Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Timestamps

  0:00: Introduction

  0:45: Trends in Marketing

  2:45: Trends in Consulting

  5:20: Trends in Healthcare

  8:30: Outro

Links to Full Conversations

Weinberg College Career Summit

 Cassie Petoskey:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World Podcast, where we bring you stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. This episode is brought to you by the Waldron Student-Alumni Connections Program, where we help Weinberg College students explore career options through connecting with alumni. In today's episode, we're excited to feature a few clips from this year's Weinberg College Career Summit Alumni Panels, focusing on the changing landscapes in consulting, healthcare and marketing. First is a quote from the communications and marketing Alumni panel where Latha Sundaram, who graduated from Weinberg College in 1995, talked about the challenges and opportunities with training employees in building client communications in hybrid environments.

Latha Sundaram:
I think in terms of the actual trends that hit the media industry, you guys have [inaudible 00:00:44] on the major ones. The trend actually, aside from the pandemic we're facing now is the writer's strike and how that impacts content and what's out there. So I think as an industry, we're starting to look more at that versus any delayed impact from the pandemic. But in terms of getting together, absolutely agree. It's those moments in person, I remember early on that shaped my career the most, so now we're trying to reconcile how we create that. It was interesting. We do a lot of employee surveys. I'm sure April and Kip, you have the same, and we're struggling right now because the generation that just got in the workforce, perhaps in the last three years, the number one issue is, well, I'm not getting enough coaching. I'm not getting enough training.
Yet, we grew up in a time where a lot of that coaching and training wasn't in a big classroom, but it was someone sat down next to you and showed you how to do something or pointed to a screen. And so we're trying to figure out how we get that kind of intimate coaching and training without necessarily being in person, and we'll figure it out. We're hybrid here as well, a few days in the office, few days at home, and I think we're trying to reconcile that. The other piece that I think companies are still sorting is actual travel.
And I'm someone that's been in a global role for most of my career, and I'm still trying to figure out... I used to just, if there was a problem in a country, I'd get on a plane and you'd go meet and build relationships and fix it. And now I've got to figure out how to do that on Zoom. So the relationship component, I think is something we're still grappling that how you solve something when you used to just be there in person, you can't anymore. And most companies have cut back their travel or I haven't seen it nearly the way it used to be. So that's just something to keep in mind.

Cassie Petoskey:
The next clip is from the Consulting Alumni panel where Annie Lee, who graduated from Weinberg College in 2019, spoke on how the industry has focused on helping companies improve their employee experience to increase productivity and encourage employee retention.

Annie Lee:
At Reply, my organization, we are co-located for about two days a week and then remote for the other days. In terms of trends that I am seeing for my organization and my team, we focus a lot on modern work technologies that help organizations and their employees work more effectively. And something that I have noticed in the past few years, given the pandemic is really a larger focus on the employee experience. And for our clients, how can they make the experience of being an employee at that organization more positive? What can they do from a communication standpoint? What can they do by offering different tools that allow people to collaborate and communicate more effectively? How can they make the experience of working for a company more enjoyable and thus increase the likelihood that employees want to stay at that organization? And a lot of that has come into play with hybrid work as well and figuring out how to manage hybrid work.
So for example, some of our organizations are large financial firms that really encourage a lot of people to work in person as much as possible, and especially with the pandemic, moving out of the lockdown, they were really concerned about what hybrid work would look like. So working with us to develop technology applications that can help them do a little bit more of that tracking, but promote people having that flexible work lifestyle so that they can have that balance and feel that their organization supports them in that kind of flexible working style. So organizations are also trying to figure out the productivity side of things, like the give and take between giving flexibility and trusting employees and helping them feel valued and making them want to continue working at that organization.
Combated by also the side where leadership needs to ensure that people are working as they say they are, they want to ensure that people are being productive. They want to ensure that people are working in a way that helps the organization. So that would probably be the biggest trend for me, hybrid work, as everyone's been talking about, work is different now. I rarely go to client site, maybe once every quarter, or I'm working with partners and working with clients in person for a week or two, whereas it used to be much more frequent. And yeah, I think organizations are caring more about the experience of their employees than maybe they did prior to the pandemic.

Cassie Petoskey:
Our last highlight comes from Hayley Silver, who graduated from Feinberg School of Medicine in 2014 and spoke on the healthcare alumni panel. Dr. Silver shed light on finding a healthy work-life balance, cultural divisions in the industry, and the importance of loving what you do.

Dr. Hayley Silver:
I will say that there are a number of aspects about going into a career in medicine, specifically even a career in surgery that have changed even since I was in medical school. And I think that there are always generational differences of how those entering into the medical field, what the philosophy of that generation may be. For instance, the concept of wellness for now, I mean that really wasn't talked about when I was in medical school. And the expectation of your working hours and commitment, a lot has changed in a very short period of time. I do think that it is a very long road to get to this point. And there has to be at the very basic, a love of what you do. And I can honestly say even when I've worked somewhat illegal amounts of hours, at the end of the day, there's nothing I could imagine doing other than what I'm doing.
I have the most exciting job in the world. I get to heal people, sometimes physically with my hands. I get to make their quality of life better, sometimes cure cancer, there's nothing more rewarding. But it comes with a ton of other aspects of pressure, of the financial aspects of medicine and healthcare. The frustration for patients with lack of access to me or my team, the long wait times. Nobody really wants to work in healthcare. So we have a shortage of nurses and nurse practitioners and PAs and medical assistants, all the folks who go into delivering healthcare. It's not just the physicians. And that makes it really frustrating when I can't help people as fast or as much as I would want to. Then there's of course the lifestyle stuff. I inevitably get asked about being a woman in surgery. I have two kids. Nobody feels like they're allowed to ask me that.
I guess it's not appropriate or something. I don't know. I think that to me, balancing how to have a life, a relationship, a family is a whole other difficulty, whether you're the one bearing the child or not. It's not that my male colleagues don't have the same or similar pressure. I am the only woman in my department, so there aren't any other women that share that same or ability to relate necessarily. But my gender has never played a role in whether or not I decided to pursue my career. And that's just me personally.
But I do know that that can be a holdup for a lot of other women who are interested and are very worried about how they'll be treated and what the actual environment is to train in surgery as a woman. So I think that there are a lot of things evolving and changing as they always do at the very bare minimum. As I said, you have to love it. It's just not worth some of the really tough days, sacrificing of time with family and friends. And I mean, it's a lot of sacrifice if you don't actually really just absolutely love what you do.

Cassie Petoskey:
Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more of these conversations, links to the full videos and podcasts are in the show notes. For information about Weinberg College and this podcast, visit Weinberg.northwestern.edu and search for Waldron. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please email us with your thoughts on this program. Have a great day, and go cats.