In this episode, Jim and Lauren focus on advice related to helping people navigate their career journey / search (orprepare for it). We often debunk bad advice (since one reason we started this podcast was to be a source of truth regarding career focused insights) but in this episode, we thought we would boost good advice, such as these points below. We hope you enjoy listening.  

To advance in your career, you need to work on yourself first

Consider how you are interacting with your colleagues / team / group – are you positively contributing to the energy of the group? Are you enjoyable to work with? Do you meet your commitments?

You can lead, even if you are not the boss

Consider that sometimes a setback or failure, may actually be a blessing in disguise and a valuable learning opportunity  

Recognize the value of self reflection

Highlight your value – recruiters cannot read your mind… make your information approachable

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 share perspective about how to find silver linings in change. We both know change can be hard. but sometimes change opens up opportunities that you were not aware of.  Many people I know have been able to find a better culture, a better work life balance, more fulfillment in their career, and other things after the initial change of role. We hope you enjoy listening.  

- How to find lessons learned in these challenges and changes we face

- How to maintain positivity during challenges and changes we face

- We can work and what might not work to find the silver lining in change

- How to get into the right mindset and nourish it

- Oftentimes change provides a time of reflection 

- What are your lessons learned

- What is your motivation moving forward- Building resilience and using this to bounce forward

- Importance of a growth mindset

- Tip for what is helpful and not helpful to do when you are looking for silver linings

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 our last episode, 41, we rung in the New Year by talking about the "New Year, New Job’". To provide more advice to help with this topic, in this episode Jim and Lauren cover something we often hear from job searchers, that is dealing with the pressure of finding a job under time constraints, especially without seeming too desperate. We cover these points below.  We hope you enjoy listening!

• Limited timeframes for your job search can arise for various reasons.
• Normalize the pressure, recognize it and develop a plan
• Spread the responsibility (engage your network) so that you don’t do your search alone
• Self reflect so that you have an idea of what you are looking for next and share this with people
• Have your application materials together
• Get in a routine - schedule times for searching
• Take stock of resources you have access to and leverage these. You might have access to more than you think.
• Developing a SMART plan
• Be proactive to identify organizations and roles (don’t just look on job boards)
•  Set goals and reward yourself to keep motivated

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 episode 41, our first episode of 2025, we focus on the topic of New Year, New Job.  The new year often brings with it a fresh start and this can invigorate people especially as they think about their career. In this episode, we will provide advice and insights to help as you navigate career exploration and or a search including these below.  We hope you enjoy listening!

- The important role that self reflection plays in your exploration and search

- The importance of having “anchors” i.e. preferences for what you want in your career and what you are looking for in a role to help focus you in your search

- Document your anchors

- You should not launch a search until you know what you are looking for

- Be intentional in your search

- Use these anchors to guide you in tailoring application materials

- Reflect on what gives you energy to help you know what you may want to focus on as your career develops

- It is important to understand where you are in the process: job exploration or job search

- What signs might indicate that you should start to consider looking for a new role

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 (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!