LeverBrands

Brand Manager

Kurogo

Account Manager

Content Writer 

Aphex

Content Marketer 

HSS Hire

Marketing Manager (Maternity Cover) 

Marketing Assistant

OnTarget

Digital Marketing Assistant

Topps Tiles

Customer Service Specialist

Assistant Manager

Senior Sales Assistant

Account Manager @ Kurogo | Sharing lessons from a life in Marketing

Hey, I'm Joe 👋

I post about: 

- Careers
- Marketing 
- Leadership 

Sound good?

Hit the follow button and come say hi.

Joseph Rudd

MidWeek

MidWeek hosts workshops and panel discussions for people in their 20s and 30s navigating career uncertainty. Our London events create a space for honest conversations about work, purpose, and what comes next.

Through structured workshops and panels featuring people who've successfully navigated career transitions, we help participants move from confusion to clarity. It's where ambitious people come to figure out their next move, surrounded by others who get it.

Not networking. Not generic career advice. Just real conversations about finding work that actually fits who you are.

Founder

Still Wandering

Still Wandering is a weekly newsletter documenting the reality of finding meaningful work when you don't know what that means yet.

Every week, I share honest reflections on navigating career uncertainty in your 20s and 30s. No frameworks or success theater—just raw documentation of the actual journey.

What I write about:

- Personal experiments in self-discovery and what I'm learning
- Conversations with others figuring out their professional path  
- The questions we're not supposed to ask about work and meaning
- Resources and ideas that genuinely shift perspective

This is for anyone who knows they want more from work but can't articulate what that is. For those collecting experiences and degrees but still feeling like they're living someone else's life. 

I'm not here to sell you answers. I'm here to make the wandering feel less lonely by sharing mine.

Writer

TrueNorth

TrueNorth is an AI-powered career coach designed for people who need to figure out what they want before they figure out how to get it.

Unlike traditional career tools that start with job searches and skills assessments, TrueNorth begins where real career clarity begins: with understanding yourself.

How it works:

Deep self-discovery sessions - Through thoughtful AI-guided conversations, uncover your core values, what energises you, and what kind of impact you want to make. No generic personality tests—just real exploration of what matters to you.

Pattern recognition - TrueNorth remembers every conversation, tracking how your thinking evolves over time. It spots patterns you might miss and reflects them back to help you see yourself more clearly.

Practical pathfinding - Once you understand what you're looking for, TrueNorth helps you explore aligned career paths and design small experiments to test what might actually fit. No overwhelming action plans—just the next right step.

Ongoing support - Career clarity isn't a one-time event. TrueNorth grows with you, helping navigate transitions, test new directions, and stay aligned as you evolve.

Who it's for:

- Recent graduates who feel overwhelmed by infinite options
- Professionals who've succeeded but feel unfulfilled  
- Career changers who know they want something different but can't articulate what
- Anyone tired of career advice that assumes you already know what you want

Built on the belief that you can't build a meaningful career until you understand what meaning means to you. Everything else—the applications, the networking, the skill-building—comes after that.

Start with who you are. End with work that fits.

arco.

Personal Brand Strategist

Thoughtleadr

Key Responsibilities:

• Managed content strategy and engagement for 10+ eight-figure business leaders
• Built and nurtured online communities across LinkedIn, Twitter, and email channels
• Developed personal brand strategies for C-suite executives and founders
• Created high-performing content that drove 6-figure audience growth

Notable Achievements:

• Increased client engagement rates by 300%+ through strategic content optimization
• Scaled multiple executive personal brands to industry-leading positions
• Secured podcast appearances and speaking opportunities at major industry events
• Generated millions of impressions monthly across client accounts
• Built repeatable systems for thought leadership that scaled across diverse industries

Creative Director

Opulous

Digital Marketing Intern

PUBLIC PRESSURE

ITMV

Digital Marketing Consultant

Expedition Engineering Ltd

Junior Engineer

Helping businesses deliver impact by enhancing their visibility and reputation | Founder of arco.

I spent my early twenties collecting careers like stamps. Architecture degree, music production, entrepreneurship—each pivot made perfect sense at the time, but from the outside it looked like I couldn't commit to anything.

The truth was simpler: I had no idea who I was, so how could I know what to do?

I discovered this wasn't just my problem. Almost everyone I knew—smart, capable people with good degrees—felt completely lost about their careers. We'd been taught how to get jobs, but nobody taught us how to figure out what work would actually fulfil us.

That realisation changed everything. I saw that the real problem wasn't a lack of opportunities or skills. It was that most career advice starts at step 10 when people like us were still stuck at step 1: understanding ourselves.

Now I'm building tools and communities to fix this:

TrueNorth: An AI-powered career coach that starts with self-discovery, not job listings

MidWeek: London events bringing together people navigating career uncertainty

Still Wandering: A newsletter documenting the messy reality of finding meaningful work

I work with people in their 20s and 30s who know they want something more from work but can't articulate what that is. People who've tried following conventional career paths but felt like they were wearing someone else's clothes.

My approach is simple: you can't build a meaningful career until you understand what meaning means to you. Everything else—the skills, the networking, the applications—comes after that.

If you're tired of career advice that assumes you already know what you want, let's talk.

Alex McCann

🚨 I'm looking for a freelance social media manager.

Right now I'm writing long-form content here and on Substack, as well as doing podcast interviews. But a lot of the 22-28 year olds I'm trying to help are on Instagram and TikTok.

So I need help translating what I'm building into formats that work on those platforms.

Looking for someone who can:

- Turn my LinkedIn posts and Substack articles into Instagram carousels and TikTok videos.

- Clip podcast appearances into short-form content

- Understand the difference between philosophical depth and generic career platitudes

Experience in career development or education content is useful, but what matters most is that you care about the problem we're trying to solve: rethinking traditional career advice and helping people engage with more meaningful work.

If you're interested, drop me a message.

Alex  McCann

Founder of MidWeek | Re-thinking Traditional Career Advice | Building TrueNorth AI & Still Wandering Newsletter

So you got the promotion, it feels good for a week, but then you find yourself already looking for the next one.

You hit the salary milestone, your lifestyle creeps up and it doesn't feel how you thought it would, so you set a higher one.

This pattern keeps showing up in the conversations I'm having with the professionally lost. The analyst tracking time until VP. The consultant counting years to partner. The startup employee refreshing their equity value daily.

Each achievement delivers less satisfaction than the last. The window keeps shrinking. What gave you months of feeling good now gives you days.

This is how dopamine works with any repeated stimulus. Your brain adapts. What felt significant becomes baseline. You need bigger hits for the same feeling.

Status makes this worse because it's relative. There's always someone ahead. Always another level. The finish line moves as you approach it.
Five years in, most people realise they've built an entire career around chasing this momentary high.

Optimising purely for status markers, titles, salary numbers, recognition, tends to lead somewhere hollow.

The people I know who seem genuinely satisfied have different patterns. 

They're doing work that matches how they think. Solving problems they're positioned to solve. Seeing impact they can trace.

The satisfaction builds slowly and compounds over time.

I woke up this morning feeling a beautiful combination of pride, excitement, relief and joy.

Yesterday, Gabe Whitehead ran our first MidWeek event on navigating your quarter-life crisis. A group of people turned up to a room in Hoxton to openly discuss feeling lost at work.

It was special to watch. People being completely open with strangers. The anxiety, the confusion, the guilt about wanting something different. The room felt relaxed. People gave suggestions freely. Nobody pretended to have answers they didn't have.

This is the problem Midweek exists for. 81% of 18-24 year olds reported experiencing burnout in 2025. For 25-34 year olds, it's 83%. Only 39% of Gen Z workers felt equipped to succeed in their roles this year, down over 20 points from 2024. 

More and more young people feel misaligned in their work. The lack of meaning is wearing on people.

One theme that kept coming up was service. 

Gandhi said: "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." When you're building something that helps people with a problem you understand deeply, the work starts to feel different. There's clarity in that.

Sitting in that room yesterday, that quote made sense in a way it hadn't before. This is what's energising about building Midweek. Creating something in service of people wrestling with one of the most complex decisions they'll make. Creating space for people to think properly about a question that will shape 80,000 hours of their lives.

We're building an online version of Midweek for people outside London. If you might be interested in joining, the waitlist will be in the comments.

Why everyone must become an entrepreneur

This was the title of a video Daniel Priestley released last month.

When it comes to business, there's pretty much nothing I disagree with Daniel on. But I'm genuinely curious how this plays out in practice.

He gives the example of Homer Simpson to illustrate how the economy used to work. And he's right. Homer had an average job at a nuclear plant that paid for a five-bedroom house, three kids, a car, holidays. His wife didn't need to work. 

That was peak industrial age, where being average was enough to live comfortably.

His argument makes sense to me. We're watching that world collapse in real time. The wage system that rewarded average is dying. AI automates anything repeatable, anything average. The new economy runs on power laws where the top 10% take 90% of the pie. 

You either define your own niche and dominate it, or you get left behind with nothing.

He's right that you can't be Homer Simpson anymore. Digital assets like IP, media, data, and code let you work from anywhere and capture value directly. Everyone needs to think like an entrepreneur just to survive.

But then I look around. The NHS employs 1.5 million people. Education employs 1.66 million. These massive organisations that employ hundreds of thousands aren't collapsing tomorrow. Someone still needs to work those jobs.

Maybe Daniel's timescale is longer than it feels. Maybe these large employers will shrink but not disappear. Maybe "entrepreneurial" just means something different than starting a business.

Honestly, I don't have a strong view either way. But I'd like to hear what people think.

Do you see this shift happening as quickly as Daniel suggests? And if so, what happens to the people who can't or don't want to become entrepreneurs?

Yesterday I had a really interesting conversation with Kathy Wu Brady

We talked about career transitions, identity shifts, and the patterns I'm seeing in the people I work with.

One thing keeps coming up in my career helpdesk sessions.
When I ask people about their skills, they describe them in the context they've used them. Someone in marketing for 30 years will say "marketing." Someone in finance will say "finance."

This is particularly true for people who've been in corporate environments. You become your job title. Your identity merges with your function. After enough time, they become indistinguishable.

The problem is, this creates tunnel vision.

If you see yourself as "someone who does marketing," you'll only look for marketing roles. And marketing, in your mind, means one thing: selling products, getting people to buy stuff, increasing conversion rates.

But marketing isn't really about selling. Not fundamentally.

When you strip away the context, marketing is understanding human psychology. It's persuasion. It's influence. It's knowing what motivates people and how to communicate with them effectively.

And once you see it that way, the entire world opens up.

You could use those skills in education, designing courses that actually change behaviour. You could use them in healthcare, helping people adopt better habits. You could use them in conflict resolution, urban planning, or community building.

The skill is the same. The context is unlimited.

But if you keep thinking of yourself as "a marketer," you'll miss all of that. You'll stay in the lane you've always been in, even when it's not serving you anymore.

Most people describe their skills through the lens of where they've used them. Once you learn to see them for what they actually are, everything changes.

Are you damaging your ability to think for yourself?

One of the many fascinating topics Gabriel Fairman, Rodrigo Demetrio and I covered on the Bureau Works podcast this week.

Gabriel works with translators who've watched their profession transform right before their eyes. In the 2000s, machine translation was a joke. Now it's an industry norm. They're stuck asking what they can do that the machine can't.

Emotional intelligence. Reading between the lines. Understanding context the machine misses. Making decisions that require judgement.

Most people doing expensive, predictable, procedural work are sitting ducks. If your workflow is consistent, replicable, and costs a lot, there's huge incentive to replace you.

We spent an hour unpacking which jobs are at risk, what separates people who adapt from those who don't, and why passive mindsets are dangerous. Passive pessimism (everything's terrible, what's the point) or passive optimism (it'll work out somehow). Neither helps when your industry is changing so dramatically.

One of Gabriel's quotes that's stuck with me since recording: "machines become mirrors".

We're defining ourselves in relation to what AI can do. Skills we valued yesterday become irrelevant today. The things that made you employable, competent, valuable - typing speed, perfect spelling, remembering facts - suddenly don't matter. So you're left questioning: what part of me is still useful? What makes me different from the machine?

That identity crisis is happening across every industry touched by AI. And most people are avoiding the question entirely.

The people who'll be fine are building resilience, developing agency, and maintaining the discipline to think deeply when shortcuts are everywhere.

Thanks to Gabriel and Rodrigo for the depth. Rare to find people willing to sit in uncomfortable questions instead of rushing past them.

I was wrong.

We spend so much time online listening to people who tell you to do things their way. Personal branding is set up so everyone has their spiel, with their IP all neatly packaged and clearly articulated.

And once you've staked your claim, changing course becomes tricky.
The problem is, if you're truly committed to being a lifelong learner, you're bound to get things wrong. 

Learning is about being willing to update your understanding when new evidence appears. Sometimes that means going back on yourself, potentially alienating people who agreed with your previous position.

I don't want to build my brand around telling people what they should do.
I know there's more incentive to package everything up nicely and insist you follow my way. What I'm happy to do is share what I'm learning on my journey of committing myself to the solution of a very complex problem.

I want to build my brand around the idea that we can stumble, change our minds, and admit we were wrong. This is the beautiful thing about big problems: there's no neat answer waiting to be discovered. There's just iteration, experimentation, and gradual improvement.

Check out the latest Still Wandering article to hear 3 things I've changed my mind about since I've been rethinking traditional careers advice.

(Link in comments)

If surviving your workday requires two hours of morning preparation, you're solving the wrong problem.

Everywhere I look online I see these elaborate morning routines. Meditation, journaling, cold showers, breathwork, gratitude practice. 

All before 8am. All to prepare for jobs that leave people tired and bored by 2PM.

I've been there myself.

But imagine if you spent the time optimising preparing for your day on better understanding what aligned and fulfilling work might look like for you?

What problems do you find yourself naturally drawn to? 

What skills do you have that you haven't fully explored? 

What type of work leaves you with more capacity at the end of the day?

These are some really important questions that people seem to just gloss over.

Finding work where you can bring craftsmanship and genuine interest changes everything. Work where Monday doesn't require psychological armour. Where the challenge is engaging rather than draining.

Hard work still matters, and optimising your productivity is still extremely important, but we need to ask ourselves if we're directing our efforts towards the right challenges.

The wellness and productivity industry is worth billions because despite all of the abundance we have, we have never been so unsatisfied.

P.S. If you're interested in sustainable productivity, I highly recommend checking out Caitlin Rozario's work.

taplio

The Battle

Joseph Rudd

Alex McCann

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The Battle

Joseph Rudd

Alex McCann

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Alex McCann's LinkedIn Performance

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