Joe Morrell

A mid-life career change showed Joe Morrell that finding a job in a different industry was not as easy as he thought it was going to be.

In his mid-forties, after working as a Music Minister, Joe returned to school to become a counselor. “I was 48 years old with a freshly-minted master’s degree from Vanderbilt University with no job, no prospects and no connections,” Joe laughs. “I had been on television and I honestly believed that the job opportunities would come to me.”

Even though his face and voice were well-known in the Nashville area, no one knew him as a counselor. He had a degree but no experience.

“I knew that I needed to build a network,” he recalls. “I also needed to figure out what kind of counselor I was going to be.” Joe knew that he wasn’t interested in building a traditional therapy practice. “In school we were told that life as a therapist is spent listening to clients for 50 minutes, taking notes and then doing it all over again day after day,” says Joe, who earned his M.Ed. in Human Development Counseling from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and a Masters from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX. He is a member in good standing with the National Board of Certified Counselors. “The thought of being shut in an office all day didn’t appeal to me.”

There were no career paths that matched his interests so Joe decided to invent his own. “All the things I teach people today—things like identifying transferrable skills and figuring out how to apply them in new ways—I did myself as I launched my counseling practice.”

Today, Joe is president of Morrell Management Consulting, LLC and works as an Organizational Behavior Consultant who specializes in leadership coaching, management development and career/outplacement consulting. His practice includes a diverse mix of outplacement seminars, individual therapy clients, management development and executive coaching. “In a single day I can go from a team building session with executives making six figures to an outplacement workshop with first-line supervisors to one-on-one therapy sessions.”

As a musician who earned three degrees in music, Joe found a way to weave his love of the performing arts into his work as a counselor. “Leading a workshop is a lot like directing a choir,” says Joe who has developed and delivered programs for Coca Cola, Caterpillar Financial, CompUSA, Phycor, Spherion, Dawn Food Products, Evergreen Industries, Rand McNally, Surgis, Deloitte, The Siegfried Group, Healthcare Management Systems, American Endoscopy Services, Inc., New Mexico Department of Labor and Pacific Scientific EKD. He is also a popular speaker called upon regularly to provide motivational presentations for businesses, civic organizations, churches and career transition support groups. He was co-host of “Career Talk Radio” a live call-in program presented every Friday on WAKM, 950AM in Franklin, TN. He also appears regularly as a guest on live and pre-recorded TV/cable programs discussing career topics and workplace behavior issues.

Joe is the author of multiple Management Training Programs, for Organizational Excellence, Career4ce, a Career Development and Outplacement system for groups and individuals, SnapStyles, a workplace Personality Assessment and Development process, and “Designing Your Career – The Total You” published as a guide for individuals in career transition/development and as a college level textbook for adult students. He also served as an adjunct Professor at Aquinas College in Nashville, TN where he taught courses in Industrial Organizational Behavior, Human Relations in the Workplace, Human Resources Management, Small Group Dynamics and Career Pathways.

Joe has been reinventing himself on a daily basis since leaving Vanderbilt. “The eclectic approach I used to design my practice—I call it the Portfolio Career—is just one of the many directions my clients can take as they reinvent their work lives,” he says. Instead of working for a single company in the traditional sense, people with Portfolio Careers create a number of income streams—all built around their skills and interests—and are always on the lookout for opportunities to apply those skills in new ways.

“I am the poster child for the Portfolio Career,” he laughs. “I haven’t had a regular job since 1993!”