We believe a longer life deserves a career that can evolve with you. Through thought leadership, tools, and community, we help people approach career reinvention with greater clarity, agency and possibility.
Our Story
What's Next began with a question that neither of us could stop asking.
We had both reached moments in our careers when the path ahead was no longer obvious. We had built successful professional lives, yet found ourselves navigating the uncertainty of what came next. As we compared our experiences, we realised that what felt deeply personal was, in fact, part of a much larger shift.
As our conversations continued, we realised we were far from alone. We met accomplished professionals from different industries, countries and stages of life who were asking remarkably similar questions. They had built successful careers, yet the old career script no longer fit. The advice available to them either assumed they were just starting out or encouraged them to begin again, overlooking everything they had already built.
We began researching the question. What emerged challenged one of the most deeply held assumptions about careers: that they should unfold in a single, linear progression. Instead, we saw careers that evolved through cycles of growth, disruption, renewal and reinvention. Experience wasn't left behind with each transition; it became the foundation for what came next.
That insight became the Perennial Career Framework®: a new way of understanding careers not as a single linear journey, but as a working life that grows through cycles of renewal and builds on everything that came before.
Today, What's Next brings that framework to life through research, writing, programs and conversations. We help individuals and organizations rethink careers in the age of longevity and support people navigating the many stages of longer working lives.
Our work draws on years of research and direct conversations with professionals navigating these transitions. Our book, The Many Lives of Work explores what career change actually looks like in midlife. Through our research, book, programs and speaking engagements, our mission is to help people navigate longer working lives with greater clarity and confidence, while creating a richer language for careers that evolve over time.
We believe a longer life deserves a career that can evolve with you.
Co-Founders
After three decades in senior global leadership, Galya Frayman Molinas turned her attention to a question the corporate world rarely asks: what happens when accomplished people reach the end of one chapter of their working lives, but are not yet finished contributing?
That question lies at the heart of The Many Lives of Work: Rethinking Career in the Age of Longevity, which she co-authored with Gamze Dinçkök Yücaoğlu, and of the What’s Next Initiative, the research-backed platform they founded together.
Galya spent more than two decades at The Coca-Cola Company, serving as president of business units in Mexico, Turkey and Central Asia, and Senior Vice President of Global Strategy at The Coca-Cola Company. Working across Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia gave her a broad perspective on how careers, identity and reinvention are understood across cultures.
Building on her executive experience, Galya now brings this perspective to a portfolio of work spanning across business, education and social impact. She teaches strategy at London Business School, supports social entrepreneurs through Ashoka and other changemaker networks, and serves on boards across sectors. She is featured in a Harvard Business School case on leadership in dynamic markets.
The Many Lives of Work draws on years of research and conversations with people navigating career transitions in midlife. It is Galya’s most personal and rigorous contribution to a subject she believes deserves greater honesty, depth and attention.
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Few people bring to the question of career reinvention what Gamze Dinçkök Yücaoğlu does: a decade of academic research at Harvard Business School, a training in psychotherapy, and two significant career pivots of her own. That combination, analytical rigour and deep personal understanding of what transition actually feels like, shapes everything she has built at What's Next, and everything she has written in The Many Lives of Work: Rethinking Career in the Age of Longevity.
Her work sits at a distinctive intersection: rigorous academic research, the study of identity and transition through a psychotherapeutic lens, and her own lived experience of significant career change. That combination gives her thinking on midlife reinvention an unusual depth, both analytical and deeply human.
Gamze holds a degree in Economics and Psychology from Harvard College and spent over a decade at Harvard Business School's MENA Research Center, where she served as Associate Director of Research, working closely with faculty and authoring case studies. She has designed and championed executive education programs through the Young Presidents’ Organization.
She is currently pursuing an MProf in Psychotherapy at Regent's University London, exploring questions of identity, meaning, and transition through a humanistic lens, research that informs the writing and thinking behind The Many Lives of Work directly.
Gamze's path has included two significant pivots of her own. That experience is not incidental to her work at What's Next. It is the foundation of it.
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