My favourite career podcasts for women
My current top recommendations for helping you stay motivated and feel supported no matter where you are on your career journey.
Back in May I shared with you some of my favourite wellbeing podcasts which turned out to be one of the most popular posts I’d ever written (you can read it here).
So I thought it was high time to follow up with my top picks for careers podcasts too, particularly ones which address the issues that women currently face in the workplace.
When you’re experiencing a career struggle or are starting a career change journey, it can be a lonely experience if you don’t know anyone else going through it. And that’s where these career podcasts can come into their own, not only offering excellent tips and advice, but also connecting you with others who have been through something similar. I really hope they help you. Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have any recommendations of your own…
This podcast is hugely popular (over 3 million listeners) and with good reason. Hosted by Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper who run their own careers consultancy called Amazing If, there’s not much these two don’t know about the world of work. Each episode is highly practical and covers all sorts of topics to help your career development from staying confident, to portfolio careers, to how to improve your work relationships. I’ve recommended it to countless clients and friends, and they often come back telling they’ve been binge listening all the past episodes!
This show is all about championing gender equality and discussing what that really looks like in the modern workplace. Host Joy Burnford is a strong believer in not fixing women but fixing the system which allows for gender imbalance to creep in. Her guests are inspiring and relatable real women who share how they’ve achieved success at work whilst balancing ambition and motherhood. The recent episodes on job sharing and wellbeing at work were really eye opening for me, as well as the episodes covering the impact of women’s life stages on their careers, from managing periods, to fertility (and infertility), pregnancy (and pregnancy loss), maternity leave to menopause and everything else in between.
The DIFTK podcast is for self-employed parents who are trying to juggle freelance work around their kids. The two hosts Frankie and Steve are hilarious and relatable, discussing all sorts of topics that are universal to self-employed parents such as what to do when you need to take a client call with your kids around, to planning maternity leave as a freelancer or how to juggle your workload during the summer holidays. There’s a great online community you can join too and even real world meet ups where you can get off Zoom and meet other freelance parents face to face.
If you have a dream of writing a book one day, this one is for you. Earlier this year I decided to stop putting off a long held ambition of mine and start working on a proposal for a careers book idea. It’s been an exciting and scary process and I still have no idea if it will ever see the light of day, but I knew at the start that I needed some advice and to hear the experiences of other writers to help me along the journey. The host of this podcast Penny Wincer is a published author, book coach and busy working mum, and she interviews other writers about the challenges of writing, publishing and creativity whilst juggling the demands of motherhood, caring and other paid work.
Careering Into Motherhood was set up by Jane Johnson to empower women and help them negotiate with employers to offer flexible working so they can stay in their careers. Jane negotiated her own senior role as a job-share, and in 2019 she set up the Careering Into Motherhood Facebook Group to promote discussion around flexible working. The free group now has more than 10,000 members and a successful women’s mentoring programme. I’ve also hosted an episode on why summer is a great time for a career change, and been interviewed in this episode about how to set achievable goals.
Got any recommendations of your own? Please share them in the comments.