Labor in the Loop

Episode 01 — Meet Your Hosts

Content note: This episode is rated NSFKM. Not safe for Karen's mom (or yours). Proceed accordingly.

About This Episode

Every podcast has to start somewhere. So we’re going to start at the beginning!

In our debut episode, we-- Britt and Karen-- introduce ourselves by sharing our career paths, starting with all the wrong jobs, pivots, and years spent figuring ourselves out. Britt grew from filing medical charts at her mom's doctor's office at 16 to HR consultant. Karen grew from washing dishes at summer camp to a PhD in AI ethics. To get there, we rewrote a lot of stories about ourselves, like “I’m lazy,” and “there’s no job that will pay me that I will be good at.”

What We Cover

How two friends from Southern California ended up studying work for a living

Britt's career path: filing charts at her mom's doctor's office, childcare, Starbucks, sales, a collection agency, a hospital in South Carolina, and finally HR

Karen's career path: summer camp kitchen, gift wrapping, a church office,, financial planning admin, Korea, a PhD, and workforce development research

What it actually means to be a "late bloomer" and why we take pride in the label (now, anyway ;)

What our nonlinear career paths taught us

What's coming up on the show: hiring process deep dives, workplace dynamics, AI and the future of work, and probably some crying

Timestamps

00:00 — Intro and content warning (hi Karen's mom)

01:04 — Introducing Britt and Karen

05:13 — How we met!

09:47 — Britt's career story begins

22:56 — First real office job, temp agencies, and how Starbucks made Britt more extroverted

33:36 — A ribbon-cutting ceremony that changed everything

40:01 — Finding HR at 34

43:42 — Karen's career story begins

1:04:07 — Korea, a postdoc, and what burnout actually feels like

1:26:00 — Where they both landed and why they started this podcast

1:35:00 — What Labor in the Loop is all about (so far)

About Your Hosts

Brittany (Britt) is a certified HR professional based in Boise, Idaho with four years of experience spanning HR generalist work, talent acquisition, and fractional HR consulting through her own practice, Lumi HR LLC. She got into HR the long way, through customer service, restaurants, sales, administration, and a lot of figuring it out as she went. That path is exactly why she cares so much about the people side of work.

Karen Boyd is a values and technology researcher and director of research at a think tank in Southern California. She holds an MBA from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD from the University of Maryland's School of Information, where she studied AI ethics and the future of work. She is, by her own admission, better at studying people than working with them.

Connect With Us

Britt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyhumphreys

Karen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drkarenboyd/

Lumi HR LLC: https://www.instagram.com/lumihrllc/

Karen’s author account: https://www.instagram.com/karenboydauthor/

Leave Us a Review

If this episode resonated with you, we'd love to hear from you. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or write us an email with your feedback and questions!

Labor in the Loop is part career strategy, part tech deep dive, part therapy session between two friends who study work for a living.