Career Stories

"Your gut is normally right, but you should back it up with some research as well." - Matt Dunn New AI tool, same old anxiety: am I using this properly, or badly, or barely at all?  Matt Dunn has spent the past decade in the middle of exactly that problem. He started thinking seriously about automation more than ten years ago and has since moved into AI, now leading AI Programs at Quantum, an IT c...

"Ultimately, humans are always going to be accountable - you can't put that on AI." - Mythili Baker Every few weeks, the AI conversation resets again - a new model, a new headline, a new reason to wonder whether the skills you've built still count. For people working inside large, regulated organisations, the question isn't abstract: it's showing up in budgets, headcount, and what "good work" even...

What does the FIFA World Cup tell us about leadership communication? And what kind of career do you actually have? In this June advice episode, Dr Luella Forbes and Associate Professor Michelle Gander explore how organisations communicate difficult news, how careers have changed, and why real employee engagement is much rarer than most organisations realise. In this episode: What two different Wor...

This week's guest is Simon Johnson, Senior Director of Customer Success for Asia Pacific and Japan at DocuSign. Simon leads a team of around 35 people across the region, but his career did not start with a clear plan. He missed the marks for the degree he wanted, fell into tech almost by accident, and built his way up through Macquarie Bank, JP Morgan, MYOB, EMC, Google and Okta. In this episode:...

This week's guest is Claudine Besserer, a global brand strategy leader who spent 32 years at Mars. She rose from a 21-year-old sensory analysis technician, training factory workers to taste-test chocolate and ice cream, to leading global brand strategy for Royal Canin, a brand she helped grow to 6.5 billion euros. Claudine built her career by repeatedly creating roles that did not exist and moving...

This week's guest is Anita Owen, Chief Delivery Officer at Novigi, a 550-person tech and data firm serving Australia's superannuation industry. Anita leads a team of 350, but her path to the C-suite started in data entry at a life insurance company after she dropped out of university and travelled the world. Her career has been built on curiosity, putting her hand up, and asking questions when oth...

In this month's Career Advice episode, Dr Luella Forbes and Associate Professor Michelle Gander reflect on May's guest conversations with Fadzi Whande, Charity Becker and Annette Brodie, and find a common thread: each of them took a long, non-linear path to land in the work she does now. Luella also opens up about her own delayed reaction, post-doctorate and post-redundancy. The doctorate is done,...

This week's guest is Annette Brodie, founder and CEO of The Reconnect Project, a Sydney-based social enterprise and charity on a mission to close Australia's digital divide. Annette spent more than two decades in the not-for-profit sector across Australia and the UK, with a career that moved from retail communications and waste avoidance to running her own organisation from the ground up. In this...

This week's guest is Charity Becker, an organisational coach based in Melbourne with 20 years of experience spanning coaching, coaching supervision, and coach training. After an unconventional path through hospitality, nannying and psychotherapy, Charity was drawn into the world of coaching while managing an executive coaching panel at a major bank, fell in love with it, and has since built a port...

This week's guest is: Creators & Guests Dr Luella Forbes - Host More detailed show notes with links to information discussed by guests can be found here. New epiosodes on a Wednesday, with interviews with leaders or experts every week and a monthly discussion on what we've heard in the last week of the month. We'd love to hear from you.  Share your thoughts on recent episodes or questions you...

Creators & Guests Dr Luella Forbes - Host Dinda Timperon - Guest In this bonus episode of Career Stories, Dr Luella Forbes is joined by Dinda Timperon — Head of Cybersecurity Engineering at a major Australian wealth management organisation, RAAF veteran, and founder of Perth Women's Circle, a community of over 10,000 women focused on professional growth and development. Having experienced burn...

How do you keep growing in your career when you feel like you've hit a ceiling? In this episode of Career Stories, Michelle Gander and Luella Forbes explore the habits, mindset shifts, and everyday practices that help professionals stay curious, motivated, and engaged, no matter where they are in their career. In this episode, we cover:  What a growth mindset actually looks like in practice (it's...

This week's guest is Dr Annelen Schär, Head of Omnichannel Portfolio Management at Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart — a digital leader working at the intersection of e-commerce, customer experience and business architecture in one of the world's most iconic car brands. Annelen has spent almost 15 years at Mercedes-Benz, completing a Doctorate of Business Administration along the way, all while raising t...

This week's guest is Elizabeth Shaw, Partner responsible for diversity, equity and inclusion consulting at PwC Australia. Elizabeth has spent her career at the intersection of gender equality, workplace culture and social impact, from chairing UN Women Australia in her early thirties to advising the Prime Minister and representing Australia at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. She is one o...

This week's guest is Jo Lindsay, Managing Director at Reed Talent Solutions, a part of Reed, the world's largest family-run recruitment business. Jo joined Reed on a graduate scheme in 1997 and has built her entire career there, moving through project management, sales, consultancy and leadership without ever needing to look elsewhere. Hers is a career story about what happens when an organisation...

This month on Career Stories, Dr Luella Forbes and Associate Professor Michelle Gander reflect on the career stories of Steve Price, Dr Mia Carbon, and Dinda Timperon — three very different people with some surprisingly connected threads running through their careers. In this episode: Why the people who say they don't have a career strategy often turn out to be the most strategic of all — and what...

This week's guest is Dinda Timperon, Head of Cybersecurity Engineering at one of Australia's largest wealth management organisations, and founder of Perth Women's Circle, a community of over 10,000 women focused on growth and development. Dinda's career spans the Royal Australian Air Force, aerospace engineering, flight test, a stint writing stage plays, and now leading national teams in financial...

This week's guest is Dr Mia Carbon, Deputy Director General of Biosecurity and Emergency Management for Western Australia — or, as she describes it, part of the team responsible for protecting one of the world's most unique environments. From training as a vet and working in rural Victoria and the UK, to a pivotal move into public policy, to leading one of WA's most complex government roles, Mia's...

This week's guest is Steve Price, General Manager of Financial Services at David Jones — the world's oldest department store. Having spent his career across banking, SaaS and retail in both the UK and Australia, Steve has specialised in building innovative products and customer experiences, from launching one of the UK's first internet banking services in the late 90s, to bringing Apple Pay to Aus...

This week's episode is our first monthly career advice conversation, where Dr Luella Forbes and co-host Michelle Gander — Associate Professor and specialist in Career Development — reflect on the themes and insights from this month's guest interviews with Mehdi Langroudi and Kelly Shay. In this episode: What purpose actually means at work — and why the research uses different language than the bus...

This week's guest is Kelly Shay, Retirement and Retention Leader at Mercer Australia — someone who has spent her career working to improve outcomes for people who can't always speak for themselves. From student politics at Murdoch University, to organising aged care and disability workers in Australia and the US, to superannuation — Kelly's career has been anything but conventional, and entirely o...

This week's guest is Mehdi Langroudi, Executive Director of Network Operations for Main Roads Western Australia — or, in his son's words, "the guy who fixes traffic"! With a global career spanning Scotland, London, Dubai, Qatar and now Perth, Mehdi shares how he accidentally fell into traffic engineering, what he's learned about leading diverse technical teams, and why career choices don't need to...

Introducing Career Stories, the podcast that shares other people's career stories to help you with yours. New episodes on a Wednesday, where Dr Luella Forbes interviews leaders, entrepreneurs or experts about their career story, and in the last week of the month, a discussion with Associate Professor Michelle Gander on what we've learned from those conversations. We'd love to hear from you.  Share...

Introducing Career Stories, the podcast that shares other people's career stories to help you with yours. New episodes on a Wednesday, where Dr Luella Forbes interviews leaders, entrepreneurs or experts on their career story, and in the last week of the month, a discussion with Associate Professor Michelle Gander on what we've learned from those conversations. We'd love to hear from you.  Share yo...