When there’s an opportunity to be online, I think it’s worth pursuing.

Elissa Sangster: That’s Lindsey Pollak, a frequent guest at Forté events. Lindsay wrote the recently released book Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World. In this episode, she talks about how to build an online presence to get your career off the ground.

Lindsey Pollak: Because I think the direction we’re going in is that your online presence is going to be almost as important as your in-person. I don’t think we’re going to have résumés in the future; I think we’re all going to have online profiles.

Elissa: Welcome back to our Career Lab podcast. Each episode, we bring you advice and insight about careers in business and how to make the connections to get you started. Today, we’re going to hear from Kimberly Hall. Kimberly works in Human Resources at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. She recently spoke at one of our Forté Career Lab events about how she found her calling, and the steps she took to build her career. But first, back to Lindsey Pollak. Lindsey is well known as a speaker and book author specializing in career advice. Just recently, she started a new project.

Lindsey: About three months ago, I launched a blog at lindseypollak.blogspot.com, and I answer student questions, I post event listings such as the Forté events, I link to articles about what you shouldn’t do on Facebook, I provide resources, and it’s just been so much fun. It was a college student who came up to me and said, “You absolutely have to have a blog, people want to interact with you,” and I think with the generation that I work with, it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done, because the book is great, and the speaking is great, but the blog is really where the exciting things happen and where I get to connect with the real people.

Elissa: At our Career Lab event in Minnesota this winter, Lindsey talked about how to build an online presence using blogs and other tools to help you make professional contacts.

Lindsey: I think the reality is today — and this is new, this is the past couple years — before I’m going to interview you, I’m going to Google you, and I’m going to check you out on Facebook and LinkedIn. And yeah, we’ve talked about all the things not to do, but if you’re a smart student, there’s so many ways that you can stand out even before you come into the interview room, and really impress somebody. So, writing book reviews on Amazon for relatively intellectual and interesting books, having a LinkedIn professional profile, a Doostang profile, having a Facebook page that’s not necessarily professional, but interesting and shows that you’re an involved person, having your own blog, commenting and posting on other people’s blogs. There are all these opportunities to make a first impression before you even walk into a room, so you can be a leg up on the competition just by building your online presence.

And I think a big mistake that people make when they blog is it’s all about them, and nobody wants to sit and read what you had for breakfast this morning. It’s just not going to cut it, and nobody cares. So with my role, and my advice to anyone who’

Elissa Ellis: Hello and welcome the Career Lab Podcast. I’m Elissa Ellis, Executive Director of the Forte Foundation. Recently, we brought the Career Lab to Minneapolis for an evening of discussion with women in all different fields of business. Kymm Pollack is currently a Marketing Director for General Mills in the Cereal Division. Like many women in business, she envisioned herself in a very different career when she was an undergraduate.

Kymm Pollack: I thought actually, I was going to be the American Ambassador to the United Nations. That was what I entered college thinking I was gonna do. I was always really interested in International Languages, politics, that kind of stuff. Actually when I graduated from college, I thought I was actually going to go into the Peace Corp and it was only when I felt I needed a back up option to the Peace Corp because not everybody gets accepted into the Peace Corp that I threw my resume into MetLife Insurance Company, they had a wonderful management training program and it was really my back up option but in getting interested in this program and interviewing, all of a sudden I realized, “Wow, maybe this is something that I would be really interested in.”

In the end, I did have to end up deciding between MetLife and the Peace Corp and I just really felt that the pull for the business job was ultimately what I really wanted to do. In fact, one of the people at MetLife that had interviewed me, I had finally gotten sick of asking, I had asked all the questions I could possible ask during my re-visit and so finally I said, “Why do you want me here?” And he looked at me and said, “Because whether you know it or not, you’re gonna be in business and I would just love for your career to start here at MetLife,” and that actually statement really stuck with me because my dad was a doctor, my mom was a teacher, I didn’t really have a lot of business people who were influences in my life. Then that got me off into business and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

Elissa: Kymm told us that what surprised her most about the business world is the broad spectrum of career options.

Kymm: There are so many different paths that you can take and it’s almost overwhelming. I think back to when I was an undergrad and part of the reasons why I think I didn’t even consider much business is just I went to a liberal arts college and there weren’t a lot of business recruiters coming there. Luckily for me, MetLife came there but I had no idea sort of the spectrum of all the different jobs that were available. It wasn’t until I went back and got my MBA I think that I was in a better position to take advantage of all the opportunities and to really craft a path for, no this is really what I’m interested in, brand management, which is what I do now. I wouldn’t even have known that term when I was an undergrad.

I think going into business, it’s just the sheer spectrum of all the different things that you can do, no matter what’s your interest, no matter what’s your passion’s. That was unexpected. I guess I thought of it a little bit more in a siloed sort of, “Well, this is business,” but business has so many different definitions.

Elissa: Kymm explained what

Valerie Bockstette: I have an MBA. My career track is a little bit untraditional or maybe traditional.

Andrea M Kimmel: I think we live in an environment where careers evolve, and career interests evolve. And I think I wanted a degree that would help my career evolve with my changing interests.

Whitney Guston: For me, the opportunity to go to business school was not only to meet amazing people and really expand my network but also to be able to work effectively with people who are experts in finance.

Elissa Sangster: Hello. And welcome to the Career Lab podcast. Earlier this month, Career Lab traveled to Boston for an evening of panel discussions, networking and workshops at Harvard business school. Our speakers represented just some of the many options open to women in business today. Valerie Bockstette is a consultant at FSG Social Impact Advisors, a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. She talked about the growing career opportunities in the world of social enterprise.

Valerie: So we help foundations such as the Gates foundation or for example a community foundation such as the Boston Foundation, or corporations that are focused on corporate social responsibility. Figure out how to best invest their resources and who to give money to, how to measure the success of those grants. I have an MBA, My career track is a little bit untraditional or maybe traditional. I graduated from Brown in 2000 and majored in International Relations but decided to become an investment banker so I worked on Wall Street for three years doing mergers and acquisitions work then came to Harvard business school to get my MBA, specifically to transition into the nonprofit sector. Graduated from HBS in 2005 and spent two years at a small nonprofit consulting firm in Boston working as its managing director, and just recently transitioned to FSG.

HBS is actually a wonderful institution in terms of what they call social enterprise. There are a number of classes at HBS on the academic side so my second year half the classes I enrolled in were actually taught at HBS and focused on different topics of nonprofit management. There’s a very strong social enterprise club on campus and there is a program called Leadership Fellows, which I participated in, which funded me for my first year in the nonprofit sector so it paid half the salary so that the nonprofit could afford someone like an HBS grad.

Elissa: Careers in the nonprofit world are often seen as a trade-off, sacrificing money for intangible rewards. Valerie talked about what drew her to the nonprofit world.

Valerie: It’s just that joy of knowing that what you’re doing is valuable and that presumably you are not working for a nonprofit whose cause you believe in. So to know that you’re contributing to that cause every day, even on frustrating days, is very important. I think the other thing that I’d just touch on is you’ve got so much more responsibility when you work for a nonprofit because their nonprofits are so resource constrained you probably have two or three jobs at the same time. You may or may not notice that, but you will understand how an organization runs from top to bottom.

You may have to wear the accountant hat one

In the final episode of the Career Lab podcast series, we talk to Elizabeth Vale, managing director at Morgan Stanley to get her advice on building and sustaining a career. We also hear from Karen Le Vert about launching her own business and a few current and recent MBA students, who describe the route they took to business school and beyond.

Elizabeth Vale: I would ask questions like who has been successful in this role? What are models which have been a good fit here? What training, what gifts combined to make a person successful in this role?

Elissa Sangster: Hello and welcome to episode three of the Career Lab podcast. That was Elizabeth Vale, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. We asked Elizabeth what questions she would advise asking of a perspective employer. After all, now is the season when many college seniors are about to graduate and commit to their first job.

Elizabeth: I would ask also about a career path. I think one frustration with many jobs I’ve been in has been you really need to create your own career path. Is there a logical progression? Is there the ability to move around? Very often people get stuck and I think you want to make sure that the firm generally endorses multiple experiences. So I think that’s not a bad question at all to ask and perfectly appropriate.

Elissa: We asked Karen for her advice for women who know they want to go the entrepreneurial route.

Karen: One of the main things in preparation is knowing thyself. When you go into business on your own, you start by yourself a lot of times. Sometimes you have one or two other people around you, but you have to learn where your strengths are, and I’ll call them growth edges, to where you need to compliment yourself. Secondly, it’s always better to get into something where you have some background about the market that you’re going to be in. Businesses have high failure rates for money, for not approaching the market correctly, not really understanding the customer, so you can give yourself a better chance of success if you put some of those things in your favor.

Elissa: Karen is one of our many speakers who decided at some point in her career that an MBA would give her the edge she needed to accomplish her goals.

Karen: I wasn’t sure actually right when I graduated that I would get an MBA. I started eight years after I was out of school. I don’t think that you necessarily have to have an MBA to be successful in business, but I learned a lot about business plans and the financial side of the business so at least you could build forecasts and see if you’

In this episode, you’ll hear from Lindsey Pollak, millenial expert and author of Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World. Lindsey shares her advice on finding the right career, landing an interview, and preparing for life beyond college.

Lindsey Pollak: The biggest question I get is, I have so many interests, what do I do? The biggest mistake is to not take action, so don’t let fear of making the wrong decision overcome you.

Elissa Ellis : That was Lindsey Pollak, author of the book, Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to do Before you Join the Real World. Welcome to our second Career Lab Podcast, I’m Elissa Ellis, Director of the Forte Foundation. This episode we’re going to hear Lindsey’s advice about how to jumpstart your career based on interviews she did with recruiters all over the country.

Lindsey: One of my favorite tips is really about email and your online presence. These days email is the primary form of communication for pretty much everything, so understanding, first, what’s a proper email address, meaning your name and a professional sounding URL rather than my sister’s email, which was, [email protected], is probably not the best choice. Everything from that to the subject line, which should be very descriptive and professional to a very professionally written, specific goal orientated email asking somebody for help, for a job, whether it’s a cover letter, a networking email, having a signature line at the bottom of that email, so they can contact you.

Making sure the tone is right and not to young sounding and probably the tip that most people comment on as being a big change for them is not having to many exclamation points in an email because there’s no better way to look young than having an exclamation point at the end of every sentence, so watch your email and you’re already ahead of the game.

Elissa: We asked Lindsey what questions she gets most frequently from women who are just starting out.

Lindsey: One of the top questions is, I’ve gotten the name of somebody that I should contact from somebody I know, what do I do with that? My advice on that is to write an email asking them for a 15 minute conversation for specific advice. A lot of people feel like they’re using people when they ask for help, but if you ask for information and advice you can never go wrong, so switching the mindset from asking for a job and feeling desperate to asking for advice.

Elissa: Lindsey also talked about how to test drive your resume.

Lindsey: Hand someone your resume for 60 seconds and if they can’t tell what kind of job you want, go back to the drawing board because the biggest problem with entry level resumes is, they’re all over the place. I interviewed a recruiter and she said, “If I see a resume and I don’t know where it goes in my company, I throw it in the garbage.”

Elissa: We asked Lindsey how she advises women who are struggling to decide on the right way to begin a career.

Lindsey: I always say, “A job is not a soulmate. There’s not one out there that’s absolutely the one for

Elissa Ellis Sangster: Hello and welcome to our first Career Lab podcast. I’m Elissa Ellis, Director of the Forté Foundation. At our recent event in Los Angeles, a panel of business leaders spoke with our audience of undergrads about a career in business.

I came here because my friend invited me and she said it was going to be a lot of strong women. I’m a bit of a feminist, so I wanted to talk to some of the women that were here, find a relaxed environment where you could just talk to women on a one-on-one personal basis.

Talk about doing an MBA. It’s something that I had never considered before, but just the prospects of breaking into this field or even the fact that you can go straight out of school. It’s just something I didn’t know at all, so that was really interesting.

The one thing and the main thing that I hoped it would do is allow me to be able to compete with other individuals within a company, allow me to grow more.

Elissa: One of the surprising things that we heard from our speakers was that they couldn’t have guessed where their careers would take them.

Katherine Bair Desmond: I’m Katherine Bair Desmond. I’m the manager of Women’s Recruiting Initiatives for McKinsey & Company in North America. I was an English and Psychology major. When I was going into my senior year, I spent my summer doing marketing with Coca-Cola in Atlanta where I grew up, and had such a positive experience. Realized that actually business, which I’d always thought was just boring and what my dad did, actually might be really, really interesting. I’ve decided that, that was what I wanted to do after I graduated.

I definitely had not anticipated going into business and I don’t think I really understood what business was when I was in college. I went to a liberal arts school, I studied English Psychology and I spent my free time hanging out in the theater. It just wasn’t an area that I knew anything about. I think that first experience through that summer internship opened my eyes to the fact that actually business might be really exciting and there was so much I didn’t know about it, and so much I wanted to learn about it, that I decided I’d give it a go.

Elissa: Katherine wasn’t the only one who reported that her career path took her by surprise. Rodney Craig is the Director at Merrill Lynch Capital in the Healthcare Leveraged Finance Group. We asked Rodney whether he could have predicted where he would end up.

Rodney Craig: Never. I had no knowledge of investment banking really prior to my senior year at USC. I went to USC undergrad and I never would have guessed that I would wind up working at Merrill Lynch providing finance and for leveraged buyout, so it’s been a pretty good ride.

Elissa: Rodney also talked to our audience about his experience in business school.

Rodney: It was a lot of fun. It was a great group of people, it’s very competitive, a lot of very intelligent people. I think that it was probably the best two year of my life because I was more mature, I knew what I wanted to do going into business. Then, for me, business school validated my goals of going into finance, so it was a great experience for me.

Elissa: Eric Chamb

Elissa Sangster: Welcome back to our three part series on careers at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. Barbara Novick is Vice Chairman of BlackRock, and one of the firm’s founders.