Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep111: Best decisions I made in my career.

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Have you ever made a career decision that you regret? What did you do? Why did you regret it? Let's talk about it.

In this episode, I will share with you the 5 best decisions I ever made in my career that really helped me rise up from junior to leadership and management positions while only in my 20s. So if you want to learn what it actually takes to rise up to senior leadership positions while being a young leader working your 9-5 job, make sure that you stay to the end of this episode to find out. The first big decision that I ever had to make in my career was deciding to join a small company during the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis when there were no jobs available right after I graduated. Now it was a pretty difficult decision for me at the time because I had that paper qualification, I had that paper cert, I had all these you know A's and

allocates and all these things that made me feel like I had to paper cert, I had all these you know A's and allocates and all these things that made me feel like I had to join a big company but I eventually made the decision to join that small company and it proved to be one of the best decisions in my career because it allowed me to gain a lot of knowledge, a lot of skills as well as exposure and the most important one was I met my manager who eventually referred me to join my dream company which is a global multinational company so that I could continue to elevate my career. This one very important lesson right at the beginning of my career taught me that there are no wrong decisions in your career. At the end of the day, you should choose what you want to do

and really see the brightest side of any decision that you can make and if you're ever in a small company right now it is not the dead end for you you can always move to a big company just like i have so just always focus on improving yourself on to the second best decision i've made in my career was coming to the realization that working hard is not enough. Working hard hard hard is just not good enough if you want to climb the corporate ladder and you really want to do well in your job. So what I realized was after learning how to work hard, I had to learn how to work smart to be more productive and more effective but at at the same time, I also needed to learn how to network smart. And aside from just delivering my roles and my job,

I also focused on building very strong relationships and networking within the company itself. And how this eventually turned out in my career was, I managed to get a lot of referrals to move from one company to the other. And not just that, I also received multiple invitations for interviews in companies that probably were a little bit out of my league

and probably would have thousands, if not tens of thousands of applicants such as I received interview invitations to Google, to PayPal, and some of the central banks. And these are really not easy interviews to get unless there's somebody there who has worked with you before aka me, worked with me before and knew that I really had a lot of value to add and was really willing to refer me. So that was the strategy around work hard, work smart and don't forget to network smart

as well. So it's a holistic one for you to advance your career. One of the best things that I decided to do that really helped me elevate in my career as well as in my personal life was learning more about myself, making the effort to self-reflect, to learn more about my strengths, my weaknesses, my default habits, my specific working styles really enabled me to only volunteer for projects that would suit my strengths and my capabilities and therefore allowed me to shine and emerge as top

performer every single year. And by emerging as top performer every single year, of course it helps a lot in getting my promotions, my increments, my bonuses as well as opening more doors for me to transition within the company or even externally with getting headhunted with multiple opportunities as well. So there is something really really valuable in learning about yourself right. Knowing your career clarity you know for myself I knew exactly what I wanted, I knew what I was good at and the things that I was not so good at I was always upskilling all the time to make sure that it is no longer a liability for me but eventually turning my weaknesses into strengths as well so never underestimate self-reflection self-assessment and really the power of understanding your own

personality because it makes a huge impact in your career at this this point, you might be thinking, oh Mei Ping, you are so lucky and you are also so brave. I don't think I can be as brave as you. No, stop there because at the end of the day, every career decision that you make definitely impacts your career. It's up to you to decide what you want, what is worth it and then putting in your time, effort and energy to upskill yourself to make yourself as valuable as possible with the right strategies and tools to make sure that you increase your chances for success, right? And to increase your chances for success is what I always say getting the right mindset, understanding yourself and other people, upskilling

yourself to be able to be as productive, effective and somebody that people want to work with and finally building the right reputation so that you are seen as a valuable professional and other people feel comfortable to give you that right endorsement in your career. So all these things are something that I teach in my paid program The Corporate Survivor specifically designed for 9 to 5 working professionals. So if that's something that you want to check out you can always go to www.thecorporatesurvivor.co to learn how the step-by-step program can really help you to elevate your career. On to the next career decision, back in 2013 when I decided to join Visa which is a global payments company. It was a long time ago and it was also the time where fintech was not exactly a thing and when I decided to move from consulting into the fintech technology

space, a lot of people told me that me paying this is a dumb decision. You should not be moving to this sort of like fintech company. Nobody knows what it's all about. It a dead end yada yada yada however interestingly a few years after that the whole fintech industry completely boomed so my experience in visa in the payments technology space actually opened up more opportunities for me to take on new projects to get selected for interesting initiatives that eventually led me to leading to and even and eventually led me to and eventually allowed me to become the head of governance for fintech at Standard Chartered Bank. So this episode taught me that interesting opportunities are everywhere but it's really Ia juga memberitahu saya bahawa peluang yang menarik ada di mana-mana pun.

Tetapi, ia benar-benar terpaksa anda melihat peluang tersebut, terutama melihat peluang yang berkembang dan berkembang yang kelihatan yang kebanyakan orang tidak lihat. Dan jangan terlalu berdikari jika orang lain tidak melihat visi anda. Mungkin mereka tidak boleh melihatnya. Tetapi menariknya, dari situasi saya, beberapa tahun kemudian, banyak orang bertanya kepada saya, Oh, anda sangat bertuah kerana anda berada dalam fintech when it was early on and you got rewarded later. Well, not necessarily. It was because I was courageous enough to make a decision that felt right in my career. When going through that logic that nobody else understood at that time. But I think the lesson that it taught me is that a crazy decision at the beginning

may pay rewards later on if you know exactly what you're doing and you have already gone through that thought process of what you could potentially get out of it. So don't let anyone else say that you're crazy. If you believe in your career decision, you should always 100% stick to your decision. Moving on to the last best career decision I've made in my career so far helped me significantly in moving up the management as well as leadership positions while only in my 20s was taking the unconventional decision path and the unconventional career choices to move from consulting, risk advisory and assurance, jumping into the banking space, but not just the banking space but a completely new team to revive an entire department as well as working on remediation projects for very high priority commitments to the regulators so that was exactly what i did at senate charter which seemed very unconventional at that time again it was one of those decisions where a lot

of people told me maybe this is completely stupid why are you going into banking and why would you go into a team that like has no structure in place to do everything yourself but the beauty is this i saw the opportunity i knew in terms of my background skills and experiences of what i can do i had a vision of how i think i could implement a lot of how I think I could implement a lot of the solutions that the business needed. And at the time, it was a USD $1 billion business where I felt that I had what it takes, where I felt that I knew that this was a great opportunity.

I was very sure that I had the background skills, experiences to be able to deliver a good job. And it will give me multiple exposure to very senior management, which normally somebody in my position would not have been able to do that. So I made the unconventional decision. I took the leap and I jumped right into the job.

To be fair, 100%, it was absolutely crazy job. And I do think that I'm a pretty efficient person in general but that job i worked 18 maybe even 20 hours for a long time um however i think a lot of the skills i gained the exposure you know the mindset the grit the perseverance that everything else that came with it i'd say that the five years that I spent in banking was probably worth about 15 years and it's not just measured in the number of years alone but the kind of like maturity the seniority the understanding that I have at the top management level that was extremely invaluable experience that I would definitely not change it for anything ever so those are the five best

decisions that I made in my nine to five corporate career that allowed me to move from junior all the way to senior leadership positions while just only in my 20s, working with people from across 43 countries and managing a huge, huge, huge portfolio for somebody my age. Since you've stayed to the end, I have a super duper exciting announcement to share with you. If you are listening to this episode, on the day of release, I am launching three free live trainings to help you to plan and grow your career for success without getting stuck. So these are three exclusive live trainings that I'm running on linkedin so make sure that you check out the dates in the description follow me on linkedin dial in on time and looking forward to help you elevate your career and

if you can't make any of the dates then and you want to join the training like right now right now then head on over to www.growyourcorporatecareer.com where you can also watch this training live on demand. So with that, I wish you all the best and I'll see you next week. Bye.