The Career Peer: Thriving, Navigating, and Valuing Your Career

Before attempting to write philosophically about The Career Peer, let’s be clear: My co-host and I created the podcast, primarily, for fun and because we wanted to work on something together. At the get-go, we could have selected another path for content — our day-to-day lives, favorite songs, breads we like, etc.

However, we decided to pursue this idea of resources for reflecting on your career. Why would we choose a career development topic? So many organizations have some form of career growth program and so many educational institutions have centers dedicated to this topic; not to mention the well-established websites that provide generous resources.

Our choices were even less understandable when you factor in the time — research, preparation, recording, editing, publishing, and more — required to produce a professional-level podcast.

We weren’t striving for high levels of listenership. We weren’t trying to make money. We aimed for goals around content and production quality, learning, and relatability. Career development seemingly wasn’t at the core of our work expertise. Or… was it?

One of the values that industrial-organizational psychologists strive to adhere to every day — and especially highlighted when working with CEOs, executives and other senior leaders -- relates to inspiring organizational health, well-being, and effectiveness while simultaneously inspiring individual health, well-being, and effectiveness. Essentially, we recognize that organizations thrive when we guide and challenge individuals to elevated levels of performance. Career development, including tools for self-reflection and the opportunity to increase self-awareness becomes vital to organizational success and to organizational leadership. Specifically, when I coach at the CEO level and the executive level, we’re often delving deep into the nuances of how to increase a leader’s power — expertise, areas where greater attention is needed, and social/interpersonal understanding — to the do the job well.

There are a few key takeaways. First, if you enjoy it, embrace it — which happens to double as a key career development piece! Second, often our highest-impact organizational interventions integrate individual interventions within their universe of activities — not surprising, as this is a core concept within organizational change. Third, CEOs, executives, and senior leaders can benefit greatly from career development too — this has been a repeated experience for me over the years, and something I don’t know that enough people give enough recognition to, in terms of the human side of being a top-level leader.

So… The Career Peer. We had fun. And, yeah, it was worth it.