29: Navigating Your Career While Being a Caregiver with Joan Smith

As you navigate your mid-career journey, your personal and professional GPS will take you places and provide a lot of learning and growth. And as life happens, you’ll find that your GPS may take you on a well-needed detour and provide you with a lot of perspectives as well. 

John gets on the mic with Senior Program Analyst Joan Smith to talk about her career path and how her GPS has served her well throughout her career. Joan shares her early aspirations for being a teacher and how she took her love for teaching and training into her work and fuels her ambitions to land a training role in HR in the future. 

As a mid-life career changer, Joan took a leap of faith and returned to school to pursue a Master's in Human Resource Management while working full-time and caregiving. Joan also shares why owning her story about caregiving was one of the easiest things she had to do in her interview. 

Joan shares how she uses and leverages LinkedIn to grow her network intentionally and how she has gained valuable information from belonging to various professional associations throughout her career. This is a motivating and inspirational episode filled with practical and real advice to help you right now. 

You can connect with Joan on LinkedIn by clicking on this link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joancsmith/

Key Topics & Time Stamps: 

·      What Joan wanted to be growing up (3:44)

·      Joan’s Career Path and job search strategies (5:55)

·      Addressing a work gap during an interview (11:01)

·      How Joan practiced for her interviews (14:50)

·      Why you need to be involved in professional associations for your growth and development (18:15)

·      Why networking is vital to Joan’s career development  (21:19)

·      Why HR is Joan’s next destination (25:02)

·      Joan’s advice for following your Mid-Career GPS (29:58)

List of Resources:

·      SHOW UP - Six Strategies to Lead a More Energetic and Impactful Career

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