The Next Step Didn’t Start as a Podcast
When I launched the series, it wasn’t really a podcast. It was a LinkedIn Live experiment.
At the time, our myHub career development group at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry was already hosting Career Stories events (and still do), where alumni come back to share how they built their careers, the choices they made, and the lessons they learned along the way.
I wanted to find a way to build on that. Sometimes we had incredible alumni visiting campus, and their advice only reached the people in the room. Other times, there were alumni we wanted to highlight but couldn’t bring back in person. LinkedIn Live felt like a simple way to extend those conversations, to repurpose what was already happening and make it more accessible.
That’s how The Next Step began: as a series of live sessions with alumni, streamed to anyone who wanted to listen.
The problem was, once the session ended, it only lived on LinkedIn. A 35-45-minute discussion about career paths, job search strategies, or graduate school tips lived on one platform.
That’s when repurposing came into play.
Instead of treating those lives as one-time events, I started downloading the video and sharing them on YouTube, and the audio on Spotify and Apple.
And that’s what The Next Step is today: a podcast where University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry alumni share their career journeys and offer practical advice on professional development, job searches, and navigating graduate school.
I now record all conversations ahead of time using Riverside—no more live streaming. There’s a little less stress involved 🙂
Once the recording is done, I do minimal editing, add a teaser clip at the beginning, drop in the intro, an ad, and the outro. Then schedule it to launch as a live broadcast using Restream. It first airs on LinkedIn because of its professional development theme. Then it’s published on YouTube and podcast channels.
The content no longer has a shelf life of 45 minutes. It’s evergreen. Episodes are shared in newsletters, cut into short clips for social, embedded into news stories, or turned into articles for the website.
Here’s what I learned: repurposing isn’t just about squeezing extra value from a single piece of content. Sometimes, it’s about letting an idea evolve into a new format entirely.
The Next Step grew up. What started as a scrappy LinkedIn Live now has a home across platforms and a much broader audience.
How are you repurposing your content? Let me know!
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