As a job hunter or career changer, you have never had so many digital resources to assist, educate, and inspire you. In recent posts, we have recommended free open online leadership courses and smartphone apps to support your job hunt. Today, we’ll introduce what we believe are four of the most informative and entertaining podcasts to support your professional development.

Podcasts can be easily incorporated into your weekly routine, because they are so easy to listen to while you commute, exercise, or even enjoy some downtime. Just subscribe on your apple or android device, download, and listen at your convenience. If you haven’t become a podcast addict yet, these gems will jump start your new digital passion, and could very well boost your career.

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

Soft skills, competencies, and character are essential to your professional development and job performance, in any industry. This podcast is hosted by career consultant and success coach Pete Mockaitis, who has worked for every Ivy League school, Google, McKinsey, the United Nations, and Amazon. In each episode, Mockaitis grills thought leaders and results-getters to arrive at actionable insights that can improve your job performance. The host’s style is dynamic and engaging, so you won’t be sacrificing entertainment when you switch from the radio to this podcast in the morning. There are more than 300 episodes, with two or three new ones added each week.

If you want to start making a greater impact at work immediately, check for recent episodes on topics including:

• Mental clarity and focus
• Leadership and rallying coworkers around a cause
• Persuasion
• Conducting constructive meetings
• Preventing burnout

How Did You Get Into That?

When you meet people with fascinating careers, do you enjoy finding out how they got into their lines of work? If you do—and if you’re contemplating a career change yourself—you’ll enjoy virtually “meeting” a fascinating new person each week. Host Grant Baldwin had his own career crisis before becoming a speaker, blogger, and podcaster. He’s held more than 500 career events, inspired well over 400,000 people, and has put together nearly 250 fascinating podcast episodes. If you need a motivational kick in the pants, you’ll find it in the journeys of people just like you who wanted something more out of their careers and did the work to make that happen. Grant interviews successful professionals in finance, medicine, marketing, sports, entertainment, the arts, and more.  Even if you’re perfectly satisfied in your career, you’ll find inspiration to get more out of your professional life from this podcast.

Manager Tools

Whether you are an aspiring manager, or are looking for ways to improve specific management skills, this is one of the strongest resources available. There’s a Manager Tools podcast for dealing with every situation you find yourself in, and the hosts of this show tell you exactly how to proceed, in detail. This weekly podcast, with more than 540 free episodes and over 700 members-only episodes, can help you navigate key areas of management including:

• Onboarding new employees
• Office politics
• Running meetings
• Employee training
• Conducting performance reviews

The Tim Ferriss Show

This podcaster is best known as the self-experimenting author of The 4-Hour Workweek. A “most interesting man in the world” type, Ferriss lectures at Princeton, scuba dives in Panama, and dances the tango in Buenos Aires, all while focusing on the resources of time and mobility to maximize his quality of life. The show is highly entertaining, because both the host and guests on each episode are highly unconventional success stories who have figured out how to extract more enjoyment from their careers. This weekly podcast has well over 300 shows. Get started by checking out these recent episodes:

• Lessons from Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Ray Dalio, and Other Icons
• How to Succeed in High Stress Situations
• Whitney Wolfe Herd – Founder and CEO of Bumble

Do you listen to any career-related podcasts? Or how about podcasts related to motivation and personal growth? If you subscribe to any podcasts that you find helpful and enjoyable, we welcome you to share them with our community on Facebook!