#30 Empowering people to take ownership of their careers ft. Courtney Brand

Courtney Brand is the Founder and CEO of thelighthouse, a personalized career platform built for people’s ever-changing careers. In this episode of the Unsubscribed! Podcast, she joins Pierce to talk about her entrepreneurial journey, how she envisions helping professionals at critical points in their careers, and how companies can do the same for their employees.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1) What led Courtney to build her company, thelighthouse

2) How the traditional career path is changing, and what resources are out there for people

3) The value of building a personal brand

Show Notes

Ever find yourself in a situation where you’re considering a new job opportunity and the first person you can think of asking for advice is your mom or your sister? You’re not alone. Even though the workforce and how we think about our careers has changed drastically in the last decade, we still tend to resort to the same close network when we’re making a decision.

This was something that Courtney Brand was seeing over and over again during one summer when she had to contend with a number of career inflection points, as she calls them. Each time, instead of reaching out to people who might have experienced what she was going to do, she’d pick up the phone and call her mother to talk through her decisions. This is what her platform, thelighthouse, seeks to change.

“The traditional career path has eroded. What that means is that professionals are navigating more change, and the changes are more extreme. Yet, we’re still using these old-school sources of career advice. We need better, smarter solutions to help us navigate our careers.”

thelighthouse is a private network focused on connecting and growing rising leaders across top industries. It does this by getting users to input their goals, and then connects them with professionals who have gone down a similar path. The goal? To empower professionals in their ever-changing careers.

The way Courtney sees it, in today’s workforce, there is a lot more of an opportunity for people to own their career path and how others perceive them. Personal branding is important, but your identity can’t just be tied to your current role — because that’s always subject to change. Instead, you should focus on your goals and interests, bringing as much of yourself to the table as you can. At the end of the day, that’s the person that people (and companies) are going to be interested in.