Taylor Bosen | Public Relations
After hearing so many stories about professionals’ career journeys, good and bad, I thought, “Everyone should hear this. It will make them feel so much better about the future”. This is why I started this podcast! The Career Chronicles: Personal Stories of Professional Growth is just that. I sit down with communications professionals and we talk about their time in college, the various jobs they’ve had, how networking played a role, how they overcame setbacks, and all the lessons and advice they want students and young professionals to know. Believe it or not, professionals really do love to mentor.
The Process:
While I’m a lover of podcasts, the only experience I had with podcasting platforms came from one assignment for my digital media class. Therefore, I was uneducated on how to use different platforms and equipment. Luckily, the Spori has recording studios free for student use. I went to work, learning how to use the mic and what sounded best. I wanted to get good enough that my guests saw that I knew what I was doing. While I’m still no expert, I can confidently say I learned a new and valuable hard skill.
Before I could officially start recording, I needed to create a description, logo, brand guide, and social media account to promote it. For design aspects, I used Canva to find the right icons and colors to bring it all together.
As I started planning this project, I made a list of all the people I could invite as guests. As it turns out, your network is bigger than you think. From professors to guest presenters, to local business owners, the possibilities were endless. When I told peers what I was doing, they told me about professionals in their network I should interview. Now, because these people were professional, I knew my process of invitation and recording needed to be sophisticated. I spent adequate time putting together a professional email to introduce myself, invite them to be guests on my podcast, and give them all the necessary information so they felt well-informed. Then I created follow-up and Thank You templates, arguably one of the most important parts of this whole process.
While there may have been a more efficient way to edit, I stuck with Anchor FM because it’s what I felt most comfortable with. Editing took up most of my time, as I wanted to make all the audio sound smooth together, while making sure my guest sounded good. From a PR perspective, it takes courage for guests to share such real and raw stories with me, so I wanted to make sure they sounded as great as they actually are. For convenience sake, I conducted all these interviews over zoom, recording each meeting to add the zoom audio in the episodes. It was a pleasure to look each guest in the eyes as they poured out their hearts.
After recording each episode early in the week, I spent the rest of the time editing and creating posts for the official podcast instagram to promote new releases. Instagram is where I got the most traffic for The Career Chronicles.
With my guests sharing their episodes with friends and family, and my peers supporting the podcast and gaining insights for their own career journeys, I was pleased with the audience size.
Putting all of this together equated to 52 hours of work! I didn’t mind, however, because it was something I was truly passionate about.
Conclusion:
People keep asking me: Will you continue The Career Chronicles after graduation? My answer is always yes. I still have a long list of guests whose stories need to be heard. While the goal of this project was to help students feel empowered in their career path as they learned about the job journeys of successful people, it was so much more than that. It gave professionals and opportunity to share their story and to mentor. Through my three guests, I learned about the benefits of being willing to be critiqued and to change. I learned about how family plays one of the most important roles in your career choice. I learned that it’s normal to feel inadequate. We will never master our field in communications because it’s always changing, and we change with it. Most importantly, I learned how to build and maintain connections by being a better communicator. I hope you get to learn what I learned as you listen to these amazing stories.
Spotify Link: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wwNsJarr1PkYZf7uZAKI0
Apple Podcasts Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-career-chronicles-personal-stories-of/id1689226997
Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/thecareerchronicles/