How to vet career advice and know who to trust

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the Career Strategy Podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies news and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop in Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Welcome back to another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.

Sarah Doody [00:00:42]: And today, I wanna address a bit of a hot topic, and that is why you need to be really careful Who you take career advice from. Let’s face it. By not vetting who you take career advice from, You are really setting yourself up for a lot of confusion and potentially wasting a lot of time by really aimlessly following advice from people without considering if they really know what the heck they’re talking about. I get it. In your job search, in your career, when you have a question, the first thing many of us do is just Google it, or we go post something on LinkedIn or ask in a community we’re a part of. Hey. Does anyone know the answer to x, y, and z? Then what happens? You got a lot of conflicting advice. Right? You’ve probably experienced this.

Sarah Doody [00:01:41]: One person tells you to do one thing, another says another, a third person says something completely different. And it’s extremely frustrating, especially in your career when the stakes can be quite high, especially if you’re in a job search. Right? So the next time you find that someone gives you advice, before you just follow that advice on that web page or in that email or in that conversation that you have with someone. Consider that just because it was on some website or just because that person has a ton of followers on social media or something like that, it doesn’t mean their advice is always accurate. And what I want you to consider is a few very strategic but simple questions to help you discern whether or not You should trust and take the advice from these people. Right? Let’s imagine that you’re in the middle of a job search and you have a question, and then you come across some article or someone responds to an email or a LinkedIn post you make, we’re asking for advice on this topic. The first thing you wanna ask yourself about the person or the source of this information is, Has this person actually helped people get hired? Then you wanna think to yourself in this use case of a question related to your job search. You wanna think about questions like, okay, how many people has this person helped? Are the people that this person has helped, are they similar to me? Right? Are they in a similar career stage? Do they have a job similar to what I want to do? Are they in a similar geography to me? Right? Advice might vary depending on where you are located in the world.

Sarah Doody [00:03:36]: You might consider, are the people that this person has helped, Are they at companies where I wanna work or similar companies? Are they at similar career stages? You wanna make sure that you are aligned with the type of people that this person has helped. Right? Another thing to consider is How recently did this person help people get hired? Were they doing it 20 years ago? Have they helped people get hired in the last 2 years? Potentially big difference. Right? And then how experienced is this person? Right? Has this person just Maybe graduated from college and is dishing out career advice, but they themselves have not been hired yet, then you might wanna reconsider their advice. The answers to these questions are going to help kind of build your trust meter for the advice, the person, the website, the source of where you are getting this information. Because it should go without saying, but we can’t believe everything that we are told on the Internet or that people post on LinkedIn or in the comments of LinkedIn or in Facebook or LinkedIn groups that we are a part of. But I think that oftentimes, especially in our job search, We are so worried about messing up that oftentimes we doubt the knowledge and our own gut reaction, and we replace that with advice from total strangers that we don’t even vet. And that, when you think about it, Doesn’t really make sense. So if you are in the middle of trying to get some questions answered or clarify Topics related to your job search or something else, don’t just follow the advice that you find online.

Sarah Doody [00:05:30]: Make sure to vet That website, that source, that person. Oftentimes, if I Google something and I end up on a website with an article, I will look over to that author’s page or I will Google the author to try and get a better understanding of, you know, What qualifies them to speak on this topic? Alright. There you have it. So before you Take career advice from anyone. I really encourage you to spend a tiny bit of time doing some investigator work to figure out how much and why you should trust this person. Because doing this, Investing this very small amount of time to do some due diligence could save you a lot of time in the future. Because If you take advice and it’s wrong, then you’re gonna have to go back and redo something that maybe you coulda done correctly the first time if you had gone to the right source. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:06:32]: I hope this was helpful. I hope it helped you rethink how to look for and vet advice from people in your career, and I will see you on the next episode of the Career Strategy Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Career Strategy Podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, through Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it If you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts.