This article explores the experience of careering during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a wide range of recent research, it proposes a framework for understanding this experience which attends to its multi-scalar nature and to its temporality. The article provides an analysis which addresses the micro, meso and macro levels within which individuals’ careers take place. An argument is made that periods of crisis reorder our temporal experiences creating a new periodisation based on: the immediate crisis period; the subsequent period when restrictions are lifted and we return to the increasingly contested idea of ‘normal life’; and the long-term as these repeated crises reorder our thinking and our society. The framework is discussed primarily in reference to the experience of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, which highlights the cyclical and ongoing nature of such crises.