Quick Momentum For Your 2026 Biotech Career Goals

Happy New Year. We are finally in 2026. I don't know about you, but last year did feel like it dragged a little bit to me. It was a hard year. For the last few years our biotech market has not been great and 2025 was no exception. So I am hoping for a better 2026 for biotech. I don't know about you. Today we're going to recap 2025 and look forward into 2026 with all of the amazing things that we have in store for you. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm.

I've helped over 85 biotech 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, you're.

In the right place. First of all, I am in the middle of an office renovation. It was almost complete, but obviously I have a totally bare wall behind me. It might be bare for a little while. My husband is an artist and a woodworker and he is making a beautiful custom piece for my wall behind me. But for now I'm really enjoying the new color and I hope you like it too. We have had a lot of good change in 2025. If you've been with me all through the year, you know that we moved our community from Kajabi into school and I'm loving that. It is such a There's so much more we can do. It's more interactive. I'm just really, really enjoying the school platform. So if you haven't checked that out, grab the link in our description and do that soon. It is a great community and we have a lot going on this month, so I'm going to tell you about all that soon. But I want to recap a few things that we did in 2025 that set people up for success. First of all, the school move was huge. I moved the entire course library in there and we have a lot more interactive weekly events so that's really, really fun. On Tuesdays, the whole community does a Q and A with me, which is great. They bring their questions and we're making that more interactive, which I love. I also do office hours with our premium members twice a week, which is awesome. It is great facetime and I get to really dig in on their particular problems, look at applications, workshop interviews and do career development. So I am loving it. One of our most beloved features is our seven day interview accelerator course which sets you up to have a brand new resume, a brand new LinkedIn presence and start applying for jobs in seven days. And it's not a huge heavy lift. We give you all the tools so that is a fan favorite in there. And last month in December we did our networking challenge and that is going to be an evergreen challenge. So if you ever want to pop into the community and do a month of networking challenge to build healthy networking habits, that is there for you. I am going to continue doing it. I saw amazing results with my own LinkedIn profile and I know that I should be doing these things. But the challenge just frames networking activities in a really accessible way and it gives you accountability so that you are not dropping the ball on any day and you get support from the group. So I really love that challenge and people had amazing results. I had good results and I'm a good networker. I network consistently on LinkedIn. We had folks come in with no networking. Some of them had a few hundred even less connections. They hadn't been posting, they hadn't commented, some of them didn't have a profile picture. So we got everything set up for them and people saw ridiculous improvements in their metrics. So I teach you how to use the analytics in LinkedIn so that you're tracking how well this is working for you. People had great network growth, they had bigger profile reach, meaning that their profile is being seen by way more people. They were found in more searches. So it was a really good December event because December is historically not a great time to apply for jobs. Although there are a couple of people in our community who are killing it with getting interviews in December. I've been so impressed with them. However, for the most part it is a tough month to get an interview because everyone is in end of year mode, interview teams are on vacation. I can't even convene an interview team with my clients if I want to sometimes. So it's a hard month. January though, January is the month we are really excited to jump in and apply in January because a lot of jobs open up in January. Budgets are refreshed, hiring managers have a lot of energy after coming out of a nice little holiday season and they are ready to build their teams and ready to go. So with that in mind, on Monday the 5th, we're launching our application challenge. This is also going to be an evergreen challenge where you can come in anytime and start on day one. Your day one is your day one. However, if you're already in the community or you jump in before that, you can launch with us on Monday. I will do five days of teaching Monday through Friday next week. Then I'm going to set you up for the daily habits that will get you success as you start applying here in January. So I'm really excited for that. We're going to revamp resumes, we're going to learn how to look for jobs, we're going to learn how to expand what types of jobs we're looking for. It's going to be a lot of fun and you're going to learn a lot. So if you're not in the community, jump in. I'd love to have you in this challenge and you can layer that on top of the networking challenge because neither challenge is a huge time commitment. It is just consistency. We're just building the muscle of networking and the muscle of applying. I promise to make it fun in January. We're also doing some other great things. We are going to have an annual planning session on Monday the 12th where we're going to go through and think about our year. If you are trying to get a new job, you're going to plan for that. If you're trying to get a promotion, you'll plan for that. Whatever your goals are, we're going to teach you how to plan for them. We're going to plan together and it's going to be really fun. I'm also going to have a great guest come into the community and talk to us about presentations. Presentation skills are not just for job talks, although that is a great application for them. We'll also be discussing presenting to your group in lab meeting settings, presenting to your company in like an all hands meeting, and presenting at conferences. So this is such an essential skill. We have seen over and over that people who give better presentations get jobs faster and get promoted faster. So do not sleep on improving your presentation skills. This is going to also come out as a podcast, but we're going to have some interaction with this amazing special guest if you're in the community. And finally, I'm going to be adapting an AI challenge that I'm doing with another group of mine for our community. I think learning to use AI is so essential and most people are still just chatting with ChatGPT like a little Chatbot buddy. There is so much more you can do with it. So I'm going to create a 10 week intro course for AI in your life. This is not just for job searching, not just for applications, but how might you use AI to make little tools for yourself to automate things that are repetitive, that you don't want to have to do manually anymore? There are a lot of applications for AI that you may not be aware of and I want to give you the tools for that if you haven't been exploring already. It's a little bit of a passion of mine and I want to make sure that you are also learning these things alongside me, because it's not going anywhere. Employers are going to start to expect that you're integrating AI into your workflows, that you're doing things smarter and faster with the use of these tools. And so I want to make sure that you're comfortable with them, you understand them, you understand the safety around them. And you are starting 2026 with a better appreciation for what all these tools can do for you. So that is the POD today, because I am busy making all of these things for you. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes. I'm so excited and I wish you a very happy new year. And I just wanna leave you with this. I am not an astrology gal. I do not really believe in the zodiac signs. All of this stuff is kind of woo woo to me. That said, I am going to steal this year's zodiac because it is really powerful. This is the year of the Fire Horse. So if you know anything about the Chinese zodiac calendar, which I really don't, so I may misspeak here. Don't hold it against me. There are 12 animals and five elements and they rotate on a 60 year cycle. And we are in a Fire Horse year. So we've got the fire element and we've got the horse animal and this is a really powerful combination. Again, I'm a scientist. What I want to take from this is the energy and the intent. I want to take the intent of Fire horse into my 2026 because it just feels really right to me. And there is actually a lot of research about the power of intent and the power of how you approach things. So I am personally approaching my new year, my 2026, with Fire Horse energy, which is intense energy, ambition, progress, forward motion and bold leadership. I'm a horseback rider. You may or may not know that about me. So I really do resonate with this because my amazing horses are incredibly powerful and I wanna bring some of that unstoppable energy into 2026 with me. So if you wanna set an intention with me, channel that energy and just think of it anytime you feel a little bit stuck, a little bit down or you feel like you're losing momentum. You can be the Fire Horse with me if you want to be. That is all for today. I am so happy to have you here. Happy 2026. Happy Fire Horse Year Floods Go. Thanks so much for listening to the.

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You back here next Friday.