during years of working long, stressful hours in restaurants, even though he'd done well for himself.

"I was lucky, I was making good money," said Brouillette, whose work brought him from his hometown of Montreal to Yukon about five years ago.

The loss of his job during the pandemic, however, left him staring at the prospect of "going back down to the bottom of the ladder" in his industry.

He decided to move on.

As the pandemic drags on, many people, like Brouillette, are thinking about their future, their work-life balance and the things they want to change.

DeeAnne Chomiak, a Florida-based life and business coach, went through that process herself years before the pandemic, leaving behind a high-flying business career for something different.