Get Ready For Career SKOOL!

Karina I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees so I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, your in the right place. Happy Friday everyone. I am going to do things a little bit differently today. I'm actually here to announce something I've been working on behind the scenes that I'm really excited to share with you. We just launched a brand new home for our community on Skool that's S K O O L in case you haven't heard of it. And I want to tell you about what it is, how to join, and all the free resources and prizes that you'll get if you join us there in school. For the past few years I have been working on creating a space for career development and I want to make a place where job seekers and biotech professionals can learn from me and each other and really form community because it can be a little bit lonely as you're going through your career and sometimes we feel like we're in competition with each other, like there's only so many jobs to go around. And the thing about that scarcity mindset is it's usually rooted in not having a community and knowing other people going through the same things. So I have tried in two different places to build this community and absolutely failed. So you know I'm all about experimenting. I am a scientist after all. So our first attempt was in Slack and that just did not work. And our second attempt was in Kajabi where there was a dedicated community space and I just had terrible engagement there and what I found was that there weren't a lot of guardrails on how people could come in and interact with. So people came in, asked questions without helping or reading other questions and it just wasn't a productive place and my wonderful members who were really in there to help got frustrated. The feedback I got was that they didn't want to participate because people were taking too much and they weren't giving enough and so I shut that down. I just moved as well. So I took the summer to get Myself settled, I moved across state lines. It was quite a big move, if you know me at all. You know, I have horses and goats and chickens and a whole farm. So I took some time to get that settled. And in the meantime, I've been very quietly working on a project in the background to move us over to school. So school is a platform that's built around interaction, accountability and it's gamified, it's fun, there's leveling up involved, it's really engaging. Much more than any other community platform I've tried. And I'm a member of a couple of school communities for my own professional development and I've really enjoyed it. So I'm hoping that this works for us. So here's the best part. This community is going to be free to join going forward. There is no membership fee to get into this community. In the future. I'm going to add some tiered membership levels that are going to include more intensive support and access to me. But honestly, there's a lot of great free resources that we already had on our website, just download and go. Those are all now in the community. So not only do you get those free resources, but you get access to a great community of people. And I am going to have some great stuff that's grandfathered in if you join before I roll out those tiers that you're just going to have, which is nice. So this is my little call to action for you. Jump into the community now, don't wait. So what's inside? You will get access to this little thing I made called the 7 Day Interview Accelerator. And this is a structured, step by step, seven day program to get ready for interviews fast and to start landing them fast. So what I've done there is I've taken pieces of each of the courses that I have and I've put them into a little structured module so that you can really quickly go through the most important parts of making your resume, making your LinkedIn, learning to network and applying for jobs. And there's some interview readiness in there too. So it's kind of a mix of everything, but it's really aimed to get you a really quick win, have a great resume and going out and applying for jobs. By the end of that seven days, you'll also get access to all of my existing courses and free resources like resume tools, LinkedIn strategies, networking templates, all of that. And the way I roll that out is you have to participate to get access. So there is a little bit of gamification in there. It's really, really easy to participate. But as you participate, you're going to unlock more and more of those things. I also have created a brand new tool that has never been rolled out anywhere else called the Career Coach on Call. And it is my digital clone, trained on over 500 hours of me coaching, teaching, participating in panel discussions, all my podcasts, all of my Career Coach columns. It's all types of things so that you can ask questions anytime and you can get tailored advice. Whether you're in the middle of your career trying to get a promotion, whether you are thinking about managing your first person and developing that relationship with a direct report, whether you're job seeking and you're stuck in your Resume and your LinkedIn and your interviews, all of that is in there. What I really like about the Career Coach on Call is it's versatile. You can upload your resume, you can give it parts of your LinkedIn profile and it's going to be really tactical. The other thing I'm doing in there is I've brought back my Q and A sessions, but I've made them weekly now instead of monthly. So every week on Tuesdays, usually unless there's holidays or travel or something like that, I will be doing a live Q and A session. We are allowing people to submit their questions for that in a thread. I will timestamp where I answer those questions. So if you can't make it live, you can still get your answer. And that is available only in the community. So I'm not putting that on YouTube or anything else. You have to be in the community to get answers into your questions in that live event. And we are gamifying everything just because everyone loves a good game. It's a fun reward system. If you post in the community, if you share your wins, if you set goals, if you climb the leaderboard. I am going to be giving away hot seat coaching sessions every month. With me, I'm choosing three winners every month from a variety of areas where I want to encourage good participation. I have a post that tells you all about exactly how to win and just start participating. You might get a free hot seat coaching session with me. This is all designed to make your career journey a little bit less overwhelming, a little more actionable, and hopefully a lot more fun because we're doing it together now. One of the things I love about this setup is that it really emphasizes giving more than you take. So every post, every comment, every like helps build momentum not just for you, but for the whole community. And you know what? Let's do something fun. If you are on YouTube you will see this in the video. If you're not on YouTube and you're listening to this podcast, I'll be describing this, but I'm actually giving you a little walkthrough. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you exactly what is happening in the community. And if you are listening to this on your podcast app, you're not going to be able to see it. I will describe things, but you can always pop over to YouTube. All right, so I'm here in the community and this is our community tab. There are multiple little spaces you can see along the top here on our little navigation menu. Community is where all the conversations take place and it is the first tab because that's the most important thing here. There are a few little boards here, so a general discussion is where I usually make announcements. But you can post job seeking questions, career development questions wins accountability, which are goals that we set every single week. You can see we have a September goal challenge here and on this people are putting their goals. I'm not going to scroll down because I'm going to protect the identity of the folks in the community. But you can see Taya's goals and my goals. Taya's our community manager. We have measurable goals and this is actually part of the contest for this month is setting and checking in on measurable goals so that you can win a coaching session with me. And in the classroom we have a great set of classes and these are here for you. I also offer one to one coaching and so you can also sign up for one to one coaching sessions if you need deeper support. And we have a calendar of community events including Those Q&As, our podcast releases and special speakers coming in. And then we have a fun map as well. You can actually see where folks are in the world. So as you zoom in on an area, you can actually find other members in your region. If you ever wanted to have a meetup, that is the way to do it. And we have a leaderboard that helps to track who is making progress in our community. And that leaderboard is awesome because the first person on that leaderboard every month is going to get a coaching session with me. Back to the community. I just want to dive into our Q&As this week that you might have missed if you weren't in the community. So we had some really great questions asked and so they come onto a thread like this, everybody asks their question and then some People in the community might weigh in before it's Q and A time and actually give you a take on what they think, which is awesome. That's what this is all about, right? Not just me, but the whole community coming together. But I also timestamp the answers. So then when you go to watch the replay, which is right here in the thread, you are able to get to go straight to the timestamp of your question. Although I obviously recommend that you watch all of them because you never know what you're going to learn. But any questions that interest you, you can just pop right to that answer timestamp. So this is something that is going to live in here. And what's really cool is that there's a search bar here. So I remember one of the questions and I'll go through these in a minute. One of the questions was about interview nerves. You could search for things like if you're getting ready for an interview and you're nervous, you could search for all posts that are about interviews by searching that. And you can see there are four posts here, there are 21 things in the classroom. It tells you how to go straight to things. So you're. It's really easy to navigate around. We could look for nervous. There was one community post and it happened to be that question here. So you can then find resources really fast. So let's say you had a question, you find, oh, somebody asked that question three months ago in the Q and A. You can go straight to that video, straight to the timestamp, and you can get my answer. So it's a little bit self service, but of course you can always start a new thread and ask questions again if you have a hot take on it. All right, I want to just jump into some of the questions that we asked. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to go through those. This week in the Q and A we had some awesome questions asked and answered. One of the questions was about COVID letters, asking if they're still an effective way to stand out and are there other techniques to stand out, if not cover letters? So we discussed that. Who actually reads the COVID letters? When do they read them? And I think that that was a really nice discussion because cover letters are that kind of bane of people's existence. Who wants to write a cover letter? But I talk about when they might be important and when you might be able to get away with not giving one or to put a little bit less effort into making your cover letter. The next question I answered was about the general consensus that people feel that job descriptions are looking for really narrow, very deep skill sets as opposed to broader skill sets. And so I talked about how to handle that, how to look at your transferable skills and to make them feel narrower, even if you do have a broader experience base. The next question was a bit of a broad question, but I interpreted it as what are some ways that we can get involved in doing things during a career gap? We talked about how you might actually approach accelerators from schools and volunteer pro bono to do a couple of things project based for some of the startups and their accelerators to give yourself a little consulting experience, which is a great way to build your resume. So I don't advocate for going and working for free. I will say that sometimes doing some pro bono work in a new area is a great way to fill out your resume and to get some awesome experience and to put a few more things into that gap so that you can talk about it when you're in an interview situation. The next question was about an interviewer who was asking really specific detailed questions of one of our candidates, one of our community members who she couldn't really talk about it because it was a protected project and that happens a lot. So I had a tactic for how to handle that and deflect and let them know that it was confidential and in general terms, answer the question. And then the second part of the question was she also felt that she wasn't the project owner on something that this person was really pressing on. And so I talked about how you would give credit to the actual project owner while also highlighting your contributions as a cross functional team member. Another question I answered we actually highlighted in our little walkthrough here about interview nerves, how to handle interview nerves. And this person is going on site for an interview for the first time in a long time. Many companies are still doing totally virtual interviews, but it's now scary to go on site for interviews. So we talked about some tactics to handle those nerves. And the last question I'll highlight from this Q and A was about a career changer. Not a huge career change, just sort of a shift. So doing something in the public realm versus the private realm and thinking about how to frame the skills for a job that is going to be really similar, honestly, but for a company as opposed to an academic institution. So those are the questions we answered this week in our Q and A. Already see new questions popping in for next week's Q and A. So if you're not in the community yet. Jump in, get your question answered. So if you're listening to this and you're not already inside, here's what to do. You are going to head to the show notes here or the description if you're on YouTube and click the link. Or you can head over to skool.com that's s K-O-O-L.com backslash biotech career coach and that will get you right to our community. The registration is really fast. It takes less than two minutes. All you really need to do is say you want to join and you will get access right away. And I'm really excited to see what we can build together in this new space. I ask a lot of questions. I want to know from you what's most useful and which topics are highest on your list. So so get in there and make yourself heard so that I can build content around your needs. My goal is to give you not only the tools and strategies for job seeking and career development, but also a great network of peers who understand what you're going through and can cheer you on and honestly will last a lifetime. We make connections here for the rest of our careers, so please join us and make those great connections because you never know who's going to get you your next job. So join today. It's free, it's open, you'll lock in extra perks if you get in early and I really appreciate you listening and I'll see you in the community. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support resources and materials and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip when you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.