How UX career coaching cohorts can hold you back and why Career Strategy Lab takes a different approach

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Why this non cohort approach works better in my opinion and based on the feedback we receive on everyone is that we are really focused on outcomes over schedules. 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 and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it.

Sarah Doody [00:00:50]: Hey, friend. Welcome back to another episode of the career strategy podcast. Today, I wanna tackle a very common question we receive, which is, is career strategy labs UX job search accelerator run-in true cohorts? The answer is no. And if you wanna know why, keep listening. So most career coaching programs in the UX industry and frankly anywhere rely on this idea of cohorts to keep people accountable. But the problem is what happens when life gets in the way. Right? What happens if you’re supposed to be on this strict schedule and then something happens and you fall behind? Here is what happens. You fall behind, then you start to get down on yourself, and then you get frustrated, and then you fall even more behind, and you start second guessing everything, and then you just think I’m so far behind.

Sarah Doody [00:01:49]: Forget it. I’m just gonna stop putting effort into this thing I signed up for. That is very common in the experience of cohort based courses or CBCs as it’s kind of become popularized because everything needs an acronym these days. But on the flip side, when it comes to cohorts, what happens if you wanna move faster than the group? Right? If you are someone who is not employed full time right now, you have a lot of time to put into a course. If someone else is employed full time, they might only have three hours a week versus you might have six hours a day. So the idea of cohorts in theory makes a lot of sense, but they can be problematic and actually hold you back. That is why career strategy lab takes a different approach. In our UX job search accelerator program, we help you build daily and weekly habits that really help you keep moving forward at your own pace.

Sarah Doody [00:02:57]: And these daily and weekly habits are gonna help you succeed in your job once you are hired or if you’re already in a job, it’s gonna make you even more effective. So today, I wanna explain why we don’t use cohorts inside Career Strategy Lab and why that actually helps you stay more accountable, more consistent, and confident in your job search. And by the end of this episode, you are gonna see how the tools and structure that we’ve created will help you achieve your goals without the limitations of traditional cohort courses. So first of all, let’s talk about why do people assume that courses need to be in cohorts and that their success is attached to a cohort experience. Certainly, many people don’t believe this, but this has become a very big trend, this idea of cohort based courses. And somewhere in the last, I wanna say about five years, this acronym of cohort based courses CBCs has become popularized probably because a lot of the course platforms use it in their marketing. Right? So cohort based courses, meaning courses that start and stop on a certain day, they aren’t new. It’s not a new concept.

Sarah Doody [00:04:24]: Right? This is just people going through a course on the same dates, etcetera, not groundbreaking. Like I said, they do offer structure, but it’s also a little bit of illusion of accountability through shared deadlines. And people often assume that they can’t be successful and be motivated without the connectedness of a cohort. And the problem here is that, first of all, it deemphasizes the importance of personal responsibility, one of my favorite phrases of all time. Right? You can sign up for a cohort based course that starts on Monday, ends on Friday, and has check ins every day, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be successful. You will be successful because you show up for yourself and do the work. Pretty simple. And the challenge with a lot of cohort based courses is that it doesn’t account for the individual.

Sarah Doody [00:05:26]: Right? It doesn’t think about the holistic experience of every single person going through the program because everyone moves at a different pace. Everyone has different time and energy that they can put into the course they are doing. So sometimes, cohorts can slow down fast learners and fast workers, and they can also overwhelm people who need more time or people who just have life situations thrown at them in the middle of, the course they signed up for. So if life interrupts your progress, this structure and rigidity of the dates, etcetera, in a true cohort can often leave you behind with little to no way to catch up. So career strategy lab is not run-in cohorts, but we have intentionally designed the whole experience so that you still have that accountability, and you still have that community that people often gravitate to when it comes to a cohort experience. So let me just share some of the ways that we have baked in accountability and community into our experience so that whether you’re treating Career Strategy Labs UX job search accelerator like your full time job because you’re laid off and you’re treating it like a nine to five, or if you’re working on career strategy lab after your nine to five, these accountability and community elements that we’ve baked in help you continue to make consistent progress regardless of the time that you have to commit. So we really focus on building these habits that fit your life. So you can do these daily and weekly things to keep making progress.

Sarah Doody [00:07:26]: A couple of examples that we do, we really have sprintified the parts of career strategy lab, meaning your resume, your LinkedIn, your portfolio, your job search, preparing for interviews, etcetera. We’ve sprintified everything. That alone is going to help keep you on track because you’re all familiar with the concept of sprints, and sprints come with checklists, come with recommended schedules, and things like that. So that is one of the ways that we give you the tools to create the timeline that’s gonna work for you. Then we also have weekly sprint check ins, very similar to what your team might do today. Right? Every Monday, we have an accountability thread. People say what they’re gonna work on for the week. They commit to it.

Sarah Doody [00:08:17]: And then on Friday, we check-in again. We also have you fill out a form on Friday. This is really for you to stay accountable. Right? We also daily sprint check ins similar to the Monday check-in. Every day, we have a post where we remind you of key things that you need to be doing regardless of if you’re working on your resume or your portfolio or your LinkedIn or whatever it is. One of the things we do in our daily sprint check ins are what we call the three e’s. Now what are the three e’s? First of all, we ask you, what are you going to execute today? Are you gonna write your resume bullet points? Are you gonna knock out a case study? Right? So what are you gonna execute? How are you going to engage in the career strategy lab community? Right? That creates accountability, accounts connection, etcetera. So maybe you’re going to comment on someone post, maybe you’re gonna provide feedback to someone on their resume.

Sarah Doody [00:09:21]: And then what are you gonna do to encourage? That might be showing up in a LinkedIn group or a Slack community or Discord that you belong to, or it could be someone not even in your job. It could be someone in your life, you know, a friend who needs encouragement or something. But creating these rituals of executing stuff, engaging with the people in your, peer group of career strategy lab, and getting into the practice of encouraging other people really, really helps keep you grounded, keep you focused, and really ditch a lot of the overwhelm that can come over us as we are trying to tackle our job search. Like I said, we also have weekly checklists. So if you decide this week is the week I’m gonna work on my resume, great. Get the checklist, go through it, make sure you’re doing everything, and that helps you avoid that problem where you sit down to write to your resume, and you’re like, I don’t know what to do. Let me Google that. Let me go on LinkedIn.

Sarah Doody [00:10:23]: Let me go on Instagram. Let me go on YouTube. Right? You get out of that let me decide what to do today mode, and let me go research how to do these things because we give you the checklist of what to do, and then you just watch the video or you grab the template and you just do it. Right? Another thing that’s really powerful is the submission deadlines. So in career strategy lab, you can submit something for critique up to eight items throughout your time in the program. You have to submit those for review every Sunday. So if you want your LinkedIn reviewed this week because you updated it, great. You have to submit that by Sunday evening.

Sarah Doody [00:11:07]: Those deadlines are very strategic because we all know when you have a deadline, you’re more likely to do something. And someone on one of our recent open houses, I believe it was Steven, and he said the accountability of knowing that I had this Sunday deadline to submit something helped me not fall into the trap of trying to perfect something. He really said that knowing that that deadline was there helped him just focus on good enough so that he could get into that feedback loop of work on my resume, submit it, get some feedback, make changes, submit it, get some more feedback. Right? So those deadlines, are something that come up with a lot of people when they tell us what they like about the program. So that’s how we have structured the program to create accountability, to create community, and to create structure without forcing everyone to be on the exact timeline because it’s just unrealistic to think that, let’s say, 20 people will all be on the same pace, the same timeline, etcetera, and, frankly, the same starting point. Right? Some people come into career strategy lab with a resume that’s probably, like, 80% ready to go. Other people come into career strategy lab, and they haven’t updated their resume in twelve years because they’ve been at the same company for twelve years and haven’t had to think about their resume. So that’s another thing to consider and why we didn’t make this very rigid structure because we know everyone coming into career strategy lab has a different starting point, but everyone has the same goals.

Sarah Doody [00:13:03]: Everyone has the goal to be able to showcase themselves as an awesome candidate and articulate their value so they stand out from hundreds of other candidates and increase the odds that they get the interviews, and ultimately, our goal of seeing people get five fair salary increases. Alright. So those are some of the ways that we have built in, like I said, that accountability. Another thing that I wanna point out concerning why this non cohort approach works better in my opinion and based on the feedback we receive on everyone is that we are really focused on outcomes over schedules. So cohorts are focused on schedules. Right? Because it’s very date driven. We are focused on outcomes. We want you to complete your resume, complete your portfolio, complete your LinkedIn, start applying for jobs, etcetera, on the timeline that makes sense for you.

Sarah Doody [00:14:07]: So some people come into career strategy lab, and they finish their resume in, like, the first two weeks. That’s great. Other people come into career strategy lab, and maybe they have interviews coming up. So their resume worked because they got interviews. They might jump right to focusing on their portfolio because maybe they have interviews coming up, and they know they need to present a project from their portfolio. So they hop to that part of career strategy labs. So we definitely have baked in this flexibility by not focusing on schedules and focusing on outcomes. And this approach really helps you create a system that works for you based on whatever your career goals are.

Sarah Doody [00:14:56]: Alright. So we have three key takeaways here. First of all, we focus on building daily and weekly habits that keep you accountable and consistent without the need for cohorts. Number two, we use cohorts because we want you to be outcome driven, not schedule driven. If your resume takes you three weeks, that’s fine. If your resume takes you three days, that’s also fine. Different people have different starting points. Different people have different time that they can commit to the program, and so we don’t wanna hold you back by saying that when you join career strategy lab, you can only access the resume course first.

Sarah Doody [00:15:47]: And once you finish your resume, that unlocks, say, the portfolio course. Like, that’s not helpful to anyone. And number three, the power of peer support and mentor feedback that provides you the structure and guidance you need to stay motivated. And this one is really important because the power of not having everyone doing everything at the exact same time, that means that if you join career strategy lab today, there are people ahead of you who have already maybe finished their resume or finished their portfolio, and they’re getting interviews. And the power in that is that when you ask a question in the community, there are people ahead of you who can provide very relevant timely feedback because they just went on three interviews, so something about their resume and something about their portfolio is working versus if you’re in a cohort experience and you ask a question about resume, but everyone is at the same kind of timeline of creating their resume, you’re not gonna get very much feedback and input from your peers because everyone is kind of, like, still in the early stages of making their resume. Right? So there’s so much power in having people who are a few steps ahead of you because along with the coaches inside of career strategy lab, other people who’ve been through career strategy lab are really essentially serving as pseudo coaches because they’ve already done what you’re doing. They’ve already made their resume, and they’re happy to provide feedback for you if you have questions. So at Career Strategy Lab, we really believe that your career journey should be tailored to you.

Sarah Doody [00:17:36]: That’s why we take a super holistic approach, and we don’t do this one size fits all model. And with our habit and outcome focused approach, you will stay on track, you will achieve your goals, and you will build a process and habits really that are going to serve you for years to come. So if you are ready to take control of your job search and do it on your own timeline yet in community with other people who are just as laser focused on all of this as you, then I’d love to invite you to learn more. If you are familiar with Career Strategy Lab, you’ve probably checked out some of our workshops. If you’re not, the best way to learn about who we are and what we do is go to careerstrategylab.com/apply. And that’ll give you all the details of who it’s for, what’s included, how it works, etcetera, etcetera. And if you have any questions at all, send me a message on LinkedIn. I’m very easy to find.

Sarah Doody [00:18:47]: Just put in my name, and you’ll find me. I am happy to go back and forth with you on LinkedIn messages or have a one on one call. I have a couple of team members who share taking calls with me. So if you’re wondering, I wanna learn more about career strategy lab, hit us up on LinkedIn, send us a message, slide into our DMs as they say, or reach out and say, hey, I wanna have a phone call. How do I do that? And we will set you up. So please know that despite what you hear out there, cohorts can be helpful, but they don’t guarantee success. And sometimes it can be helpful to take your focus off of a rigid schedule to provide accountability and your future job searches and in your day to day job once you get hired. Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:19:49]: That’s all for today. I will talk to you in another episode. Have a great rest of your day. See you later. Thanks for listening to the career strategy podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, 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.

Sarah Doody [00:20:13]: 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. Catch you later.