Difference Makers Discuss Season 5
The best career advice tends to arrive from an unlikely source. A conversation with someone you have only just met. A contact you had almost forgotten about. A question you did not expect to be asked. Season 5 of Difference Makers Discuss brings together six guests whose paths turned on exactly those moments.
Across six episodes, host Sinead Donovan explores why your next opportunity may be hiding in your weakest connection, and how a career gets shaped far more by the forks in the road than by the plan. She meets an accountant who built an audience of a million, and hears how one woman is working to raise the sights of young people who have been told to expect less. She finds out what saying “yes” can do for a career in Formula One, and asks what artificial intelligence should really be doing in the service of professionals.
The thread running through all six is a simple one. A Chartered Accountancy qualification is a starting point rather than a destination. These are people who took the training, pointed it somewhere unexpected, and made a difference when they got there.
Episodes run fortnightly on Thursdays at 6pm, from 1 October to 10 December 2026. Every episode is free to attend, and every episode is available afterwards on demand and as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and other podcast networks.
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Aisling McCaffrey is clear that the seventeen year old choosing a university course could not have described where she is now. She works at the Impact Investing Institute in London on the question of why capital does not flow to the places that need it. Recent months have taken her to the Ethiopian border with Somalia alongside UNHCR and UNDP, and to India to look at the textile and apparel sector.
Difference Makers Discuss, season 5, episode 1. Sinead Donovan talks to Kingsley Aikins, founder of Diaspora Matters. This is the second of a two part conversation, the first of which closed season 4.
Season 4 of Difference Makers Discuss covered a lot of ground. Six guests, six very different lives, and on the face of it not much in common beyond a professional qualification and a willingness to talk honestly. Watch them back to back, and something else emerges. Every one of these stories turns on the same thing: the decision to connect with another human being when it would have been easier not to.
In this special edition of Difference Makers Discuss, recorded for the Chartered Accountants Worldwide UAE community, host Carla Wilson is joined by international tax specialist Hugo van Zyl and HR leader Sarah Brooks. Together they unpack the tax, payroll, and governance risks of letting employees work across borders, along with the practical steps every organisation should take.
Have you ever been told to keep your head down, work hard, and let your good work speak for itself? It sounds like solid advice. It’s also, according to Kingsley Aikins, pretty much the worst career guidance you can get.
What does a fourth-generation New Zealander, with a Singaporean-Chinese mum, a law degree, a Chartered Accountancy qualification, and an Irish husband have in common with the Italian government, a 2,000-strong parent community in Greenwich, and a global mission to attract foreign investment? In this episode of Difference Makers Discuss, host Sinead Donovan finds out.
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