The 20 Minute Career

Ever wondered who tracks down the wealthy people who give away millions to universities, charities and causes? This week on The 20 Minute Career, Jane talks to Stephanie Papadopolous who works in Prospect Development/Research at the University of Sydney, uncovering and researching the donors behind major philanthropic gifts a career almost nobody knows exists. Steph's path in was anything but line...

Ever wondered what a career in marketing actually looks like beyond the creative brief? This week I sits down with Rushenka Perera, VP of Marketing at SAP, to find out what B2B marketing really involves — and it's a lot more than you'd expect. Rushenka shares her honest path into marketing emerging from university straight into a recession and grabbing the first opportunity with both hands. From t...

What does it actually look like to build a career around reducing waste and do it inside a major retailer? Pen Turnbull didn't plan a career in sustainability. She started by volunteering five hours a week at a tiny social enterprise salvaging timber from earthquake rubble in Christchurch. That one email changed everything. Now she leads waste minimisation and circular economy programs across a la...

Engineering is one of those careers that sounds straight forward from the outside. You build things. You solve problems. You apply what you learned at university and get on with it. Mark Sproule started where a lot of engineers start curious, hands-on, and drawn to figuring out how things work. As a kid it was old boats. At university it was biomedical engineering. At ResMed it was prototyping wit...

Law is one of the most popular career choices young people nominate year after year, cohort after cohort. And it’s not hard to see why. For generations, students have grown up watching legal dramas - LA Law, Suits, The Good Wife and wanted that life. The sharp suits. The courtroom wins. The confidence of Harvey Specter walking into a room and owning it. It looks like the perfect career. High stake...

Nobody grows up wanting to be a salesperson. Dan Ridd didn't. He dropped out of university, fell into a business development job at a telecoms company, and made £10,000 in his first month at 21 years old. That was the beginning of a 15 year career at the very top of enterprise sales working with organisations like Atlassian, Canva and HSBC across Australia and the UK, closing deals worth millions....

Most people hear the word philanthropy and think it's someone else's world. The world of billionaires and big cheques. Tori Grimes is here to tell you it's not. Philanthropy and fundraising sit at the intersection of purpose, people and pressure. It's a career where you spend your days building relationships with people who care deeply about changing something in the world and then asking them to...

C ustomer Success is one of the most important roles in tech. Get it right and you retain customers, drive growth, and add millions to the bottom line. Get it wrong and the cost to an organisation can be just as significant. And yet chances are you've never heard of it. Let alone considered it as a career. Jana Zafirovska has built an entire career in Customer Success and in this episode she break...

Every big project inside an organisation needs someone to run it. Not just manage the timeline but own it, drive it, and get it over the line. That person is a project implementation manager. Krystal didn't take the linear path to get here. A science degree, finance job, and no real clear idea of where she was actually heading. She'll be the first to tell you that's more normal than you think. Wha...

Most people only think about cybersecurity when something goes wrong. A hacked account. A data breach. A compromised credit card. Alex Hogue thinks about it every single day because that's the job. Working at the sharp end of one of the most in demand fields in tech, Alex protects the data that millions of people trust with their lives. And here's what most people don't realise it's not just about...

Most people think change management is just processes, meetings, and rolling out new systems. In this episode, Amii Hansen explains why the role is really about people. Amii shares how she found her way into change management, what the job actually looks like day-to-day, and the pressure that comes with helping people navigate uncertainty and resistance during workplace change. We also explore how...

Nobody told you what the job was really like. Not the pressure. Not the politics. Not the moment you realise the role you've been working towards looks nothing like the reality. The 20 Minute Career is the conversation that fixes that. Every week, one real person in one real career sits down and tells you exactly what the job is like from the inside — the path they took, the pressure they didn't s...