Yonas Tesfaye

I came to the United States from Ethiopia at eleven, with my mother and my younger sister. My father stayed behind. I now lead engineering at a mid-cap company in Minneapolis. The path from there to here was a path my American peers do not entirely understand, and it is the path I now help other first-generation African brothers navigate.

Let me name the specific work. The career path of a first-generation African in the West is not just the career. It is also the negotiation with the family expectations our parents brought with them, the expectations they developed once they arrived, and the expectations they placed on us as their American or European or Canadian children. None of those expectations are unreasonable on their own. All of them together are sometimes impossible. The work I do is the work of holding all of that at the same time — the actual career math, the actual family math, and the honest internal accounting of what kind of life the brother in front of me wants.

Most of my clients come to me at one of three career moments. The first is the moment of choosing a career field — usually a brother in his twenties, often finishing school or in the first job, negotiating parental expectations that he go into medicine, law, or engineering when his own interests are elsewhere. The work in this moment is about the long-arc conversation with parents, the building of an alternative path that the parents can recognize as serious work, and the management of the brother's own guilt about not doing what was expected of him.

The second is the mid-career moment — usually a brother in his thirties or forties, established in a field, looking at the next move. The work in this moment is the same work that the broader career-leadership circle on this platform takes on: visibility, promotion narratives, the question of when to stay and when to leave. With the first-generation overlay, though, there is often an additional layer. The brother is sending money home. The brother has aging parents who may need to be cared for in the U.S. or back home. The brother is the one his younger siblings look to. All of that informs the career decisions.

The third is the leaving-corporate moment. Some brothers in their forties and fifties decide that the long climb is not what they want to spend the next twenty years doing. The decision to leave is complicated for first-generation brothers in specific ways. The financial cushion may need to support people the brother is responsible for. The status loss may be felt particularly by the family back home, who are watching the brother's career from a distance and have an idea of what success means. The work of leaving requires careful preparation and the right conversations with the right people.

I work with brothers across the African diaspora — Ethiopian, Eritrean, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, Kenyan, Somali, Sudanese, and brothers from other countries — and the patterns are recognizable across national lines even when the specifics differ. My rate is one hundred thirty dollars per hour, with a free thirty-minute first call. Sessions are by video. I work in English and Amharic for the brothers who prefer Amharic in some parts of the conversation. I work in arcs of four sessions, with the option to extend.

I am direct in this work. I am not a coach who tells brothers what they want to hear. The brothers I have helped most are the brothers who showed up willing to be told what they did not want to hear, and willing to do something with the information. If that is the work you are ready to do, I am the coach for you.