Creating a Career Roadmap: Sarah Doody’s Episode on the AIGA Design Podcast

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: You know, when I say the greatest product you’ll ever work on is you, I don’t mean that our listeners should go and make a logo for themselves. Like, that’s not what treating your career as a product means in the world of product development, which I know some of your listeners are definitely involved in. Like, we have this concept of product roadmaps. Like, where do we want this product or business to be? Two years, five years, you know, even longer. 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.

Sarah Doody [00:00:49]: 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. Great to be with you. I’m excited to chat and connect with your audience.

Sarah Doody [00:01:13]: Yeah, thanks again for being here. So you have a lot of expertise. You talk about UX and product careers in design. I actually just caught you on your LinkedIn livestream a few minutes before we started recording ours. Let’s just jump in. You have some interesting metaphors for is to help job seekers think about their careers. And the first one is thinking about yourself as a product or that the greatest product you’ll work on is yourself. So I’d love to learn more about that.

Sarah Doody [00:01:40]: How do you think about yourself as a product?

Sarah Doody [00:01:42]: This whole idea of treating yourself in your career as a product really stemmed from like some personal reflection that I did when a lot of people kept asking me, like, how did you get to where you are in your career? And when I really thought about it, I thought, wow, I’ve actually been like designing my way into and out of different career situations for years. And when I really did like a retrospective research project on my own career, it was a little bit creepy, to be honest, like how much I had been applying design and research principles to my career. And I think this idea of treating yourself as a product is so important because when it comes to career advancement and the highs and the lows that can come from goal setting or a job search even. And maybe you notice this too. There’s a lot of talk about mental health in the workplace for sure. And I think a lot of it is because like so many people define their personal self worth as a human based on Job title, salary, names of companies on their resume. And I think framing your career as a product helps detach a little bit and helps you make more objective and strategic decisions around like what are we doing, why are we doing it, etc. So yeah, that’s a long answer to how did this come to be essentially?

Sarah Doody [00:03:25]: Right. I feel like there’s that parallel a little bit with the personal brand language, which I kind of shudder and cringe at sometimes. But I feel like, yes, treating yourself as a product is a bit more holistic than a brand. That often is sort of a surface level connotation for me. Whereas the product, since you were talking about research as well and really thinking about it in a more holistic, deeper way seems like a way to help people have a little bit of separation from like themselves and their, their self worth as individuals versus just them as professionals who are essentially selling their time for money.

Sarah Doody [00:03:58]: Yeah. And you know, when I say the greatest product you’ll ever work on is you, I don’t mean that our listeners should go and make a logo for themselves. Like that’s not what treating your career as a product means in the world of product development, which I know some of your listeners are definitely involved in. Like, we have this concept of product roadmaps, like where do we want this product or business to be two years, five years, even longer. And that allows us to have this ebb and flow of short and long term focus that guides our decision making so that a product team isn’t tempted by the latest trendy thing, but instead they’re thinking, wait a second, does it even make sense to add this feature to our product given our product roadmap? So that’s kind of the parallel I see with our careers having that kind of focus and that compass or roadmap analogy that we can use in our professional life and personal too, potentially.

Sarah Doody [00:05:13]: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I’d love to dig more into this roadmap and compass analogy that you use to help people understand their careers. I did want to back up a little bit since you did mention your own journey and how in retrospect you started to see this product thinking and these approaches in research. So could you tell us a little bit about that? Because you’ve kind of gone from the practitioner side of things to being more of a career coach, helping other people with their careers along the way. So can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve made that transition and then we’ll learn more about roadmaps more generally?

Sarah Doody [00:05:44]: Yeah, so I mean, there’s so many examples. But one that really jumps out on my mind is, I’m sure you’ve seen examples and your listeners have seen examples of pitch decks that startups use to pitch themselves, like to investors, for example. And years and years ago, in the early mid, early 2000s, I was at a startup in New York, and things were tumultuous, let’s say. And I kind of was told, if you want to stay here, invent your own job description. And I was like, what the heck is going on? So I kind of made like a pitch deck for myself. And I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, but looking back at it, even a few years ago, there was like a clear path of, where am I now? Where do I want to be in five years? In 10 years, it had kind of like competitors, let’s say. So not really competitors is more like people I looked up to at Ideo and Nike and all these places. And even, like, Marissa Mayer was on there.

Sarah Doody [00:06:51]: And I was pulling out the parallels between us and things I saw in them that I thought I was good at. And having that vision or pitch deck for myself, if you will, really, really helped me in that situation. Carve out a role that worked for me and the company, but also set me up with skills that I could take after I left that company. And it was even as granular as things like, I want to increase my visibility in the industry. And I had just gotten on Twitter like in 2007 or something, and there was a Google spreadsheet, and it was like, each week I must post on Twitter this many times, and every month I need to post this many blog posts. And in hindsight, I just was thinking, like, where did I come up with this? But I guess it’s just like a reflection of my natural product development skills that I’ve been putting into practice decades ago to apply to my career.

Sarah Doody [00:07:55]: Yeah. It’s also a way to, like, rehearse some of this stuff because you know these questions like, oh, where are you going to see yourself in five years, 10 years down the line? Like, it’s almost like a cliche job interview question anyways, of, like, with this pitch deck for yourself, you’re already anticipating and rehearsing some of the stuff that you could use down the line.

Sarah Doody [00:08:12]: Yeah. And you reminded me there was also this element of almost like a journey map. So if people aren’t familiar with a journey map, it’s kind of mapping out a timeline of someone’s experience, but you’re thinking about, what are they Thinking what are they feeling, what are they doing? Et cetera. And there was literally, in hindsight, a journey map of, I believe it was the last 12 or 18 months of my time at this company. And there was a horizontal, you know, x axis is time, and the Y axis went above and below the time axis. So I’m struggling with my graph terminology, but above the graph, it was like super high positive experiences. And if you think of emojis, it’s like the emoji with the stars and super happy. And then the lines below the horizontal timeline and these lines are now going vertically, were like negative frustration, you know.

Sarah Doody [00:09:12]: And so I was able to visualize, okay, six months ago when I was in this role, I was working on this. I was really, really excited and happy and, you know, stimulated. Three months ago, when I was working on this thing, it was a frustrated emoji for all these reasons. And that really helped me identify the future job description that I was oddly pitching to this company I was already employed at. So, yeah, we do these experience maps in product design, and I just did it for my career.

Sarah Doody [00:09:45]: I love it when designers kind of do this more meta stuff where they apply design principles, like, to themselves, to their careers. Moving forward with that, a big part of getting a job or even just getting the attention of a recruiter or a hiring manager is clearly articulating your competitive advantage. Right. What makes you as a candidate stand out in a stack of resumes or usually a digital stack of resumes at this point? And, you know, that’s one of the themes of our show this year as well, which this idea of margins, and in particular, competitive margins. Right. Like, how do you set yourself apart? And your point of view is about research and using research to set that vision. Can you tell us a little bit more about how research plays a role in all of this?

Sarah Doody [00:10:32]: A big part. And I know we’ll kind of ebb and flow back and forth between this compass and roadmap and everything. But one of the things that really strikes me is that if you think of product teams and startups and companies or anyone, really, a lot of companies will do research once and then not do it anymore. They just tick the box like, yep, we did research and we’re not going to think about it again. And the problem that I’ve seen, and maybe you’ve encountered too, is when you only do research once, like, say you’re researching a new product idea, you miss out on a lot of valuable intel from customers even before they become a customer, and even after they Become a customer. Which is why continuous research is so important. Because if we play along with this compass analogy, it allows like companies and product teams to recalibrate their vision bracket compass for whatever they’re doing. And in the same way, when it comes to your career, you know, if you’re only thinking about what are my short and long term goals in January or a week before your annual performance review, that’s only giving you one chance a year.

Sarah Doody [00:11:53]: Let’s say your career is like 40 years, 40 chances over a 40 year career to like check in and see if you’re on track or not. So back to research. I’m really an advocate for once you do have this vision, roadmap, compassion, whatever we call it, checking in on at minimum a quarterly basis. But I think there’s things that you could be doing every week, every month, every quarter, every year, and those activities might be different. You know, you’re not going to spend like two hours every week working on this. But being mindful about the cadence that you are checking in with yourself so you can have more opportunities to course correct. So you don’t run into a scenario where, you know, you reach a skill plateau or a salary plateau or in my case, you are at the same holiday party in a penthouse in New York overlooking Central park two years in a row and thinking to yourself, I told myself last year I wasn’t going to be here again and here I am again. It’s because I wasn’t being mindful about taking action to get myself out of that particular situation.

Sarah Doody [00:13:05]: Totally. Yeah, there’s definitely worst first world problems to have. But like, I feel like. I know, but like learning plateaus are also, I think really important for people. Right. Because it’s like that’s its own kind of trap that some designers end up in as well. Of like, okay, the salary is good, the co workers are good, all of that. But it’s like you’re doing the same thing or you don’t feel like you’re learning new things, you’re just on a kind of autopilot.

Sarah Doody [00:13:30]: That’s not the best kind of autopilot for you at the moment.

Sarah Doody [00:13:33]: Yeah. And so many people are so focused on like the job I want to get next in two months or three months or something, but they forget to think, okay, what do I maybe want to be doing four years from now or five years from now? And how does that impact and inform what job I should seek out next? So that it’s affording me the opportunity to acquire the skills and experience that are going to help me stand out in the margins from the other candidates when I apply to that job to be, I don’t know, like a creative director or something four years from now. There’s probably things you need in your current job to equip you to be ready for that next job. So that’s another thing to think about because a lot of people are just with horse blinders on thinking about only the next job, but not the one after that.

Sarah Doody [00:14:29]: Totally. I think there’s also these scenarios. This has come up with other guests on the show as well. I’d love to bring you into this scenario where oftentimes at these competitive companies, these companies that are competing for talent, you’ll have a short list. If you get to that shortlist, people are equally qualified with all of the table stakes skills. It’s like, you know the right software, you know the right methods, whatever that is. And I found because I’ve been on both sides of hiring that there’s sometimes these little things that are maybe not directly in the job description that is what makes you stand out in the margins. For example, we had a previous guest, Colton Switzerland, last year’s season who is a UX designer, but he made a board game and that was like something that was like a hook for him in these job interviews.

Sarah Doody [00:15:16]: Right. Even though he’s not interviewing for game designer kind of roles. So there’s sometimes there’s little personal things or other things like that. Do you have any thoughts on like scenarios like this where like, okay, you’ve already gotten to that short list stage and then like, what are some of these final things that can maybe like tip in your advantage?

Sarah Doody [00:15:33]: I love this question because it kind of goes to a very important tip I give job seekers in that you always want to be prepared to do two things. Number one, have like back pocket facts and information that you can share with people either in real time in an interview or that you could be using to tailor your cover letter for that job or tweak your resume, your portfolio if you have one. Etc. So I think what most people need to think about is or remember is that so many candidates all describe themselves in a similar fashion. I’m a designer. I want to make products that change the world and improve humanity for all of time. You know, like these very artistic aspirational phrases which, okay, we can. It’s great if you want to do that.

Sarah Doody [00:16:31]: But when you’re a recruiter hiring manager and you read 40 variations of that in the last hour, like you’re not standing Out. So a couple of tips. If you are switching careers, for example, or even industries, say you previously were a teacher, worked in education or something, and you’re applying to udemy Khan Academy, something masterclass.com, something like that, you will stand out from other candidates because your previous experience in education versus someone who might tick all of the same boxes as you except has no experience in education because you have that domain knowledge. And like the more red tape that there is in an industry such as healthcare, finance, other things, that domain knowledge that you have becomes even more valuable because it’s hard for someone with no experience in like medical billing or something to jump into like some job at a health insurance company and be able to hit the ground running day one. But if you have experience in that, very important. So as you’re applying for jobs, think to yourself, what unique things from my experience could I have in my back pocket to include in the COVID letter, interview, et cetera. And don’t discount like Colton. Don’t discount seemingly irrelevant things like Colton wasn’t applying to like epic games probably, but the very fact that he created a board game, it communicates a lot of soft skills.

Sarah Doody [00:18:12]: Right. Like problem solving, follow through proactiveness, like all these qualities that could make you stand out from other people. So huge, huge fan of shining a spotlight on all of that stuff. Yeah.

Sarah Doody [00:18:26]: Especially if you’re a career changer. We had another guest, Megan Thomas, who started her career as a flight attendant and then went through boot camps and then became a designer that way. You know, even if you’re not listing this in your resume, if it’s like years and years ago, like it’s going to come up, it’s not a secret, so you might as well lean into it. And in her case, like all of those customer service and people skills from being a flight attendant, like very much applied to these design and tech careers that she’s been doing since then.

Sarah Doody [00:18:55]: Definitely. I mean, you think of the research skills, managing stakeholders, like dealing with like disgruntled people on an airplane is basically dealing with a bunch of stakeholders, right?

Sarah Doody [00:19:07]: Yeah, yeah, definitely need that. In addition to whatever Adobe or Figma skills and all of those sort of things that you need on your resume, right?

Sarah Doody [00:19:17]: Yeah.

Sarah Doody [00:19:18]: So jumping back to what you call the career roadmap and the compass statement, I know we’ve been using them interchangeably or part of the same system. Can you help us understand that a little bit more? What do you mean by these compass statements and career roadmaps?

Sarah Doody [00:19:32]: So let’s start with the career roadmap so this goes back to what we were talking about earlier concerning having this clarity around your short and long term goals and recognizing what you need to do in the short term to be set up for those longer term goals. But before you even create a career roadmap, the first thing that I do with all of my career coaching clients is we really take a step back and look at your life. Because I’m a big advocate of helping people create what I call like a life first career. Meaning that we are very fortunate to live in this world where many professions allow you the flexibility, whether at time, location, etc. To make time for stuff in your life, whether that means like picking your kid up from school or taking them to school every morning, not needing to work weekends, being able to work from anywhere. So the first thing we really do is look at like what do you want out of your life, what are kind of your non negotiables and what would your dream or ideal say week look like? And once you really get a vision for that, it creates these guardrails to help you think about, okay, if I want to be able to pick my kid up and walk them to and from school every day or something, what does that mean for the company culture and things like that? So then once you have that vision for your your life, then you’re able to establish even clearer short and long term goals on this career roadmap. So the roadmap is really like the planning document, like the nitty gritty with an Excel spreadsheet of how many tweets and blog posts I needed to do and things like that. But then the compass statement, this one’s interesting because this some people could use the word about me statement, but the reason I like to call it a compass is because it serves as a filter for you to make decisions about should I apply to this job, should I take this job, should I learn to code or not.

Sarah Doody [00:21:54]: So it serves as a filter for you making decisions. It also serves as a filter for people as they learn about you. So this compass statement could appear in whole or part at the top of your resume, at the top of your LinkedIn profile, in a cover letter or something like that. And the goal is that it is going to back to attraction. It’s going to attract the right people and in some cases repel the wrong opportunities because you don’t want to be contacted and inundated with recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn for roles that have nothing to do with you’re interested in. Well, that won’t happen if you have a clear compass statement on your LinkedIn to help attract those right people and let people know exactly what you do and therefore what you don’t do. So that’s the difference between the roadmap and the compass statement. The compass statement is literal couple of sentences versus roadmap is more tactical of like, here are my goals, here’s what I’m going to do by these dates, et cetera.

Sarah Doody [00:23:04]: Right.

Sarah Doody [00:23:05]: And the roadmap is something that is not external. Like maybe you show it to your boss if you want, but it’s not this like external statement that you’re putting out into the world.

Sarah Doody [00:23:17]: Could be like for the next couple of jobs down the line in that sense.

Sarah Doody [00:23:21]: Exactly. Yeah. And these things are always evolving too, you know, back to research. Like reviewing your compass statement, reviewing your roadmap are things that you might be doing, I mean, hopefully on a quarterly basis, but depending on how fluid your career might be changing or things are happening, you might be reviewing and editing that every month, you know, So I often say to people as they work on their compass statement, we’re not getting the perfect version because it’s going to change. I mean, I had no idea I would be doing what I’m doing today, three, five years ago. I honestly, I will be very curious to see what I’m doing three or five years into the future. So that’s one thing to remember too. This is not, you know, an inconcrete document.

Sarah Doody [00:24:10]: Really.

Sarah Doody [00:24:10]: For sure. Yeah. I’d love to riff a little bit more on this compass statement. I think it is reminding me of this design principle of subtraction. Right. So for like the graphic designers out there, when you’re doing a layout or even like a UI designer, UX designer, you’re laying out a page and you have to put stuff on there. And often you have like different stakeholders with different, you know, requests, feature requests or content requests. And then you have to end up simplifying or prioritizing what goes below the fold or what is just on a different page.

Sarah Doody [00:24:42]: And so there’s that like put stuff on the page and then take stuff off until it works. And I feel like when it comes to job seekers, there’s almost a pitfall in being like open to too many things, like just because you can do them in a way, because as you say, like, it ends up getting like, you get some really random recruiters or that actually takes. Takes away your focus in things. So, yeah, I’m just wondering if you could speak to this idea of like the Subtractive part of your compass and, like, thinking about, like, what you’re repelling as well as attracting.

Sarah Doody [00:25:13]: Yeah, this is a really important point because. Let’s talk about LinkedIn for a second, because one of the places this compass could live would literally be two places definitely in the about section of your LinkedIn, because you can have a lot of text there. The other place this could be, and we have this compass statement, but I really look at it as, like, Lego blocks that you can use. Okay, I’m going to use the first Sentence as my LinkedIn headline, which is the text under your name. And when you think of the user experience of LinkedIn from the perspective of a hiring manager or recruiter and how it works, your LinkedIn profile is essentially a webpage that you need to SEO optimize, search engine optimize to increase the chances you show up when people are doing searches for candidates like you. And I’ve used this example in other interviews, but I’m going to use it again because it’s so good. I was doing just random LinkedIn profile reviews of headlines. So that text under the name.

Sarah Doody [00:26:27]: Yeah, I’m not making this up. Someone’s headline said something along the lines of, I can’t remember verbatim, but it definitely said, like, designer, passionate about football, milkshakes and Jesus. And I was like, no recruiter is searching for the words Jesus, football and milkshakes. I mean, a recruiter looking for, like, a designer, probably, you know, And I use that example because you need to be cognizant of the message and the story you’re telling, being mindful of the people and, like, the technology or algorithms that are going to be, quote, using or consuming, consuming that content. And so I think kind of goes back to our riff at the beginning around, like, your identity and not trying to use LinkedIn to tell everyone about your food preferences and sport interests and religious beliefs and stuff. It’s like, this page has one job to do. Communicate your professional experience and help you. If you’re job searching, get hired.

Sarah Doody [00:27:43]: So subtraction. We don’t need to know all those other things. We just need to optimize this. So you’re telling us more about your, say, product designer experience. And can I keep going about another one I just saw a couple hours ago?

Sarah Doody [00:27:59]: Yeah, definitely.

Sarah Doody [00:28:00]: So we were doing some critiques, and this is very great for your listeners, but I was doing some critiques of compass statements and someone had one at the top of their resume this morning, and they had worked in graphic design and then art Direction and creative direction for 20 years. They’re switching into the world of product design and ux. And so their compass statement, and I’m going off memory, said something like product designer with four years of experience, period. Previously worked in design as an art director, slash creative director for 20 years with clients including craft whoever, whoever won multiple Communication Arts awards and this other award that I’m now forgetting, who cares? A big deal. But I said to this person, okay, this is good information, but you’re not trying to get hired as an art director, creative director anymore. And only people in that world will have heard of Communication Arts magazine and this award, that I forget. So we shifted it to have less focus on these awards and just name dropping of clients and more specifics around. Like, okay, when you were a creative director and art director, what you were you working on? Oh, you were working on some digital.

Sarah Doody [00:29:30]: Great, let’s include that. I forget what the other things were. So that’s another example, like being mindful of the message you’re sending. And honestly too, part of it is like seeking external feedback from other people because it, it’s so easy to just kind of get stuck in your head, especially if you’re writing this over and over. And when I gave this person the feedback, they were like, like, yep, I see the point. Like a product designer will have not heard of Communication Arts and the awards show, you know.

Sarah Doody [00:29:59]: Totally. And I feel like we’re talking about both like the target human audience as well as the like algorithmic AI audiences here. Right. And like, especially on the AI side, like, it’s just not that smart. So if you’re adding the milkshakes and Jesus and football kind of stuff, it’s going to throw it off. Right. Or it’s just going to filter that out.

Sarah Doody [00:30:18]: Yeah, lots of confusion in the applicant tracking system for sure.

Sarah Doody [00:30:22]: Another LinkedIn related question you have this term, anti networking. I feel like networking is one of those things that like people cringe at. Unless you’re maybe just like an ultimate extrovert sales kind of person, but I think most designers are not. Yeah, we have a lot of introverts, creative types in our community. So how do you foster these professional relationships that are substantive without having to do the happy hour thing or the like really shallow online kind of interaction thing.

Sarah Doody [00:30:53]: Great question. So I’m not a fan of the word networking. And one of the reasons I think so many people say to me, no one replies to my cold emails, no one replies to my cold messages on LinkedIn, et cetera. And I say to Them. Look, you need to invest in relationships, because when you invest in relationships, the cold email problem goes away because all of a sudden your messages are now lukewarm, essentially, not cold. Because if you have a relationship with someone and I’m not meaning, like you’ve spent 40 hours with them in the past year or something, I mean, the point is you’re a familiar face, they recognize your name, and they have a general sense of what you do. When someone sees a message in their like, this happens to me, I go to my LinkedIn inbox, it’s a disaster. There’s so many cold emails from people, I have no idea who they are.

Sarah Doody [00:31:55]: They all want something.

Sarah Doody [00:31:57]: Yeah, I’ve got the bots, the cold emails, selling something.

Sarah Doody [00:32:00]: Yeah, yeah. But when someone’s name and face pops up that I recognize because they have commented on a post of mine maybe more than once, we’ve interacted in, in some way, they’re familiar. And now it’s not cold, it’s not lukewarm. So I think that distinction is really important for people to keep in mind. But like, to your point of how do you build these relationships without like burning out on virtual coffee hours and in person, all these things, you know, I think that part of it is really just about being mindful and being intentional and getting it on your calendar, as boring as that sounds, it’s the way that you’re going to turn this into a habit. And I just said this on the LinkedIn Live before this, but I literally have an event on my calendar. It’s every week or every two weeks, I forget. And in the description of the event it links to, I forget how many, like five communities or something that I try and show up in semi regularly.

Sarah Doody [00:33:11]: And that immediately takes all of the mental burden of deciding when am I going to engage, where am I going to engage, etc. So that’s point number one. But the other thing to think about is, you know, a lot of people struggle with what should I post on LinkedIn and how can I add value? And I think it goes to the idea of just getting into a habit of capturing and noticing things that spark your interest, whether it’s a tweet, a podcast episode you listen to, an article you read. Like, not everything you post online needs to be this like essay style, content creator type thing that’s like perfectly formatted and you know the ones I’m talking about, like, totally. The first one will be three words and it’s five and then it’s seven and it forms this like, beautiful Visual wave down the post or something.

Sarah Doody [00:34:13]: Right.

Sarah Doody [00:34:13]: It doesn’t have to be like that. And so I think taking the pressure off and just posting a link to an article you read and adding one or two sentences of why you thought that was interesting, that’s going to connect with people that are interested in whatever you’re interested in and then mindfully showing up in communities online, answering questions, chiming in. But if you want to be a lukewarm contact or face in an inbox, you need to show up, you know?

Sarah Doody [00:34:46]: Right. It shouldn’t just be first contact at that point. Like that’s maybe part of the research too. It’s like the pre work.

Sarah Doody [00:34:53]: Yeah. And a tip for some people, in the same way that I make this event that has the communities I’m going to show up in, you know, you may think to yourself, okay, for this quarter, for example, make a list of like five or 10 people or whatever number feels good to you that you really want to focus on getting to know, engaging with, building relationships. I have a, actually, I still use Twitter and I have a list, a private list on Twitter and it’s called something like people I’m learning from or something. And every couple of months I either add new people or remove people that I feel like kind of like done with them for now and cycle them out. And then it makes it easy. I can just go to that list and go through those people’s tweets and not be distracted by like all the wild stuff.

Sarah Doody [00:35:48]: Right. Everything the algorithm is trying to sell you.

Sarah Doody [00:35:50]: Yeah. So you kind of need to invent systems that work for you. And those are two things that @ least have helped save me time, but also help me focus when I do sit down for those 10 or 15 minutes to do my relationship building, not networking.

Sarah Doody [00:36:07]: Right. I feel like a thread in your story that I’ve noticed is what you do with Twitter, going back to your spreadsheet about how many tweets you have to post or blog posts and things like that. Just having these systems that really help you with your habits and your practice.

Sarah Doody [00:36:22]: Yeah. And I think it goes to a little bit of the part of me that wants to not waste time so I can have more time in my life to literally go skiing. Like, I have optimized my career so if it snows, I can go skiing. And that’s what I did yesterday.

Sarah Doody [00:36:41]: That’s awesome.

Sarah Doody [00:36:42]: And a bunch of days last week too.

Sarah Doody [00:36:44]: That is great.

Sarah Doody [00:36:46]: Yeah. Like, I skied 85 days last year and I’m the CEO of this company and we have team members and half the time no one even knows because I can work from the chairlift and I’ve optimized so much. So, yeah, it’s all about systems.

Sarah Doody [00:37:01]: Well, I am going to try to land this plane with one more question about career stuff and then we like to wrap it up with a learning related question. So the career question I want you to weigh in on is the controversy around cover letters, which has come up in the discourse in the last couple weeks. You actually posted on LinkedIn a year ago, and your take is that cover letters are not dead and you advise job seekers to really think of them in terms of content strategy. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Sarah Doody [00:37:31]: Yes. So I stand by my comments. Cover letters are not dead. And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in that if you want to stand out, like it or not, in the job market today, this extra effort can help you stand out. And if we think about it like the user experience of a recruiter or hiring manager, they’re so busy they have a limited time. Anything you can do to capture their attention can help you. So I treat the COVID letter such that we want the COVID letter to be like a store window on Fifth Avenue in New York, for example, or a really good movie trailer in that hopefully the COVID letter captures people’s attention so much they want to spend more than six to eight seconds with your resume. If they are busy and only read the COVID letter, we want that cover letter to really do a good job at selling you.

Sarah Doody [00:38:37]: So that cover letter needs to bring some receipts, examples of what you’ve done in previous roles, and not just like aspirational stuff about how you’re so great at creative direction and design and you want to change the world and all of this stuff. Because people will have read that a bunch of other times. What they won’t have read is that time you worked on this thing and as a result this happened. That’s going to be a lot more engaging. But the goal, the content strategy of the COVID letter, is that it attracts their attention so much that they do spend more than six to eight seconds on the COVID letter or the resume. The other thing I would say is use the job description and study it to give you clues as to what to include in there in the COVID letter. Because, sure, not all job descriptions are written well, let’s be real. But they do include clues as to which receipts you may want to include in that cover letter.

Sarah Doody [00:39:49]: So cover letters are not dead.

Sarah Doody [00:39:51]: All right, so our Wrap up question. We like to ask this of all of our guests and really bring it back to learning and learning beyond just what we do in the core of our careers and our professional selves. So the question is, what is something? It can be a fact, a skill, an insight that you’ve learned recently and how did you learn it?

Sarah Doody [00:40:11]: All right. I have learned all about the book publishing process and the levels of editors that are involved in creating a book. I’m writing a book right now, and it’s in the hands of a couple of editors right now. But understanding the distinction and the skill set between like a developmental editor, a copy editor, a line editor, a proofreader, a fact checker, I had no idea. So I’ve been at like a little MBA of book publishing over the past couple of months and it’s interesting. I love learning, but wow, I didn’t realize it was so granular.

Sarah Doody [00:40:48]: Yeah. And especially the folks who are doing like that line editing and that like, really detailed, like, proofreading stuff. It’s like, I’m really glad that there are people who are so detail oriented who can stare at a manuscript for hours doing that kind of thing.

Sarah Doody [00:41:01]: Yes.

Sarah Doody [00:41:02]: That’s amazing.

Sarah Doody [00:41:03]: There are such parallels to writing a book and designing a product or creating a logo or anything. And I’m sure there’s an article to be written someday about like the UX of writing a book or something. But research comes into play big time levels of fidelity of a chapter versus like low fidelity chapter, high fidelity chapter. And they don’t really call it that, but that’s what I’ve been referring to it to.

Sarah Doody [00:41:29]: Right.

Sarah Doody [00:41:29]: So yeah, it’s fascinating.

Sarah Doody [00:41:31]: I feel like putting it in these content strategy or content design terms makes it less scary than I am writing a book, which for me is like, I’m more of a talker than a writer. But I think if you were to frame this in terms of, oh, this is just content strategy, content design, things like. Okay, I can handle that.

Sarah Doody [00:41:49]: Yeah, it’s just 13 blog posts, not a whole book. Yeah.

Sarah Doody [00:41:57]: Well, that is amazing. Sarah Doody, thank you so much for spending some time with us on the AIG Design podcast. You can look out for Sarah’s upcoming book, the Product of How to Design, Market and Sell Yourself in youn Career, coming out later in 2024.

Sarah Doody [00:42:13]: 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.