Episode 94
Is Career Strategy Lab a scam or a genuine career booster?
13 min listen
Episode 75
13 min listen
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Episode Summary
Is Career Strategy Lab a scam, and why can’t I find any Career Strategy Lab reviews that are negative on Reddit and elsewhere? This episode tackles that burning question head-on. Today, our founder and CEO, Sarah Doody will do a deep dive into what Career Strategy Lab offers, focusing on its group coaching program and structured community designed for UX, design, and tech professionals.
Addressing concerns about the lack of negative reviews for Career Strategy Lab, the episode reveals why some people choose not to publicly share their experiences and explains the occasional negative feedback. If you’ve heard rumors about Career Strategy Lab’s slick marketing masking a flawed program, you’ll hear firsthand that the genius behind the marketing is the same expert running the coaching.
By the end, you’ll understand Career Strategy Lab’s true offerings and find out why the experience is carefully crafted to benefit professionals at all career stages. Whether you’re skeptical or curious, this episode provides the transparency and insights you need. Tune in to clear up misconceptions and get a real sense of what awaits inside Career Strategy Lab. After you listen to the episode, if you still think Career Strategy Lab is a scam then feel free to email us, we’re happy to answer questions!
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Discussion Questions About The Episode
- How do social stigmas around career coaching and professional development affect an individual's decision to seek help? Have you ever experienced or witnessed this yourself?
- How do you think the group coaching format compares to individual coaching in terms of effectiveness and support? Have you had any personal experiences with either format, and what were the outcomes?
- In what ways do you think effective marketing can both help and hinder trust in a service or product? How important is transparency in marketing for you when deciding to invest in professional development programs?
- Discuss the role of user research, experience design, and marketing in the creation and promotion of Career Strategy Lab. How can these principles be applied to enhance your personal or professional branding?
- How do you generally perceive and handle feedback in your professional life? Can you think of a time when feedback significantly impacted your career decisions or strategies, either positively or negatively?
Episode Notes & Links
Episode Transcript
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 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. Hello.
Sarah Doody [00:00:38]: Hello. On today’s episode of the Career Strategy Podcast. I want to address a question that has popped up a few times in the past couple of months. And that question, put bluntly, is is Career Strategy Laba scam? Alright. So, in case you’re wondering, what is Career Strategy Lab? Career Strategy Lab is a career coaching program that my team and I run focused on helping people in the fields of user experience, design, and tech, figure out how to navigate their careers and advance their careers, whether that means getting a promotion, getting a new job, or just being ready for unexpected opportunities. And we do that through a variety of means, mainly group coaching programs. Meaning, you join Career Strategy Lab potentially for 3 or 6 months or one of our short 1 or 2 week sprints, and you are in a community of other people focused on advancing their careers, and you are using our curriculum, our community, our live calls, our critiques, our coaching, etcetera, to help you advance your career. So that’s what Career Strategy Lab is. If you wanna learn more, just go to careerstrategylab.com.
Sarah Doody [00:02:00]: But couple of times, we’ve received this question of, is Career Strategy Lab a scam? And 2 main kind of thoughts, I guess, have been driving this question after we kind of emailed back and forth with a few people and in some cases hopped on phone calls. So one person had said, I’m gonna read it, they’d said, I’ve done a lot of Googling and I’m somewhat suspicious that there isn’t a single negative review or published experience regarding the program. It seems unlikely that everyone came out satisfied. Alright. So question number 1 regarding this suspicion that there are not negative reviews that people can find upon googling. So a few things to, consider. Number 1, many people who pursue career coaching may not necessarily want other people to know that they pursued that. It’s definitely a personal choice.
Sarah Doody [00:03:02]: Of course, we have people tag us on LinkedIn posts quite frequently after they get hired or achieve certain milestones in Career Strategy Lab and share that with people. On the flip side, there are other people who may never want to post that they worked with us because they may feel shame or vulnerability or something around having other people know that they hired help to help them navigate their career or job search. So that I think is one of the things that plays into this. However, I will say most people have a very positive experience inside Career Strategy Lab. And do we get, negative feedback? Of course, we do. Now, what is the nature of that negative feedback? The root of the negative feedback tends to stem from people who did not understand what they were signing up for when they signed up. Despite our very clear outline of what Career Strategy Lab is, whether that is on our website or in emails or when in some cases we hop on a call 1 on 1 with people before they join to answer all of these questions. One of the things that people seem to still get confused about is that there is this expectation that we are going to get on 1 on 1 calls with them every single week, anytime a day.
Sarah Doody [00:04:36]: Like, we are just on demand for them, and that is not the nature of what we do because, frankly, that is not scalable. And so that’s why we’ve created this group coaching structure that allows you to get feedback from multiple coaches, but in a very scalable way. Because if you ask a question, for example, in our community, you are going to benefit from the feedback and answers that other people in the community give you, the feedback from our 4 coaches. And even if you don’t ask a question in the community, just by being in the community, you are going to benefit from the questions that other people are asking as well. So why aren’t there negative reviews? One of the reasons is because I think people aren’t comfortable posting online, but secondly, because we frankly very rarely get negative feedback. And like I said, that negative feedback often stems from a disconnect between the person not realizing that this is not signing up for you get a bank of 8 calls with Sarah that you can use at any time or Sarah is going to personally make your portfolio and make your resume for you. So that is the first thing I want to address. The second thing I want to address is, some comments we recently received around, and I’m gonna read it.
Sarah Doody [00:06:05]: They said, the marketing is so good. The marketing for Career Strategy Lab is so good that I am worried once I join the program, I will be let down because they hired some marketing firms to do their marketing, and it’s not going to be as great once I join the program. Okay. For total clarity, I am in charge of the marketing for Career Strategy Lab. We have not hired some firm to do all of our marketing, whether it’s the podcast, newsletters, social media posts, etcetera. That is all me. And I also have a marketing degree in addition to working in the field of user research and experience design. And that combination of background between marketing, experience design, and research, I think is my superpower to be frank because my research skills have allowed me to understand our potential clients or customers of Career Strategy Lab.
Sarah Doody [00:07:13]: I’m able to understand them so well. As a result, I’m able to write very compelling copy emails, social media posts, etcetera, that truly get to the heart of people’s struggles when it comes to advancing their career. So there is not some marketing agency that I’ve paid a ton of money to to do all this for us. What you are seeing marketing wise is me. And I wanted to highlight that because whether you are marketing a physical product, a service, or yourself as a candidate, the principles of marketing still stay the same. Right? You still need to do things that help you become more visible as a new business or a new product or a candidate. You need to catch people’s attention. You need to make it easy for them to contact you.
Sarah Doody [00:08:14]: You need to nurture those relationships that you have with your prospective customers, and that is a big part of what we do with our marketing for Career Strategy Lab. You know, we get your attention oftentimes, maybe for some people it’s on social media, another it’s a YouTube video, another it’s a podcast episode or something. We have a variety of ways to kinda make people aware of us. Then we have a lot of things in place to kinda nurture those relationships and help people get to know who we are, what we do, why they can trust us, etcetera. And that could involve our weekly newsletter. It could involve them listening to more podcast episodes. Could even involve downloading, our program syllabus or some of our, checklists, like our layoff checklist or resume checklist. And then we eventually tell people about what we do on our website with very clear outlines of here’s what we do, here’s what you get, here’s how much it costs, here’s what’s not included, etcetera, etcetera.
Sarah Doody [00:09:25]: So I just wanted to point out that there is no big marketing firm. I am the marketing firm. And if you want to learn how to market yourself as a candidate, then Career Strategy Lab is going to help you do that. Because if you like the marketing for Career Strategy Lab, then guess what? You’re gonna learn how to market yourself from the very person, AKA me, who does the marketing for Career Strategy Lab. So that is the big hot topic I wanted to address today and just kind of get that out of the way because I know maybe you’ve heard about Career Strategy Lab in the past and maybe had similar thoughts as these people, you know, you can’t find negative reviews or you’re worried that once you get inside Career Strategy Lab, it will be completely different from, the quality of our marketing, etcetera. And that is just not the case. We give the experience inside Career Strategy Lab so much attention. I have intentionally designed the experience, like, I am an experienced designer.
Sarah Doody [00:10:32]: It would reflect very poorly on me if once you’re inside Career Strategy Lab, it’s just a total chaos. There’s no organization. You don’t know when calls are. Like, it’s just kind of a free for all. That would be horrible. Right? That’s not the case though because we have designed that experience. And someone have recently said, you know, I wish that I had known how detailed and attentive the team is to the experience. Because if I’d known that I would have joined sooner.
Sarah Doody [00:11:05]: So we’re gonna go back to the drawing board and see how maybe we can figure out how to communicate the level of detail and the experience a little more clearly. If you are thinking of joining Career Strategy Lab or or even hearing about it the first time and want to learn more, feel free to just check out careerstrategylab.com or if you have questions, reach out to us, reply to our emails, send me a message on LinkedIn and I will reply. It might take me a few days, but we have an open door and we want to meet you where you are at. So just please know that we are here to support you in whatever advancing your career might look like. Alright, if you have other questions I’ve not addressed again, feel free to send those to me as well, and I’ll get you an answer. Or maybe it’ll become another podcast episode, who knows? Alright. That is all for today. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and we will see you in another episode.
Sarah Doody [00:12:08]: Bye for now. 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. 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.