Public Health SPOTlight Podcast
Sujani Sivanantharajah, the founder of PHSPOT.org sits down with public health heroes of our time to share career stories, inspiration, and guidance for building public health careers.
The message she hopes to share through these conversations is that building a career is not only about climbing up the ranks, but about crafting a life that you want, around your unique needs, and one that gives importance to your mental health, wellbeing, and building relationships and friendships: you can only do good in the world if you take care of yourself.
Through PH SPOTlight, you will connect with peers you have never met before, and build relationships in a deep and meaningful way.
Public Health SPOTlight Podcast
Land a job. Grow your network. Create your career path.
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In this episode, Sujani discusses the launch of the Public Health Career Club, a membership-based community dedicated to empowering public health professionals. The Career Club, which opened its doors in October 2022, has quickly become a hub for professionals seeking personalized support, job opportunities, networking, and guidance on their career paths.
Sujani shares her personal journey, highlighting a period of reflection during her maternity leave, which led to the realization of the community's need for individualized support in a scalable way. This led to the birth of the Public Health Career Club, inspired by her experience with a community she joined.
The club has seen an impressive growth, with 200 members joining since its inception. It offers a range of benefits, including tailored onboarding, regular live training, mentor office hours with industry experts, and social events.
Featured on the show:
- Join the club or get more info here: phspot.org/club
Join The Public Health Career Club: A global membership community where public health professionals connect, learn, and support each other in building meaningful and impactful careers.
Go from feeling confused, alone and overwhelmed, to feeling confident and in control of your life and career!
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. Hi friends, and welcome to another episode here on the PH Spot podcast. This is Sujani. I am very sick, so you'll hear a little bit of a congested voice from me today, but also coughs. In between, and depending on how bad the coughs are, I might need to pause and record and edit out some of the coughs, but if they're not horrible, I might just leave it in for natural effects. So today I'm not here to share a career tip nor a guest interview, because there's something super exciting happening this week and if you've missed the million emails that we've been sending you about this announcement or all of the LinkedIn posts we've been making, I'm here to tell you on this podcast that we are open for enrollment for the first time in 2024 for the Public Health Career Club, and I hope this isn't the first time that you are hearing about the Public Health Career Club, but in the rare case it is. Here's what it's all about. It's a global membership-based community of public health peers like just amazing individuals together in this one community, supporting each other to build their dream public health careers. So PH Spot has been in existence since 2017, about seven years, but the Career Club was only launched just over a year ago, in October 2022.
Speaker 1:And how it became to be was me. I had given birth to my son and I, essentially, in those first few months, when the baby is just sleeping and pooing and sleeping and eating and drinking and whatnot I had a lot of time to myself and I kept thinking about PH Spot and the community. And up until very recently, I wrote back and I read every single welcome email response that people would send to us. And so, when it was on maternity leave and I had all these late nights, I started scrolling through all of those emails from like five years ago and just reread them. And I think I did that at that point because I was doing a lot of reflecting on PH Spot's journey, what we were offering, and I always felt like something was missing. We had all these great resources, we had the blog, we were sharing stories through the podcast, but something always felt like it was missing.
Speaker 1:And as I read these emails, one after the other, I think it clicked to me that everybody was asking for the same thing in different ways, and what that was was this guidance that they wanted to pursue, this career that they had envisioned for themselves. And I thought about, how do you achieve that? How do you give individual support to people, but how do you do that in a scalable way? Right, because there's no way I could help or support thousands of people one by one, but how could we do this in a way that is effective but also scalable? And I started looking at different models that other kind of sectors or industries were using, and this idea of a kind of like membership based community support kept coming up. And you know, I had that in the back of my head and I still wasn't sure, like, how is that going to work? Right?
Speaker 1:So, around the same time, I had found in this community that I wanted to join personally for myself, and it was a group of women who were entrepreneurs and they were women of color, and so a lot of them had similar backgrounds as me, and I felt inspired by this group and I went and joined this community and when I joined that community, I kind of saw how like communities functioned, right, these like professional communities, online communities, how valuable they were and how like well they were run. And I and I got to see from like the organizations point of view how they did the programming, how they set up the platform, the software and. And then I also saw how community members interacted with each other. Like despite this group being like two thousand people, I Still felt like I could get the help I needed. And it wasn't because they had a huge team, you know, in that organization that was running this community. It was because the community came together to help each other so I could post about just having a really, really bad day and not knowing, like what step to take next in my like an in ph spot and I'd post about it in this community and People would like jump in and offer their support.
Speaker 1:And I remember one time I was really not doing well and then I posted about it and somebody actually called me and said like hey, okay, let's talk through this. Like what's, what's bothering you? And I saw the power of community. You know I invested a lot of money to join that community and I Rarely went to any of their like training programs or anything, but I got so much out of just the individuals there. You know, the the founder was somebody that I looked up to, the, the team that pulled everything together. They were excellent, but I think the value really came from the community, and so you know that experience, combined with what I had read from the PH Spot community of what they wanted, really inspired the idea for the Career Club. So I, in addition, started talking to lots of schools of public health to see you know if it was something that they felt was missing, and they did. You know, that aspect of community was something that each one of them told me would be extremely valuable. So in October of 2022, I launched the Public Health Career Club. We welcomed almost 100 people in that first launch, or like founding members, and since then have opened up the doors about four or five times.
Speaker 1:I believe we are about 200 people strong in the community and just excited for 2024 to welcome more, and the reason we kind of open enrollment and then like close it down is, I felt in my experience of joining other membership communities, when there's that period of time when you join in and you're part of this like cohort of individuals that are coming in for the first time, from a operational perspective here at PH Spot, we're able to take care of you better. That way we can have an orientation. We can expect that there are people that are kind of like figuring things out. We know that people are going to introduce themselves in the portal. So we have this beautiful portal where all the information sits, all our events, all the recordings from past events, discussions, and so we can expect that, you know, during this period we would have introductions from people. So it just feels like a nice welcoming environment during those first couple of weeks when we're introducing new members into the club. And that's the reason that we open and close. And so right now we've been open since Monday and we will be closing enrollments as of Friday. So you have another two more days to join and as a member of the community, there is a membership fee. So you can either come on on a monthly membership fee, which is $22 USD, or annual $220 USD, and if you come on an annual plan, that just means that you get incentivized, because we take off two months payment for that and you get something every week. That's like a live training, some sort of an event that happens.
Speaker 1:We host monthly social hours so you get to meet your club members, we have newly added this year mentor office hours. So we have hand selected mentors that we know love, love, love to support public health professionals and they themselves are public health professionals, and so we're adding mentor hours. So these are just hours kind of sprinkled in throughout the month that you can show up and you can ask your specific personal question about your public health career, and each mentor is an expert in their own field and so, for example, we have Latika, who runs job application office hours. So anything related to fixing up your resume, your cover letter or preparing for an interview, if you go to her session, she's going to help you with that. We have Marissa Robinson, who's just incredible at helping you kind of navigate decisions that you might have to make in terms of next steps in your career. She also has an MPH, she has a DRPH, so if you had questions about those applications she can help you out and just unblocking things with respect to taking the next steps in your public health career. She would be an excellent person and she's going to hold about eight office hours this year. We also have Terri Ann Lynn, another excellent, passionate individual. She has built a career in the pharma industry as a public health professional, so she's super passionate about helping you figure out how you can become a public health professional, have impact in this world, and if you're interested in a career in pharma as a public health professional, she is the one that you have to talk to. She also is working on her doctorate in public policy and administration, dpa, so if you had questions about that, she has an MPH as well. You can drop into her office hours.
Speaker 1:And the thing about these individuals like the mentors that I have chosen, these are individuals I have personally worked with. They have run sessions for us inside the Career Club and at the core of it. The way I choose our mentors is, by my gut, right. There's no other way I do it. I get this gut feeling when I talk to certain individuals and their heart is just in the right place to want to help anybody in public health just figure out, because we don't need to do it alone. And so those are the three mentors in our club right now, and then all the other kind of like virtual live training and events that we do. They're done by experts, so I don't do any of them. I don't pretend to know everything about this field and I bring in the people that do know and just to give you kind of an example of, or multiple examples of, different experts that have come in to give different trainings or talks, I'll just read through some of the past events that we have held. So we had public health project management and the project management professional certification. So Ali, she ran that one because she has her PMP certification. She has used it in her work, so she came and talked about that session. I know it was super popular. Again, the recordings of all of these past sessions are available, so don't feel like, oh, like I missed that session. I should have gone.
Speaker 1:We had a session run by Assad Navid. So if you're on LinkedIn and you follow Assad, you know that he provides incredible resources on how to write a research paper and he has published papers in some of the top journals. So he came and ran a session on how to write a research paper. We had a journalist come and talk about how you can find and report health stories, right. So if you ever wanted to write for different mainstream media articles, you know this is how you could do it, and he talked about that. We had a venture clinic, so it was a Q&A with Stephanie Moxley about how to you know, launch and run your own public health consulting firm. Stephanie has been running her consulting firm for, I want to say, over five years or even 10 years and has built an incredible company and she did a Q&A and answered questions. We had an application clinic and Q&A session around the DRPH. So people who are interested in applying to the DRPH degree they had questions around application. We did that In 2024, we are going to be doing a panel discussion with individuals who have graduated from a DRPH two plus years ago and are currently working in the field and we're going to bring a group of individuals, have a panel discussion and then invite them back over the next few months to hold office hours so that individuals or members can go to their office hours and ask specific questions to those individuals. So that's how we're doing it.
Speaker 1:This year on DRPH we had a session called how do I quantify my accomplishments on my resume, so Griffey ran that one. We had a session called Networking Without Networking. Another session called Global Health Careers by Sarah Labuda. We had a session by Anjum Sultana called Career Stories and she talked about her kind of journey building a career in public policy. Another session called Finding Fulfillment in your Public Health Career. We also had a session called the Antidote to Imposter Syndrome creating internal belonging Merissa McCool she's a coach for public health professionals. She came and ran that one. We also held a Ask Me Anything kind of Q&A session with Alice, who is a epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, and so people got to ask her all sorts of questions from application to you know just how her day-to-day work is.
Speaker 1:Additionally, we have run cohort-based programs. One was called the Writing Project, so essentially we invited 10 people from the membership to come and participate in this three-month intensive writing project. We had something called Build and Update your Professional Presence. That was run by Sue Griffey. Again, it was a five-week intensive on getting your resume and LinkedIn profile are all up to date. And then, as I mentioned, we also have office hours, right. So in addition to that, we have something called Power Hours that I run, and launching a side hustle has been a very popular topic, so I've been holding a number of those throughout the year so people can come talk about their ideas and they can just help them, you know, launch an idea. It doesn't have to be a business, it's maybe a podcast or a blog or something that they're working on.
Speaker 1:So, you know, as a member, you get access to all of this programming live events. Every week something's happening, you know, in addition to what I just talked about, with experts coming in. Our coordinator, janice wonderful she holds social hours every month so you get to meet people in the club. And then we have this incredible portal that has all of this information so you won't miss anything. There's also discussions happening in the portal, similar to you know if you were using Facebook. You get to see what people are posting. You get to engage in their comments. There's a mobile app for it, so you don't have to miss out on any of it, and we'll keep you up to date through your emails If there's anything exciting happening. We definitely send out weekly newsletters to let you know that these events are happening. And then Janice is very good to send you an email on the day of a live event and then 15 minutes before, just in case you're going to miss out on, in case you kind of like forget about it. So there's a wonderful team who's going to make sure that when you come in to the club you are well taken care of.
Speaker 1:And then, aside from that right, there's also personal initiative that you can take. Several members in the club have connected with individuals who are living in the same region as them and they've sent us photos of grabbing breakfast together or lunch together and that's just incredible for us to see and we want to encourage more of those. So we'll see how we can help promote more in real life meetups. I held one last month or the month before in December in Toronto, so I did a meetup in Toronto and we had a handful of folks who are part of the club in the Toronto region come and hang out together. So we want to do more of that because, you know, there's only so much we can do kind of virtually, and then when you're able to take that connection and meet them in person, there's just like something special about that. Sorry, I had to cough there so I had to pause this recording so it might feel like there was a little bit of a cut. So that's what it is.
Speaker 1:You know, the Public Health Curriculum just an incredible online public health community and resource hub to essentially help you do three things Land a job, grow your network and create your career path, and we're here to help you with those three things and all you have to do is make the decision to invest in yourself.
Speaker 1:Take that step, type in phspotorg slash club to get more information, get the button to click to enroll, and then we'll take it from there, okay? So I really hope to see you and I can't wait to be part of your incredible career and your journey, and the team at PHspot can't wait to help you and support you through that and the community, like the 100 plus members inside the community, everyone's there to help each other and I think that's the special part about it is that we want to see everyone succeed, and I think that feeling is mutual inside the club and I feel it every day when I get to go to some of the events and join in on the discussion. So it's truly a beautiful community and if you've needed help in any three of those areas any one of those three areas so landing a job, growing your public health network or figuring out your career path in public health this is a place. I really hope to see you there. Phspotorg slash club. Thank you.