Most career advice is built for people who need a new job. Julia Toothacre spent eight years watching that frame cause problems.
Working in career offices at Azusa Pacific University and later at the Drucker School of Management, where she served as director of the career office and Career Strategist, Toothacre worked with clients across a wide professional range: freshmen sorting out their first steps, doctoral students approaching the market, alumni returning years into working lives they were ready to rethink. The career theories the field had developed were useful in certain ways. But she noticed, with some consistency, that those frameworks had been built for people making initial decisions, not for professionals grappling with circumstances that were considerably more complicated. A job that had quietly eaten away at their sense of direction. A reorg that rewrote what their role actually was. A shift in what they needed from work that their professional history had not anticipated.
So she built her own. She incorporated Ride The Tide Collective in 2018. The five-stage framework she developed, the Control Your Career process, is what the coaching work runs on.
The first stage, Realistic Reality, asks clients to look carefully at where they actually are: their current role, their past decisions, the circumstances they cannot easily change. The second, Identity Analysis, draws on assessments. Toothacre holds MBTI Step I and Step II certification, according to company materials, and works with multiple validated personality and interest tools, using them to help clients develop a clearer, more precise vocabulary for what they value and how they operate. The third stage, Purpose-Driven Plan, builds a career strategy from what that self-knowledge produces. The fourth, Initiate Action, is where the framework does something many career programs skip: clients start moving rather than preparing to move. The fifth, High-Impact Habits, is the maintenance layer, the practices that keep a career intentional rather than reactive.
Throughout, Toothacre works from a distinction she applies consistently across her work: what a professional can control, what they can influence, and what they may need to accept and work around. It is a less reassuring premise than most career advice offers, but one she argues is more workable.
The Control Your Career coaching program runs across 12 one-on-one sessions, with program lengths of three, six, or nine months depending on what a client needs. Shorter formats are available: a three-session Career Action Coaching option and a 90-minute Clarity of Self session built around a personality assessment. Alongside those, Toothacre offers a range of free and low-cost DIY resources. Accessibility matters to her. Her LinkedIn Learning course, “Taking Ownership in Your Career,” covers career management, exploration, and advancement without a job-search framework, open to anyone with access.
She also holds the title of Chief Career Strategist at ResumeTemplates.com, and currently teaches an undergraduate career course at the University of Southern California. According to her biography at ResumeTemplates.com, her work has appeared in Fortune, Fast Company, The Hill, and CNBC.
A book is coming in December 2026, also titled Control Your Career, and written as a resource people can return to at different career stages rather than advice tied to a specific labor market moment. The premise is the same one the practice has operated from since the beginning: that the decisions shaping a career are not made primarily during a job search, and that professionals who treat them that way tend to arrive somewhere they did not intend.
The Control Your Career podcast covers the same territory week by week. Recent episodes have examined how to grow professionally without a change in title, how to shape workplace culture without a formal leadership role, and what it means to make career compromises deliberately rather than by default. Episodes run short, Toothacre has said. Short enough to fit a commute.
