Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most people spend years inside an organization trying to figure out why things work the way they do. Nobody tells you before you start that the answer is not the org chart, the leadership team, or the company values on the wall. It is the culture. And culture is not a vibe. It is a system. And like any system, it can be read.

Nick Holmes is a PhD researcher in organizational behavior, the founder of Culturnova, and one of the most practical voices working on what workplace culture actually is and how to diagnose it before it costs you. In this conversation he shares the framework he has spent years building, and what it means for anyone trying to understand the environment they are working inside.

In this episode:

• Why culture is the operating system of every organization and what that means for how people work, grow, and feel at work
• The four domains of culture: Maps, Wires, Patterns, and Sparks — and what each one tells you about whether an organization is working or quietly breaking
• Why burnout is caused less by overwork and more by role ambiguity and misalignment, and what to do about it
• What managers can shape in a person's first 90 days and why that window matters more than almost anything else
• What to ask in a job interview that will tell you more about a company's real culture than anything on their website

Real Work Ready

Understanding the culture you are walking into is one of the things nobody teaches before you need it. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to navigate any environment from day one.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Nick:

Culturnova: culturenova.co.uk

UNTHINK: weunthink.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nickholmeshr

TikTok: @nickholmes_culturedesigner

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready
 The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.
 Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most HR professionals are brilliant at understanding people, organizations, and value. They are far worse at pricing their own. Nobody ever taught them how to quantify what they are worth, so they default to undercharging and overdelivering until it breaks them.

Sam Eaton is the founder of MindAbility Business Coaching, a global business coach for the HR and talent profession with 25 years of experience building HR consultancies internationally. In the last five years, she and her team have guided over 260 founders to build 6, 7, and 8 figure businesses. In this conversation she breaks down why HR professionals cannot see their own value, and what a failed gardening business taught her about knowing when to walk away.

In this episode:

• Why HR professionals consistently struggle to quantify their value, and what it costs them with clients
• How Sam scaled an HR consultancy from £650K to £4.3M, and what that growth actually required
• The story behind her book The Trouble With Pink Wheelbarrows, and what a failed online retail business taught her about forecasting, ego, and knowing when to pivot
• Why objections in a client conversation are often an opening for a deeper conversation, not a rejection
• How to turn a founder's personal goals into an actual commercial strategy

Real Work Ready
Knowing your value does not start with a pricing formula. It starts with the professional foundation Real Work Ready builds in the first years of a career.
Get started: www.realworkready.com
For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Sam:
Website: mindabilitybusinesscoaching.com

MindAbility Business Club: mindabilitybusinessclub.com
Book: The Trouble With Pink Wheelbarrows: amazon.com/dp/B0BBJN5CFB
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samanthaeaton1450
Instagram: @sam.eatonagain
 YouTube: @mindabilityconsulting5705

Connect with Laura:
 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
 Instagram: @realworkreadyhq
 Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most career advice is about skills. Nobody tells you that the professionals who last the longest are not the most skilled ones. They are the most resilient ones. The ones who built their defenses before they needed them, who knew their vulnerabilities before someone else found them, and who understood that resilience is not a response to pressure. It is a decision you make before it arrives.

Salwa Rafee is a biomedical engineer turned global cybersecurity executive who has spent over 20 years protecting the systems that protect patients, including leadership roles at Accenture, IBM, Siemens, Raytheon, H-ISAC, and USAID across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. She is a speaker, an advocate for women in STEM, and the author of Defending Digital Lifelines: Healthcare in the Cyber Age. In this conversation, she brings the framework she built for protecting hospitals into the conversation every early professional needs about protecting their career.

In this episode:

• What twenty years across the world's most complex organizations taught her about how professional environments actually work underneath the surface
• What the path of building a career in a technical, leadership-heavy field gave her that she is most grateful for
• What she wants every young professional, especially young women, to understand about building confidence and not waiting for permission
• How the framework inside her book, know your vulnerabilities before threats find them, build your defenses before you need them, applies as much to a career as to a hospital system

Real Work Ready

The behaviors that protect a career are learnable before you need them. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to build them, before they spend years figuring it out the hard way.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Salwa:

Website: salwarafee.com

Book: Defending Digital Lifelines: Healthcare in the Cyber Age

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/salwarafee

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most of us were handed the same career map. One employer. One ladder. One title at a time. Nobody told us the map was drawn for a world that no longer exists.

Andreia Fernandes is the founder of the Portfolio Career Institute in Zurich, a keynote speaker on failure culture, and the creator of the Portfolio Career Canvas framework. She has spent over a decade helping professionals build careers that do not fit one title, one ladder, or one employer, and she is making the case that this is not a risk. It is the strategy.

In this episode:

• What a portfolio career actually is and why it is fundamentally different from a side hustle or an inability to decide what you want
• Why the professionals who build the most fulfilled and financially resilient careers are the ones who stopped trying to fit one box
• What failure culture is and why your relationship with failure determines more about your career than your skills do
• What someone can do right now, before they enrol in anything or quit anything, to start building a career that reflects their full range

Real Work Ready

Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to grow into the kind of leader who designs a career on their own terms. The behaviors are learnable before you need them.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Andreia:

Portfolio Career Institute: portfoliocareerinstitute.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andreiarfernandes

Instagram: @andreia_r_fernandes

YouTube: @andreiafernandesPFC

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Most people get the job. Almost nobody gets the briefing.

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a leadership podcast for people building toward a business leadership seat. Every episode is one senior leader on one thing they had to learn the expensive way. Where they learned it. What it cost before they knew it. And what it means for someone still climbing.

Not the keynote version. Not a memoir. A briefing for the person coming up behind them.

Laura Massetti spent fifteen years inside Fortune 100 organizations hiring, evaluating, and deciding who moved up. She watched capable people do everything right and stall anyway, and she could never explain it to them in a way that helped. So she started asking the people who got past it. Not what they achieved. What they had to learn, what it cost them, and what they would hand to someone coming up behind them.

New episodes every Tuesday.

WHAT EVERY EPISODE GIVES YOU
• The lesson a senior leader learned the expensive way
• What that lesson cost before they knew it
• What to do with it while you still have time
• Career and leadership advice that assumes you are already good at your job

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Realworkreadyhq
Podcast: https://realworkready.com/podcast
Also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

FOR PEOPLE MANAGERS, HR LEADERS, AND L&D TEAMS
Real Work Ready is the professional readiness training that teaches the six behaviors determining how work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Companies bring it in for the people they are investing in.
Join the masterclass: https://realworkready.com/masterclass

CONNECT WITH LAURA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realworkreadyhq
TikTok: @realworkreadyhq
Website: https://realworkready.com

Subscribe now so the first episode lands in your feed on Tuesday.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.comMost career advice tells you to find your lane and stay in it. Nobody tells you that the people who move fastest are the ones who keep raising their hand and asking for more, even when nobody is asking them to.

Mariza Fotiou spent 20 years building a global career across financial services and energy, including as Digital COO at HSBC Private Bank and VP of Digital Product Management at BP, across New York and London. She changed roles every two to three years throughout her career by doing one thing: raising her hand when she was bored and asking for more. In this conversation, she shares what that habit actually built, what the hard moments actually taught her, and what she now knows that she wishes someone had told her at the very start.

In this episode:

• Why raising your hand when you are bored, not waiting for the right moment, is the single most powerful career strategy most people never use
• What the colleague-to-boss transition actually looks like and why nobody prepares you for it
• What it feels like to lead a team through organizational transformation when you yourself do not know what is going to happen to you
• What AI is actually doing to entry-level work and why early professionals need to understand that the job market they are walking into is not the one that existed two years ago

Real Work Ready

The habit of asking for more is something you can build before you ever need it. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the operating system for a career that lasts.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Mariza:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mariza-fotiou

CuriousIQ: curiousiq.org

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Nobody tells you that the career you plan is not the career you get. Nobody tells you that some of the biggest turns will come from a decision somebody else makes about you, in a room you are not in. And nobody tells you that the logic of your own path only becomes visible looking backwards.

Danijel Brener leads the Enterprise PMO for Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care. Before that he was Chief of Staff and Head of International Markets. Twenty two years ago he walked into an interview expecting a sales job, was told he was not a sales person, and was sent to a country he had not chosen. Five cities and two continents later, he coaches early and mid career professionals on the thing nobody explained to him: how to tell a right yes from a wrong one.

In this episode:

• Why the career you plan is almost never the career you get, and what to do with that instead of fighting it
• What it actually costs to say yes to an opportunity you did not choose, and what it buys you that staying put never will
• What he believed about how big decisions get made when he was junior, and what he found instead
• How to tell a right yes from a wrong one in year two, before you can see anything looking backwards
• Why learning to say no early is a career skill rather than a career risk

Real Work Ready

Nobody hands you a map for the first five years. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the six behaviors that determine how work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered, so that when the unplanned opportunity arrives, they are ready to take it.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Danijel:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dbrener

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready
The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.
Learn more: www.realworkready.com


Look to your left. Look to your right. You are looking at a mentor. Most people wait until they are stuck to go looking for one. Nobody tells you that the people who most want to mentor you are already around you, and that the easiest moment to build that relationship has already passed by the time you realize you needed it.
Dr. Deborah Heiser is an applied developmental psychologist, TEDx speaker, Thinkers50 honoree, founder of The Mentor Project, and founder of Mental Mapping. Through The Mentor Project she and her team delivered over 3.5 million hours of mentorship. She is the author of The Mentorship Edge. In this conversation, she shares what all of that taught her about what mentorship actually is, why it so often fails, and what it builds when it finally works the way it should.

In this episode:

• Why the most accomplished people in any organization are looking for someone to mentor right now, and why they cannot find early professionals to mentor
• What most people get wrong about mentorship that makes corporate programs fail and organic relationships never form
• What impact amnesia is and why early professionals who are not tracking their contributions right now will pay for it later
• What someone in year one or two of their career can do this week to start building the relationships and the track record that real mentorship requires

Real Work Ready
Mentorship is most valuable before you realize you need it. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to build the relationships, visibility, and track record that make it possible.
Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Deborah:
Website: deborahheiser.com
Book: The Mentorship Edge
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/deborahheiser_phd
Instagram: @deborah_heisertmp
TikTok: @deborahheiser0

Connect with Laura:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
Instagram: @realworkreadyhq
Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most career advice tells you to work harder, learn more, and build more skills. Nobody tells you that at some point, none of that is enough. The ceiling is whether you can actually get things done with people who see the world differently than you do.

Michael Shipler has spent 25 years building coalitions and driving results in some of the most complex conflict environments in the world. He is VP of Common Ground Leadership at Search for Common Ground, a global peacebuilding organization nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. He is the architect of a leadership development program built around a single conviction: the ability to collaborate across divides is the most critical skill of our time. In this conversation, he brings 25 years of working in the world's hardest places into a conversation about the skill every early professional needs to start building before they ever think they will need it.

In this episode:

• What 25 years in conflict zones, from Cambodia to Central Asia to the Horn of Africa, taught about how change actually happens and why most leadership development misses it completely
• Why the ability to collaborate across divides is becoming more valuable not less as AI equalizes technical capabilities across organizations
• What trust actually is, why dialogue alone does not build it, and what does
• What someone in year one or two of their career can start building right now that will distinguish them in ten years when most of their peers have never thought about this

Real Work Ready

The behaviors that let you get things done with people who see things differently are learnable before you ever need them. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to build them first.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Michael:

Common Ground Leadership: sfcg.org

Search for Common Ground: sfcg.org

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michael-shipler-0088a421

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most career advice tells you to do good work and let it speak for itself. Nobody tells you what is actually being observed on the other side of the table. Nobody tells you what HR leaders and managers are seeing, evaluating, and thinking about early career professionals that they almost never say out loud.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman is Chief HR Scientist at AIHR, a global HR academy serving over 65,000 professionals across 180 countries, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a former Group Chief HR Officer, and one of the most recognized voices on the future of work. He has presented at over 100 conferences, authored 80 articles, and co-authored books including Work for Humans. In this conversation, he brings the full weight of 18 years on the evaluating side of the table to an audience that has never had access to this view.

In this episode:

• What HR leaders are actually seeing and evaluating in early career professionals that most people have no idea is being observed
• Why the gap between university and the workplace persists even when organizations know it exists, and what it costs early professionals who do not know it is there
• What the research at AIHR reveals about what is changing in terms of what early professionals need to bring to the workplace right now
• What AI is making more valuable in a person, not less, and what someone in year one or two can start building before they ever need it

Real Work Ready

Everything Dr. Veldsman describes from the HR side of the table is exactly what Real Work Ready was built to teach from the professional side. The gap is real. The behaviors are learnable. The program is built for years 0 to 5.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Dieter:

AIHR: aihr.com

Book: Work for Humans

The HR Dialogues: youtube.com/@AIHRAcademytoInnovateHR

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dieterveldsman

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com