Female Founders panellist Anne Moore has mastered the skill of reinvention. Photo: CBRIN.
At 57, mid-career, Anne Moore thought the only sensible thing to do was to start a software company. At age 70, she began a PhD.
Bold moves to the outsider, but for those who know Anne best, it’s all par for the course.
“I regard myself as the ‘aging provocateur’,” she laughs.
“I don’t accept the rules placed around us readily.”
The poster child for reinvention, Anne will join fellow entrepreneur Renee Beerworth at the next Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) Female Founders event.
The event will explore career pivots, skill shifts, and entrepreneurial jumps through practical strategies, insights, and real-life stories from women changemakers who’ve successfully navigated major professional transitions.
For Anne, the object of the panel will be to help people find the permission — internally — to take a step in a new direction, no matter what stage they’re at professionally.
“With the wisdom of years is the understanding that all this — life — is finite, and you have to have a really good swing at it,” she says.
“We owe it to ourselves to honour the freedom that comes with being at pivotal points in our lives, where we get to make choices, because we don’t always.
“There comes a time when we can revisit the questions, ‘Who am I? What do I want to offer? What do I want to achieve and how do I satisfy my sense of purpose?”
Anne has coached many women through career transitions, but also speaks from personal experience.
She found her work passion at 30, moving into learning and development, instructional design, organisational development and then on to strategic workforce design. That led to global exposure in capability building and skills transfer and, eventually, her first CEO position.
In that capacity, in 2008, the University of Sydney invited her to lead a recruitment company. Initially hesitant, she read a white paper that showed only 3 per cent of graduates had meaningful work experience.
“I realised it was ground zero in something I was passionate about — capability building. I got very interested in long runways and the future of work,” she says
She later left the university to set up a human capital software platform focused on career management.
“I eventually got to the point where I had exhausted the current options. I had been a founder and CEO twice, among many other things. When you reach that point, there’s this ‘What do I do now?’ moment,” she said.
“This year I started an Entrepreneurial PhD, looking again at the future of work and how we equip people for autonomy, agency and psychological wellbeing in this new world of work that’s incredibly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). I’m creating my third startup, Adaeptiv, which focuses on building human-centred industry models based on this research and AI technologies that support productivity.
“I am a strong proponent of transition and change and enjoy the idea that I am credentialed to speak at the upcoming Female Founders event, not only because of my technical know-how, but also my lived experience.”
Renee Beerworth brings professional and lived experience to the upcoming Female Founders event looking at career pivots, skill shifts and entrepreneurial jumps. Photo: CBRIN.
As the founder and director of Spinach Ventures, Anne’s fellow panellist, Renee Beerworth, brings a complementary perspective, shaped by three decades of professional pivots — both chosen and imposed.
A people, performance and culture specialist and HR advisor with experience as an organisational design strategist, she has insight into the challenges many face when navigating career transitions, which spill into her own experiences.
“Early in my career, I was influenced by other people’s definitions of success, which seemed to focus on a traditional trajectory, with all the steps laid out,” she says.
Her perspective has since changed dramatically thanks to experiences working in different countries, starting a family, founding a business and surviving cancer.
“Coming back to work post-treatment was pivotal. I started to define more clearly what success meant for me — and it hinged on values alignment,” she says.
“We are all on our own journey, and I think there’s value in collecting a variety of experiences along the way. These experiences can help us adapt and find ways to apply our skills in different ways, across a variety of industries.
“We’re whole people, and what we need at different stages of our lives changes, and that’s ok … You don’t need to see the path laid out before you to take the next step. ”
Female Founders: Career Transitions for Women takes place on Tuesday, 9 September, from 12:15 pm to 1:30 pm at Canberra Innovation Network, Level 4, 1 Moore Street, Canberra.
