Podcast

Episode 59: Job Challenges and Career Opportunities

In this episode, we look at challenges and strategies for navigating some very familiar career topics, including dealing with role ambiguity and scope creep, and we’ll also talk about how the skill of reframing can help you make career moves faster. This episode explores these topics from the standpoint an important job role that often misunderstood – the business analyst. That’s where my guest comes in. Laura Brandenburg is the founder of Bridging the Gap, which helps mid-career professionals start and succeed in business analysis careers. She’s also the best-selling author of How to Start a Business Analyst Career.

If you enjoy the show, please rate it on Spotify or iTunes and write a one-sentence review. Your ratings and reviews help more people like you discover the podcast!

Episode Highlights

3:03

What business analysts do

5:11

Problems with an order-taking approach to working with internal clients

9:15

Thorny challenges working with cross-functional teams

10:30

How to align project expectations with stakeholders

12:11

Dealing with scope creep

16:00

Pros and cons of having to multiple roles informally

18:39

Working with a supervisor on growing your role and career

21:32

Using the skill of reframing to find career opportunities

24:46

Managing up when the supervisors lacks expertise in your job

27:53

What’s possible when we open our minds to new perspectives

32:01

Traditional and emerging career paths for business analysts

Laura’s view on the greatest unmet wellbeing need at work today

“It’s the lack of meaning. Like really, truly feeling like what you're doing is meaningful work. And that is so connected to your wellbeing because when you feel like you're making a valuable contribution to the world at large, you're feeling connected to something important, like everything else in your life tends to flow easier when that that part is taken care of. So, just that sense of feeling like our work matters in the bigger scheme of things.”

What “working with humans” means to Laura

“I think it's just a reminder that in everything we do, we're connected to other human beings. So, it’s like human beings that show up in their physicality and their emotions and their mental – all of those things – it's like we're connecting on a Zoom screen, but you're a human being on the other side… And so bringing our full humanity into our work and just appreciating that no matter what we're doing behind whatever computer screen like there's still humans that are using our work, and we're still working with them. So we're working with humans, no matter what the intermediary is that we're working through.”


Michael Glazer is the creator and host of Humans At Work. His purpose in life is to make well-being at work a globally-accepted, basic human right. Learn more about Michael here.