Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast where every week we talk about a topic to do with work to help you get a little bit more confident and feel a bit more in control of your career. And if it's your first time listening to the podcast, you do have a few episodes to catch up on but don't worry because every episode is supported

with a pod note and a pod sheet so you can listen and absorb and hear our stories

and hear all the actions we've got for you and then you can download the pod sheet and it

will just help you a little bit more with your reflection and maybe it'll give you something

to talk through with somebody else as well and today's episode is all about how to use experiments to be better at your job.

And when I was looking at some definitions of what an experiment is, it all felt very

sciencey and not very squigglyy. It's probably fair enough given it's where they came from, I think. Yeah, and it's such a shame

though, because actually as we've started to, I guess, embrace experiments in the work that Sarah and I do,

we've really seen the benefit of them, both for us in our jobs today, like how can we improve and

try new things out in the job we're doing today and give yourself some space and permission to do that?

But also how you can make some experiments for your career more broadly.

And with that in mind, we want to share in today's episode lots of different ideas for action so that you can use experiments to be better at your job and to use

them to help you explore your future a bit more too. Yeah, I think we have to let go in our mind,

which I can't help but create. You know, every time someone says experiment, I just think

Bunsen burner. And that's really, yeah, I wasn't brilliant at science at school. And I just remember that

being the one bit I was really enjoyed was when you got to get the Bunsen Burners out.

Well, I got, I don't know if you know, I got a D in my science, GCSE. Did you? Yeah, I retook

it because I was so, I was so embarrassed about it. I retook it over the summer and and I've got to see. So not much better. But I was like, yeah, science is not,

it was never my hotspot. So yeah, I also probably have a difficult relationship with the idea

of experiments being sciencey. But now I've reframed them as being squiggly. I'm all for an experiment.

I really like Margaret Heffernan's way of describing experiments. I found it really helped me to reframe what you're trying to achieve with them

and why you'd spend time thinking about experiments.

...