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001: Get to know me and the podcast vision
83 Plays1 year ago
In this first episode, I share a little about myself and the vision I have for the Career Slay Talks podcast. What is my career journey? What can you expect? Let's slay together
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Transcript
The Challenge of Representation in Career Progression
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Speaker
I've never had a boss who looked like me. And because of that, it's also been challenging to kind of see what that next level and that next step for me is. And I know a lot of us struggle with that in that the role models are few and far between. And that's not for a lack of capability, it's not a lack of competency. A lot of the time it's a lack of opportunity.
Introduction to The Career Slay Mama and Brenda's Background
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Career Slay Talks podcast. My name is Brenda Doug Bay, also known as The Career Slay Mama. Today, I thought I'd let you have a chance to get to know me a little bit more as I embark on this journey of hosting The Career Slay Talks podcast. Where do I start? I'll start with where I was born and raised. So I'm born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya.
00:00:51
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I'm originally Kenyan. I've moved to Canada as a teenager to study. And as most African immigrants do, I studied and studied and studied some more. And so professionally, I have a background in public health. I did my bachelor's at the University of British Columbia out in Vancouver, BC in Canada. I have a master's in population health.
00:01:15
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from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in global health. And then I did a PhD in population health from the University of Ottawa. And all of that is a good 15 or so years of school.
Family Life and Living in Ottawa
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an education. I am happily married to my best friend. So my husband, we met right here in Ottawa and we've been married for going on 12 years now. We've got three amazing children, a nine-year-old son and almost seven-year-old twins, a boy and girl. So we've got three, two sons and a
Career Transition to Public Health Agency
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daughter.
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Professionally, I've been working so I spent some time in academia. So I worked a little bit as a research coordinator and did some research consulting and then pivoted into the public health agency. So I joined the federal government.
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almost eight years ago and worked in the public health agency and I've grown and developed my career since then and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life to really be able to serve Canadians as a public servant but also be in that nexus between policy and strategy and be able to move things forward for the betterment of our society.
00:02:36
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I am not speaking in my professional capacity in this podcast. So the views that are shared in this podcast are my personal views and are not the views of my employer. It is important to note that I'm not speaking on behalf of the Government of Canada in this podcast. That being said, I draw from the experiences that I've had personally and professionally, and that really influences who I am today.
Journey to Career Slay Mama Blog and Career Strategist Role
00:03:02
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I'll tell you a little bit more about the blog. And you might've heard it in that intro episode. I started Careously Mama in the heart of the pandemic. So this was May of 2020, Mother's Day of 2020. I had started blogging when I just got into grad school. And I used to blog like way back in the day when blogging was a thing. Social media was just becoming, was just blowing up. This was Obama's time.
00:03:32
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just to age myself. So this is when Obama got elected for the first time. And I initially started to share in my journey, fast forward to a few years, I got married while I was doing my PhD, I had three kids, and I basically did not have time.
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And so when the pandemic hit, it just became this lightbulb moment for me that I wanted to share. I had a lot that had bottled up inside me, whether that's career advice, whether it's sharing it on my journey, and my outlet to that became Korea Slay Mama. I've shared this before. I'll share it again. I've been that go-to person in my network.
00:04:12
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friends, family come to me when they have career advice questions and they're looking for guidance, direction, mentorship. And so it's something that I've been doing ad hoc for a while. And for the first couple of years in the blog, I really just shared unsolicited career advice and career strategies.
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In 2022, so a couple of years into blogging, I decided that it would be great to really serve my audience, whether that's clients, whether that's folks who follow me on social media, or folks that I work with one-on-one to really firm up and validate some of the experiences that I had. And so I went through the process of certification with the Career Professionals Canada.
00:04:56
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And that allowed me to become a certified career strategist as well as certified resume strategist. And through the certification process, I realized that there was a lot of stuff that I was already doing, that I was already giving, that was actually pretty much in line with the principles of career coaching and career advice and career strategy. It's amazing that I found that there's a lot of theories. There's a lot of career theory that's associated with providing career advice. This was something that was quite
00:05:26
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new for me, but also not because coming from this research background, theory connected to practice and then public health is really applied.
Inspiration Behind the Platform for Marginalized Groups
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So it was very tangible for me. So why can we advise why Black Canadians?
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I've never had a Black boss. I've never had a boss who looked like me. Because of that, it's also been challenging to kind of see what that next level and that next step for me is. And I know a lot of us struggle with that in that the role models are few and far between. And that's not for a lack of capability. It's not a lack of competency. A lot of the time, it's a lack of opportunity. And so
00:06:10
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For me, this platform is a space where I hope to really inspire, I hope to equip, I hope to share on examples of here of folks who've made it, here of folks who've gone through various trials and came out of the other side intact or not so intact. And here are some people that we can draw from as reference points.
00:06:37
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as inspiration. But also here are resources from professionals, whether that's mental health, whether that's buying a home, whether that's figuring things out.
Addressing Systemic Barriers and Empowering the Diaspora
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The last maybe layer that I'd add to this is that I was born and raised in Kenya and I'm living in Canada as an immigrant. I initially came as an international student
00:07:00
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and studied and studied and studied, and then stayed on. And it's a good 25 years now that I've been in Canada, believe it or not. I actually got here in 1998 with a big snowstorm in Toronto. So if you'll remember that, if you're alive then, it's been a while. It's been 25 years.
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I'm raising first gen children. So I'm raising children in this culture that I did not grow up in, and that I might not know as much of, even though I've lived here for a while, and I'm helping them navigate systems that I did not actually navigate when I was a child, without a network, without the same level of connectivity that I might have had, had I done that in Kenya.
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And I see a lot of first generation kids, professionals trying to make their way through a system that their parents are not really equipped to guide them through. And part of that passion that I have is to help folks figure things out while I also become sensitized on how I need to guide my own kids and my own family. And so a lot of the inspiration for this podcast is really
00:08:12
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equipping information sharing and just helping us grow and helping us progress together. From a public health perspective, and I mean we have so many armchair public health professionals since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but
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One of the things that we learn in public health is how important income, place and health, and all these other factors are to your health outcomes. And so this is broadly referred to as the social determinants of health.
00:08:49
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In many cases, we'll see that, again, education, whether it's the education level of the parents, will have a big bearing on the children's health outcomes, professional outcomes throughout your life span. And so one of the ways that systemic barriers really impact us as Black people, especially in the diaspora,
00:09:12
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are barriers to employment, barriers to wealth creation, and barriers to that independence that would actually allow us to flourish, and even the barriers to our own psychological safety. So there's so many things that present themselves as barriers. And so for me, this niche is I'm taking this one piece of the puzzle, which is career and hoping to really equip us on how
00:09:39
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to slay, how to overcome the giants, how to get past all the barriers that are placed and in that one small way contribute.
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towards building this knowledge base for us to be better so that our children can
Engagement and Participation Invitation
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flourish. And so our children's children don't have to go through the same hurdles that we've had to deal with and that our parents have had to deal with. At the end of the day, I think everybody wants what's best for their family. Everyone wants what's best for their children. And if this is one way that we can do that, then that's what I'm here for.
00:10:17
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So I'm really looking forward to the upcoming episodes of the first two are kind of introductory episodes just to help you get acclimatized to who I am, what I'm about. I'm really excited about the different conversations that I'm going to have with the various people and how that's going to play out because it can only grow bigger and better from here. So how can you find me
00:10:43
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You can follow the podcast on Instagram at KoreaSlayTalks. You can also find the podcast wherever you get your podcasts, whether that's Spotify, Apple, Google. And I look forward to connecting. If you've got any questions that you have, feel free to reach out to me. If you are interested in pitching yourself as a potential guest on the podcast, feel free to send me an email.
00:11:06
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Hello, H-E-L-L-O at KoreaSlayMama, that's C-A-R-E-E-R S-L-A-Y M-A-M-A dot com. And I'd be more than happy to connect with you and chat with you so that we can get our conversation moving and going. Let's slay together.