This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Burnout is usually treated as a personal failure of stamina. It is more often a predictable result of specific working conditions, and the research on which conditions is quite clear.

That matters practically. You cannot fix with willpower something that was produced by a system.

What this course is actually about

Resilience is not endurance. Endurance is what people try first, and it is why the second burnout arrives faster than the first.

What holds up over a career is different: understanding what produced the exhaustion, recognising it earlier the next time, having emotional tools that are practised rather than theoretical, and keeping enough optionality — skills, network, savings — that a bad situation does not become a trapped one.

Understanding the mechanism

Forty-two lessons. Six on how stress and burnout are actually produced at work: what the research shows, the difference between the two, the organisational factors that generate each, the role of the line manager, and how the whole thing is measured rather than guessed at.

Then eight on emotional intelligence — resonance, energising rather than draining people, recovery, self-awareness, empathy-based conversations, the ideal self, and how a person genuinely changes. Then six on wellbeing as a designed system: the classical model and why it stopped being enough, cultural audits, behaviour change, nudges, and evaluating impact rather than participation.

A note on those blocks. They were recorded for people who build these programmes inside companies, and I have kept that framing rather than disguising it. Understanding the system that exhausts you is part of surviving it, and if you manage a team you need both views anyway.

Setbacks, the search and the plan

Then six on working through a crisis: hiring and being hired when budgets are cut, pay under pressure, development with no money, how redundancy decisions are actually made, communicating hard news, and restoring a sense of safety afterwards.

Then six on the job search: recruiter logic, CV structure, interview preparation, burnout during a search, salary negotiation and finding hidden roles on LinkedIn.

And ten of career coaching, which is the most practical block: the dream career model, identifying talents and values, impostor syndrome with the career cube, a skills audit with a balance wheel, soft skills assessment, search strategy, CV and profile, personal financial planning, burnout diagnosis and staged recovery, and an A-player audit.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have also run the redundancy conversations from the other side of the table, which is why the crisis block is not theoretical.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

This is a professional development course, not medical or psychological treatment. If you are currently in crisis, please speak to a doctor or a qualified professional first.

Where to start

Write down the three conditions at work that drain you most. Not the tasks — the conditions. Most people find that at least two are structural and could be changed, and that they had been treating all three as personal shortcomings. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.