Some people build successful careers by focusing on what’s next for themselves. Others make a point of bringing people along with them. Abdul Rastagar has spent years doing both. As Co-Founder of Sirona Marketing, Abdul has built a career spanning life sciences, healthcare, technology, and marketing. But within the healthcare marketing community, he’s also become known for something that doesn’t necessarily show up on a resume: his willingness to share what he knows, make connections, mentor others, and help people succeed. It’s that commitment to the community that earned Abdul the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award. What makes his approach particularly interesting is that it didn’t begin with a grand plan to become a mentor. It started with a simple question: Where could he give his time and knowledge and actually see the impact? For Abdul, the answer became the marketing community. Over the years, that decision has led him to create resources for job seekers, share his network, mentor fellow marketers, and directly help dozens of people land new roles. I sat down with Abdul to talk about giving back, the career lessons he’s learned along the way, why trust is becoming increasingly important in an AI-driven world, and the advice he believes the next generation of healthcare marketers needs to hear. In This Conversation: Why giving back became such an important part of Abdul’s career. Don’t work for jerks: The career mantra he wishes he had learned sooner. Why trust may be one of healthcare marketing’s biggest challenges in the age of AI. How marketers can make networking more intentional and actually useful. Why judgment, communication, and creativity will matter even more as AI becomes ubiquitous. Watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways. Sharing What You Know Can Help Others Succeed Abdul’s commitment to giving back became especially tangible during the pandemic. As marketers around him began losing their jobs, he looked for a way to put his own experience and network to use. That led to Up Your Game, a podcast focused on helping marketers navigate job applications and interviews from a marketing perspective. What started as one way to help quickly grew. Abdul brought CMOs and other leaders into the conversation and ultimately produced more than 100 episodes in a single year. For Abdul, that’s what giving back looks like: finding the skills, knowledge, or network you already have and using them to create a tangible impact for someone else. As he shared throughout our conversation, “I get excited whenever I see somebody else succeed.” Seeing other people succeed has become its own reward for Abdul. It’s a simple reminder that contributing to your professional community doesn’t have to mean launching a massive initiative. Sometimes it starts with sharing what you know, making an introduction, or taking the time to help someone who needs it. One Career Rule: Don’t Work for Jerks Not every career lesson has to be complicated. At Sirona Marketing, Abdul and his team have several internal mantras based on lessons learned through their own experiences. One of them?: “Don’t work for jerks.” It’s funny, but there’s an important lesson behind it. Earlier in his career, Abdul was more likely to stay in situations that weren’t working and simply suffer through them. Experience taught him to recognize those situations sooner and be more willing to walk away when someone clearly didn’t have his best interests at heart. And, as he quickly pointed out during our conversation, there’s an equally important second half to that rule: Don’t be a jerk either. It’s straightforward career advice, but perhaps some of the most useful. In an AI-Driven World, Trust Matters More It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about healthcare marketing in 2026 without talking about AI. But for Abdul, one of the biggest changes AI is creating isn’t just increased productivity or automation. It’s a growing issue of trust. Consumers are being inundated with more content than ever before. Some is human-created. Some is AI-generated. Some is accurate. Some isn’t. And as the volume increases, audiences are becoming more skeptical about what they see, hear, and believe. “That changes the job of the marketer,” said Abdul. He believes marketers need to work harder to demonstrate authenticity, credibility, and real expertise. And sometimes the best way to do that has very little to do with technology. Have conversations. Host roundtables. Sit down for dinner with customers. Visit them in person. Be human. That doesn’t mean avoiding AI. Abdul and his team are actively using it. In fact, he introduced me to the thought of thinking of AI tools as “teammates” that can automate work and expand what a team is capable of doing. But those teammates still need oversight. AI can make mistakes. Outputs need to be checked. Human judgment still matters. For small healthcare marketing teams in particular, AI can dramatically expand capacity. The opportunity is to use it to make the team stronger without removing the human expertise that makes the work credible in the first place. Stop Saying “Network.” Start Doing It. “Network more” might be one of the most common pieces of career advice. It’s also not particularly useful unless someone tells you what that actually means. Abdul first heard the importance of networking in business school, but he admits it took years before he truly understood its value. Once he became more intentional about building relationships, he saw a significant impact on his career and professional success. His advice for making networking more actionable is simple: Think about two or three things you want to accomplish over the next five years. Then ask yourself: Who is already where I want to be? Find those people and start reaching out. They might be former colleagues. They might be mutual connections. They might be complete strangers whose careers you find interesting. The point isn’t to collect LinkedIn connections. It’s to start conversations and build genuine relationships. Sometimes those conversations lead to professional opportunities. Sometimes they lead to friendships. Sometimes they simply introduce you to a person, perspective, or experience you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. All of them have value. The Skills the Next Generation Will Need Most When I asked Abdul what skills the next generation of healthcare marketers will need over the next decade, AI was inevitably part of his answer. Marketers will need to know how to use it. But knowing how to use AI may not be what ultimately differentiates them. Judgment, communication, and creativity will. Abdul is already seeing this with younger marketers entering the workforce. Learning how to use AI tools is important, but so is knowing when the output is wrong, when something doesn’t sound human, or when an answer simply doesn’t make sense. That requires critical thinking. The marketers who stand out won’t necessarily be the ones who can generate the most content or build the most AI workflows. They’ll be the ones who know what to do with those capabilities. They’ll ask better questions. They’ll recognize bad information. They’ll communicate like humans. And they’ll use technology to create things that are genuinely useful. Passing It Forward At the end of our conversation, I asked Abdul what “distinguished” means to him. He laughed at the word itself, saying it sounded a little too lofty. But his answer captured exactly why he received the Distinguished Service Award in the first place. For him, it comes down to giving back and passing it forward. Share what you know. Help other people succeed. Make the introduction. Have the conversation. Give someone else the benefit of what you’ve learned. Careers are built on skills and experience, but they’re also built on people. And Abdul’s career is a great reminder of just how much impact we can have when we make helping those people part of the work. Congratulations again to Abdul Rastagar, recipient of the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award. Learn more about Sirona Marketing here: https://www.sirona.marketing/
