In this episode (our last episode of 2024) Jim and Lauren talk about highlights for this year. We are amazed that we have released 40 episodes this year…   As we wrap up 2024, we thought it would be valuable to reflect on our podcast over the last year covering points such as these below.  We hope you enjoy listening!

- We didn’t wait for this to be perfect, we tried and improved over time

- Podcast listener demographics

- Top episodes based upon plays

- Our favorite episodes

- Our most challenging episodes to do

- Our favorite questions

- Surprises

- Lessons learned

- Thoughts for our 2025 podcast

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and Lauren focus on references. References are an important part of the interview process for both academic and non-academic career areas and sometimes there is confusion about how to approach this. We cover points in this episode such as these below.  We hope you enjoy listening! 

- What are references

- Why have references

- Who do you pick as references

- Importance of tailoring references for the role you are interviewing for

- You should give references a heads up that they may be contacted

- What types of questions are references asked

- When you are asked for reference, does this mean that you will be getting an offer

- How organizations reachout to references

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

As 2024 starts to come to close, Jim and Lauren focus this episode on giving gratitude and a few ways to express this including these points below. We hope you enjoy listening! 

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

- Why is it important to give thanks

- Way to give thanks

- Ways to update your network with your progress over the year

- Appreciate how you have grown

- What we are thankful for 

- Special thanks to Ayo (Lauren's nephew) who painted a picture in 2023 when he was 6 that is the podcast logo

- How we have been thanked

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and Lauren talk about skill building. We touch on where we are at with our own skill building and advice for people who want to expand their skillset.  We would also like to bust a few myths since one of the reasons we started this podcast was to myth bust!  We would like to incorporate more of these in 2025. Hope you enjoy listening! 

Focus areas:

- Why is skill building important? 

- How do we approach building skills

- Get outside of your comfort zone every to help you grow.

- Skills we have been building and looking to build

- Focus on building upon strengths that you do have

- The importance of organizational behavior

- When can you stop building skills?

- We bust the myth that if you do too long of a postdoc, you are not attractive to industry

- We bust the myth that you should only build skills that “look good”   

- We then talk about a few skills that are useful to build

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

Welcome to Propelling Careers podcast episode 36. This week (Nov 13-16 2024), Lauren is at the ABRCMS conference in Pittsburgh PA. She gave a talk on Nov 15th on The state of the industry job market:  opportunities, challenges, and strategies for success. We thought it could be worthwhile to talk about this topic in our podcast today.  ABRCMS stands for the  Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists.  ABRCMS has been the go-to conference for underrepresented community college, undergraduate and postbaccalaureate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As ABRCMS has continued to grow and evolve, it has also become a space for graduate students, postdocs, faculty, program administrators and more.

We talk a little about Pittsburgh (Jim’s home-town)

We talk a little about the ABRCMS conference

Lauren talked about her talk at the ABRCMS conference on The state of the industry job market:  opportunities, challenges, and strategies for success

So much flux right now in the industry – funding challenges, reorganizations, layoffs, etc

Fierce Biotech has a tracker to keep track of all of these layoffs

Is this current flux a normal part of the system?

Fundraising has been challenging leading to reorgs and layoffs across the industry 

We cover a few areas of growth in the industry

We cover how to use this information for your job search

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

Welcome to Propelling Careers podcast episode 35. In this episode, Jim and Lauren provide insight on how to decipher job descriptions. We know this is challenging and we know it is often confusing to know what an organization is actually looking for in a candidate. We cover topics like these below.  We hope you enjoy listening!    

- Most job desc’s cover at least four big picture things – company desc, technical skills, soft (transferrable) skills, and description of role.  Some also include preferred skills/experiences

- A candidate should do additional research outside of just looking at the job desc

- Sometimes a character limit is advised on the job desc which is why some are shorter

- Sometimes technical skills are listed as a list, sometimes these are given with more context so you can understand more what the org is looking for

- Sometimes orgs are vague on what they are looking for since  they want to be discrete on what they are doing (to keep things confidential)

- Many orgs try to make job descriptions more approachable – i.e. less gender focused.

- Examples of different types of descriptions of organizations and what this means

- Translating your technical skills into “industry speak”

- Pay attention to words on job desc’s like exploratory biology, preclinical, manufacturing, etc  - in many job descriptions, lingo’s are used and sometimes these lingo’s are important to describe the setting of the role, org, or opportunity

- Transferrable skills are often mentioned in the job description and these are important to pay attention to. We provide a few tips to highlight your transferrable skills in your application materials.

- Education required in the job desc depends upon role – many orgs want to be inclusive so many list minimum requirements to be inclusive

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and I provide advice, including these topics below, to follow up from your networking interactions. We hope you enjoy listening!    

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and Lauren cover tips to help you network more effectively by deescalating the networking process. In a professional setting, networking happens all the time.  Every time you interact with people, you are networking. We hope that our tips can help lessen the stress and anxiety of networking. We hope you enjoy

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and Lauren thought we would address a few questions that have come up often in the last few weeks from people reaching out to us. These questions have been focused mostly on applying to roles and process for organizations reviewing resumes.  Points we cover include these below. Perhaps some of you listening also have wondered about these questions too.   We hope you enjoy listening!    

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In the last few weeks, Jim and I have received a number of questions from graduate students about whether or not to do a postdoc, so we thought we would devote an episode to this important topic. It’s not a simple yes/no answer - there is a lot to consider including these points below, when you are making this choice.  We hope you enjoy

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!