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Lived Impact Guide 05
From Experience to Employment.
Your lived experience is not just a story — it is a skill set. This guide covers how to identify what you have built, how to name it professionally, and how to turn it into paid work.
Skills translation
How to identify the professional skills embedded in your lived experience and name them in language employers and organisations understand.
Career pathways
The roles, sectors, and entry points where lived experience is genuinely valued — and how to find them.
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Lived Impact Guide
From Experience to Employment
Written for people who have navigated hard systems and are ready to turn what they learned into a career — on their own terms.
Contents
What's inside
What You Have Actually Built
Naming the skills, knowledge, and capabilities that come from navigating systems — and why they are professionally valuable, not just personally meaningful.
Translating Experience Into Language Employers Understand
How to describe your lived experience on a CV, in a cover letter, and in an interview — without minimising it or over-explaining it.
Roles Where Lived Experience Is Valued
The sectors, job titles, and types of organisations that actively seek people with lived experience — and what those roles actually involve.
Peer Work, Advocacy, and Consulting
The three most common entry points for people with lived experience — what each involves, what they pay, and how to decide which fits you.
Building a Professional Profile
LinkedIn, capability statements, and how to present yourself as a professional — even if you have never had a traditional career.
Navigating Disclosure
When to share your lived experience, how much to share, and how to protect yourself when disclosure is expected but the environment is not safe.
Income Support and Employment
What to know about Centrelink, income reporting, and the transition from welfare to paid work — including the questions to ask before you start.
Setting Up as a Sole Trader
Getting an ABN, understanding your tax obligations, and formalising your practice so you can invoice professionally and protect your income.
Managing the Emotional Weight of Career Transition
Career change is hard. Career change rooted in trauma history is harder. How to pace yourself, set limits, and build a career that does not cost you your wellbeing.
When It Is Not Working — and What to Do
Recognising when a role, organisation, or pathway is not right for you — and how to exit, regroup, and try again without losing confidence.
Your experience is not a liability to manage. It is a qualification — and it is time to be paid for it.
— Hayley Brown, Lived Impact
Audience
Who this is for
This guide is for you if...
You have lived experience of navigating systems — child protection, domestic violence, mental health, disability, housing, or justice — and want to turn that into paid work
You are considering peer work, advocacy, or lived experience consulting but do not know where to start
You have tried to enter the workforce and found that your experience is either invisible or treated as a risk
You want to build a career that uses what you know — without having to hide where it came from
You are on income support and want to understand what moving into paid work actually looks like
About the author
Hayley Brown
Hayley is a lived experience leader, consultant, and the founder of Lived Impact. She has worked across domestic and family violence, child protection, mental health, disability, and community services — both as a person with lived experience and as a systems-level strategist. She writes from both sides of the table.
Your experience is a qualification.
Written by someone who built a career from lived experience — and wants to show you exactly how.
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View guideUSING THIS WITH CLIENTS OR TEAMS?
This guide is available for individual purchase, client-use licensing and organisational use.
Please do not purchase one copy and distribute it. For client packs, team access or program use, contact Lived Impact for licensing options.
View licensing optionsThis guide is licensed for individual use by the purchaser only.
You are welcome to use the ideas, prompts and reflection points in your own practice. However, the guide itself must not be copied, forwarded, uploaded, printed for others, shared with clients, or distributed across a team without an appropriate multi-user, client-use or organisational licence.
If you would like to use this guide with clients, groups, teams or programs, please contact Lived Impact for a multi-use licence. View licence options.
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