Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tapper and this is the squiggly careers podcast. Each week we talk about a different topic to do with work and practical ideas and actions to help you develop in your career and be successful in this increasingly squiggly world of work that we all find ourselves in. And today we're talking about something that I think

is particularly relevant as all of our careers get more squiggly, which is this idea of job crafting.

So we're going to explore what it is, why it's helpful, and as you probably expect from us,

five ideas for actions that you can take to craft your job today.

And so let's start by kind of really thinking about like what is job crafting.

And really simply, it's about redesigning your role in some way.

And that redesign can be very small, really kind of tiny tweaks or kind of incremental changes, or it can be

really significant redesign where you're perhaps really reevaluating the role you're doing today

and kind of how that might change. And there's a lovely quote actually from a Harvard Business Review

article that we will link to as part of the

resources that says make sure you are shaping your job not letting your job shape you and I think

that's probably really good impetus to kind of start today's conversation like really thinking

about that is we often talk about within our squiggly careers that we often have a bit of a,

there's kind of the difference is, you know, are we sort of drawing our own squiggle?

How in control of our own careers do we feel?

Or does it feel a bit more like someone's kind of drawing them for us or kind of telling us where we should go?

And I think this is one of the ways that you can really get

more control, more motivation, more engagement in the work that you're doing.

I actually think that quote is actually a really nice prompt for reflection. Like make sure

you are shaping your job, not letting your job shape you. If I look back on my career, there are

definitely roles I've had and in the organisations that I've been in where I've shaped

those roles, where the role that I did after, I don't know, a year in the job looked

...