Reflecting on a year of growth and looking ahead to 2024

Navigating the ever-evolving landscape of public health, Sujani reflects on the past year's growth and anticipates the exciting new horizons that await in 2024. This episode is a celebration of the milestones achieved and a teaser of the novel ventures on the horizon for PH SPOT. It's a narrative that intertwines personal growth with professional development, underlining the importance of taking a step back when needed and returning stronger. The community is invited to join in this celebration and look forward to the new opportunities that 2024 promises in the world of public health.

Key messages from this episode:

• The year 2023 was a period of significant growth for PH SPOT, one marked by the phspot.org platform reaching over 43,000 global users in 2023. Among the most sought-after pages on the website were the Public Health Career Club, a downloadable comparison of Canadian MPH programs, and a popular blog post comparing MPH and MSC degrees.
• Sujani also candidly shares the pressures that come with managing a growing platform while balancing the demands of motherhood and a full-time job. 
• She extends her gratitude to the dedicated team members, Lis, Stephanie and Janice, who have been instrumental in keeping PH SPOT thriving, emphasizing the collective effort behind the platform's success.
• Looking ahead, PH SPOT aims to continue its trajectory of growth with ambitious goals, including increasing the reach of its weekly public health newsletter to over 10,000 subscribers. The podcast, which has published 47 episodes in 2023 and boasts over 22,000 downloads, will take a more intentional approach to programming, seeking to cover a diverse range of topics and stories that resonate with the public health community.
• The LinkedIn network has also seen remarkable expansion, quadrupling in size to over 10,000 members. This surge in engagement is a testament to the power of community and the shared passion for public health that brings individuals together from around the world.
• The Public Health Career Club, which celebrated its first anniversary, has been a cornerstone of PH SPOT's offerings. With 190 active members participating in weekly virtual talks, training events, and in-person meetups, the club fosters a supportive environment where public health professionals can grow and thrive. Guest mentors and speakers contribute their expertise, further enriching the experience for club members. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to PH Spotlight, a community for you to build your public health career with. Join us weekly right here, and I'll be here too. Your host, sujani Siva from PH Spot. Hello and welcome to another episode of the PH Spot podcast. First off, I want to start off by apologizing that we did not have any episodes since December 15, so almost a month ago.

Speaker 1: 0:34

And you know, sometimes you just need a break and things don't go as planned. And if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know that I had a bit of a curveball thrown my way at the end of December with my son not feeling too well and just you know the busyness of life. So I gave myself permission to just stop everything I was doing, although you know it nearly was impossible not to stop thinking about not having published a podcast or not having shown up on LinkedIn. But sometimes you know you just had to give yourself permission to stop, rest, do whatever it is that you need to do so that you can come back stronger. And you know that is kind of the theme for 2024 for me is to really make things simple and easy and take it easy a little bit right when it comes to the expectations that we set on ourselves or for ourselves when it comes to our careers. It can be a lot of pressure, and for me I don't know about the rest of you, but for me that often shows up physically. I start to feel these, you know, tense muscles or headaches, and it's taken me a few years to kind of recognize that it's time for me to slow down. So, having said that, I think I I have taken that month to really rest and recover and really looking forward to starting off 2024 well rested. So with that, I want to say happy new year, welcome to 2024.

Speaker 1: 2:19

I was hoping to have talked to you all at the end of 2023 to wish you as you step into 2024, and then I was hoping to do this reflective post in 2023 and then 2024. We'd kind of talk about the future. But since this is the first episode of 2024 unscripted, so I just turned on the mic and I'm going to start talking through. So it may not be as polished as it typically is. It's going to be a combination of both. I want to celebrate everything that we've done here at PHSpot in 2023, which could not have been possible without all of you, our supporters, our community. And then I also want to tell you a little bit about what you can expect going into 2024. I don't have all of it figured out or planned out, since the end of 2023 was supposed to be that time and things didn't go as planned, and that's okay. I'm going to be taking this week and the next few weeks to kind of figure out our plan for 2024. We have a pretty good idea, but I think I'm just somebody that needs to put all of that down on paper, figure it out, make sure it all makes sense. So, thinking back to last year, we had some amazing wins. It was an amazing year nonetheless, and I want to just thank you again for being part of that community that we've built.

Speaker 1: 3:53

And when we look back at 2023, and if I start with our platform, right, PHSpotorg, that's where we house a lot of our resources, tools, everything to help you grow your public health career we had over 43,000 users globally, that's, around the world 43,000 people who were interested in getting some support in their public health careers, and they found the resources that they needed on our website. Our community is truly global, but when I think about who are the top five countries our users are from, north America is definitely one of our top users, so the US and Canada, and then, followed by those two countries, are India, united Kingdom and Nigeria, amongst several other countries. So truly a global resource for you all, and the three top popular pages or resources on our website have been, first off, the Public Health Career Club webpage, and that's where you can find a lot more information about our membership community. So the Public Health Career Club is a membership based kind of hands-on support for you to grow your public health career. So everywhere, from helping you find a job to helping you grow your network and just creating your career path, we do all of that inside this membership community, and so the website or the webpage on our website that details all of that, was our most popular page in 2023, followed by year after year. It ends up being this resource that we have. It's a downloadable tool where you get a list of all of the MPH programs, so the Master of Public Health program in Canada. It's a tool that has, I think, about 20 different variables. We've compared the 18 or so programs in Canada across these 20 variables and it's just a good starting point if you're thinking about pursuing a master's degree in Canada. It's a great tool. So that ends up being our second most popular page. And third most popular page is a blog post that we have called MPH versus MSC in public health which degree is better? This was a fun little post I had made several years ago after kind of surveying our social media community and asking them hey, like, if you have an MPH or an MSC, tell us why you chose one over the other. And this blog post kind of summarizes that, and so those were the three popular pages or resources on our website.

Speaker 1: 6:54

And, if you didn't know, we also have a weekly newsletter of public health opportunities and we send that every Thursday and we compile different opportunities so everywhere from jobs, events, books to read, articles to read that you might be interested to and we send that out on a weekly basis. Liz here on our team curates that and she's incredible. She's been with us since 2019, has been doing that and we are going very strong. And our subscribers there about 7000 people around the world are subscribed to that newsletter and it's something we've done consistently for seven years now. So that's what. That was super exciting. I'm hoping this year we can hit well over 10,000 with those subscribers. So if you know any friends, or if you yourself have not subscribed to that newsletter, you can head over to phspotorg slash, sign up and that's where you can put your email in and get that newsletter on a weekly basis.

Speaker 1: 7:57

The podcast we published 47 episodes this year, in 2023. And we have had over 22,000 downloads this year alone. We launched the podcast in 2020. So, and to date, in total, we've published over 145 episodes with incredible career stories from all around the world and I'm really hoping to bring more guests on the podcast but also kind of think intentionally about the different topics that we're bringing. In the past, I have essentially, you know, invited cool guests that I've come across to come and share their stories, and it's been kind of a natural thing, natural flow to how we do the programming. This year, I'm trying to take a little bit more of an intentional approach to the way we do the programming on the podcast, since we are a small team. You know I don't have a podcast manager or a producer that can kind of do everything from end to end. So you know we we do the best we can with the small team that we have here at PHSpot.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Okay, so our LinkedIn community that has been something that has been super fun to build in 2023. I started personally writing on LinkedIn just at the end of 2022. So November 2022. So I have thoroughly enjoyed and have found so much joy in just writing and connecting with people all around the world through LinkedIn and I had asked Stephanie so Stephanie Parash, she's our marketing coordinator to kind of take that, you know, similar approach to what I had done on my personal page on LinkedIn to our PHSpot page on LinkedIn, and so if you don't follow PHSpot on LinkedIn, you can search that up when you're on there. Next, our community there has more than quadrupled this year and we have over 10,000 people, community members, on our LinkedIn page. We have had over half a million impressions and over 300,000 new viewers of the information that we share on our LinkedIn page. So those are some huge numbers, right. Like to have 300,000 people look at the incredible content that we've put out is just, you know, mind boggling for me. That, I think, is a huge win and, again, it's not something we could have done without you or community members who are there engaging, sharing the content that we're putting out there and, of course, stephanie, who's being the face in the powerhouse behind our marketing.

Speaker 1: 11:06

We also celebrated one year of launching the Public Health Career Club, our membership-based programming that helps you build your public health career. The October 2022 is when we launched that. So October of 2023 was our one year and we have had over 190 active members in our community. There we meet weekly. We have hosted 46 virtual talks, training events, we have run master classes and we've done in-person meetups. You know, I was only able to be at one of them here in Toronto, but members in the community have met up in person and I really hope that we can help to influence more of those going into 2024. Our master classes, our speakers you know it's not possible without the mentors who have so kindly given their time. Huge shout out to Sue Griffey and Marissa Robinson, who have run two master classes, latika, who runs our resume clinics, and just several other speakers who we bring in on a weekly basis to run our training events. I also show up at least once a month to run power hours where we do Q&A sessions.

Speaker 1: 12:31

The big focus recently has been on launching a side hustle. We've seen that there has been lots of interest in launching a small or large initiative and I've been able to help people talk through their ideas, based on my experience of launching PHSpot. We'll be celebrating seven years next week, and so you know I have lots, of, lots of, lots of lessons learned that I love to just share with the members of the community. And finally, another huge win for PHSpot is that our team doubled. So up until I'd say mid-2023, it was myself and Elizabeth Huang or Liz, who you'll see signing off on the newsletters, and then we were joined by Stephanie, who I mentioned is the powerhouse behind all the marketing we do, and then Janice, who is essentially the gear that keeps the career club moving smoothly. So if you join the club, you'll get to meet Janice. She runs our sessions incredible. She herself was a member of our community and then has now joined the PHSpot team. So our kind of core team has doubled.

Speaker 1: 13:51

But that's not to say those are the only individuals who are part of our team. We have several other amazing and talented women who are kind of freelancers, who help us out to edit the podcast, for example, and other administrative work, and often, when people know that I'm a mother and I also have a nine to five job and I run pH spot there, their first thing is I don't know how you have time to do it all, and my answer is often that I don't, because it's these women who make it happen and Truly, truly, truly grateful to have them be a part of this team. So those are our you know huge wins and successes for 2023, and they sit here and I reflect on Everything we've accomplished and it makes me excited to think about what we're gonna do for 2024. Obviously, we have, you know, these Metrics that we want to hit. So, for example, I want to make sure that our newsletter subscribers are well over 10,000 people. Or we grow our community to welcome more Public health professionals who want to join our membership. There are also kind of more Creative projects that that I want to be involved in, creative partnerships to really bring whether it's content or resources or tools that you wouldn't find anywhere else Out there, and I really want to think deeply about those problem spaces and see how pH spot Can develop some of those solutions. And you know, if you have any ideas, I Honestly do welcome those ideas. You can easiest places, probably to send me a note on LinkedIn and If you have ideas, please do share them if you have struggles that you've been facing and you want to talk through some solutions. I would totally welcome that, and so that's where we're kind of headed for 2024 is really thinking about that.

Speaker 1: 15:58

And the other big piece I want to think about is this idea of you know our community members journey. So you know, we have the website, we have these resources, we have the membership. We all know we want to grow in our public health careers, but what does that mean for for each of us, right? So it means something different for you, it means something different for me and it probably means something different for your colleague or your friend, and so I want to figure out a way where I Can assure that our resources and tools are able to meet you where you're at and then take you through a journey. That makes sense, and it's not set up in a way where you kind of just have to show up to our platform and figure out what you need. So I'm hoping to map that out a little bit better, and that involves Lots of behind-the-scenes work, and you know one of the biggest things will be a huge revamp of our website, in the back end at least, how our content and our information are organized.

Speaker 1: 17:09

So there's a lot of that thinking work that I really want to do this year. I really want to empower the rest of the team to get in on this, to share their ideas and really looking forward to, you know, strengthening our team and perhaps even growing it a little bit, where I haven't really made a decision there. Otherwise, I think you know we're gonna. We're gonna continue doing the good work that we've been doing, bringing some exciting episodes on the podcast, definitely going to revive the blog. I think the blog has been quite quiet over 2023. We have had some submissions to our blog and we're hoping to publish those, and so if you're ever interested to Just do a reflective piece about your career or your journey, you can head over to our website, to our blog, and Submit your piece and then we'll we'll edit it and we'll get it up on our website and share it with the community. So the blog is something else that's going to be part of this revamping of our website.

Speaker 1: 18:16

And then partnerships, as I mentioned, is going to be another huge one. Like who are some unique partners that can join forces with PH spot to help us on our mission, to help you growing your public health career and overall, you know, just growing our community, the number of people that know about PH spot, that are able to Use our resources, our tools. We definitely want to grow our community. So if there's anything you can do to Spread the word about PH spot right about us, talk about us on your social media, tell your coworkers, tell your colleagues or your classmates, that be That'd be, you know, a huge, huge help for us to reach that goal. I hope to do more of these solo episodes this year to just share a little bit about what we're planning for 2024. And then, in addition to that, I want to get back to sharing some of those career tips I used to do in 2022, where it was a 15 minute quick tip about you know something to do with our careers, and I'm hoping to bring those back, in addition to the interviews with our amazing guests that are going to come on.

Speaker 1: 19:35

So, with that, I want to again wish you a very happy new year and I really hope that your year is off to a great start. I am wishing you well on your public health career, regardless of which phase you're at, and if the career club sounds like a place or a community that you'd love to be a part of, definitely check out phspotorg slash club. We will be opening up the doors at the end of this month again for another cohort to join the membership. We have some exciting stuff planned for this year, starting off with a career planning workshop I believe it's at the end of the month as well. We have our regular resume. Clinics will have the power hours with me. We're going to have, you know, just a lot more workshops and training, and I'll be able to talk through what some of those are going to be, probably in a future episodes, one once we've finalized all of our speakers and our mentors. So with that I'm going to wrap up this episode and looking forward to chatting with you again next week's episode.