Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep120: One big lesson learned from META shutting down podcasts.

Episode Date: May 4, 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. Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome back to another episode and another day of our, or rather my 30-day career live streams where I plan to talk about very interesting news that I see across different social media platforms, as well as

answering any Q&A that you may have related to the topics. So thank you so much for joining. Either today's your first time or, you know, you have been joining in the past couple of days. Really, really appreciate that. And today I actually wanted to talk about this one piece of news that I came across yesterday or rather this morning on LinkedIn. And it's about Meta or rather more popularly known as Facebook shutting down their podcast platform. So in case you guys don't know, Facebook introduced the whole podcast integration in June or July 2021.

So for me as a podcaster, I run a careers podcast in case you haven't checked it out yet you can just search for grow your career online offline may ping on spotify apple podcast google podcast and basically wherever podcasters found so when the news of facebook introducing this additional i guess integration capability to link our podcast into our Facebook pages, it came as a great news given that, okay, maybe the platform cares about the audio experience because not everybody has time to watch videos on YouTube and that's fine. So it came as a good thing. However, now in less than 12 months, Facebook is saying okay thanks bye um because clearly it's

maybe not exactly performing um they want to focus on other areas maybe podcasts you know on facebook i'm not exactly making money and you know that's what you know companies care about right so i so this piece of news aside or rather just to add on to it um this is actually a piece of news that i saw so in case like you you guys haven't had time to check it out so it says meta on facebook to pull the plug on his podcast platforms from next month so if you have been spending time on facebook listening to podcasts you know you might be a little bit disappointed. However, I will share that from my personal experience of being a podcast creator on Facebook, I don't think it's the most helpful thing, to be honest. A lot of my followers on Facebook, people don't go to Facebook to listen to podcasts. It's that sort of

thing. So I don't really miss it a lot, even though, you know, I came across multiple articles or other blogs of people saying that it's a missed opportunity to not be able to continue to build their audience on Facebook, yada, yada, yada. So all these are very fair comments. And probably at this point now, like you might be wondering, Mei Ping,, this is not a business live stream. This is actually a careers live stream. So how are any of these news around Facebook cancelling podcasts or they want to do something else, yada, yada, yada,

matter to me or rather matter to you? So here is the lesson that I actually want to share with you and it's a topic that I'm highly passionate about. And the quote is this, don't put all your eggs in one basket simple as that don't put all your eggs in one basket so for all the podcasters and all the people who have been complaining that oh you know you know Facebook shut down what am I going to do with all my podcast followers you know I can't um can't do

this I can't do that anymore um question to you is yeah you know it's just like your job right even if you love your company right now you love your team right now and so forth you should always be in a position to learn how to attract career opportunities or create career opportunities so never ever rely on getting too comfortable in your current company or your current team, no matter how hunky-dory everything is. Because I've actually been working with multiple clients this week, and there was also one recurring team as well. And it's the constant complaint of feeling stuck after working in the same company for more than 10 years. Now, how did this problem actually pop up? The common story that many of my clients tell me is

just a sense of complacency because you don't really see any problems and everything's okay. But one day you wake up and the day that you wake up, maybe five years from now, it can be seven years, eight years, nine years, then you start wondering to yourself like, oh, like what's up now? Like now that I'm stuck in this place doing the exact same thing or very close to the exact same thing for the past x years how can i now find my own value and reposition myself for future roles so one of the commonalities that i see in the clients that you know come to me this problem is low self-confidence which which is very unfortunate because I think like, if you do the same thing again and again,

at some point, right, you will also lose your own confidence because you start seeing the things that you do as just like, it's a day-to-day task, right? Even if I ask you like, okay, how's this valuable? What's your contribution?

You may not think of this thing that you're doing at work as something valuable, but it could be extremely valuable. It could be something that you could put in your resume, it could impress a new company at an interview, or find you more opportunities as well. So the point, I think rather the lesson that I want to, and I guess I hope you who are listening or watching to this can resonate is, when you are too reliant and too comfortable in one place, eventually you start not seeing other opportunities, not seeing what

else you can do, not seeing what else is out there. And when I say out there, right, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be external opportunities. It could just mean, okay, maybe internally within the company, there may be some interesting projects or something else that you can do. Like you start to not see any of that because you are so, maybe the word is conditioned, like you're so conditioned to just do what you're doing and get comfortable. And at that point when you want to do, you want to make a transition, it kind of became becomes challenging

and the challenging part sometimes right it's not even the resume yet it's the mindset and for a lot of my clients like the those who are stuck in a similar role or similar company for a long time i noticed that like the initial sessions are heavily focused on my set and even throughout the job search journey or job search process that I work with my clients on, they tend to need an extra bit of push. And I think the reason is because the self-confidence has definitely weakened. Self-confidence has definitely weakened.

So I hope that this is a lesson that you can take on to not be too reliant on one thing or one platform or maybe one skill. So if you're only good in that one particular skill and you don't continue to upskill different things, it might come to a point where this specific skill that you have may not be good enough. And during that time, there may be other competitors,

maybe other colleagues or other co-workers who could do what you do and maybe do even better, or they are maybe quote-unquote cheaper than you, and this will continue to hurt your career opportunity. So it's something that I want you all to be aware of and always plan your career because like, honestly, if you're relying, you know, on your boss to plan your career for you, like, that's,

wouldn't, would you agree that that's a lot of reliance on one person? That's a lot of reliance on one person and I do also work with multiple clients

where I think that there's a bit of an over-reliance on their boss to plan their career or make certain promises and eventually result, it can become very ugly when certain promises are not fulfilled. And then it kind of creates that distrust, so to speak, between the employee, which is

likely going to be you, versus the employer, which is your boss or your department or your team leader as well. So just some lessons that I think we can always learn from current events, you know, even though, you know, today's specific topic is that news that I saw around Meta, Facebook cancelling podcast. But actually when I first saw the news, the first thing I thought of was exactly as I said earlier,

don't put all your eggs in one basket because if you are doing that right, it just means that you may not have options and when you will find yourself like wanting to do something else you you may be very afraid because you you you're almost like self-sabotage like in a way so you self-sabotage telling yourself hey you know you're you're not good enough you haven't done this you haven't done that you know who want to hire me what am i going to say i've been here for so long, I'm not doing the different thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all these things are negative self-talk, right? It's self-sabotage and also probably a little bit of regret

of not planning your career ahead. So I think the best advice that if I can share with you is when you look at different events, even business news or whatever updates out there, always find the lesson that you can learn from and more importantly like recognizing that um if it's your career like you are the only person who can you know who is responsible for your career and you're the only person who cares about your own career and to expect that you know somebody else to care as much may be a bit challenging and you may end up feeling frustrated, unhappy,

multiple problems here and there due to that over-reliance, so to speak. So don't put all your eggs in one basket. If you're relying on one particular platform, one particular skill, one particular team, one particular network, I urge you to think again. I urge you to rethink how you can diversify and have more options and how you can plan your career ahead. So that is the message for today's live stream. And if you are new here, this is my

30-day live stream challenge where I answer or rather I discuss interesting topics or news that I come across on different social media that I'm on mainly you know LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, a little bit very little bit of Facebook and mostly YouTube so I do see multiple interesting conversations and I sometimes also see good slash bad career advice that I do want to dispel some of the myths as well. So if you want to join the 30-day careers live stream challenge, I go live on at 9 o'clock GMT plus 8. That's Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong time every single day in May. So if you have any interesting topics that you want to hear about, you want to know what I think of, drop me a DM on LinkedIn and maybe I'll cover it in one of

the upcoming live streams as well. So yeah, I mean, let me know, are you growing yourself this year? How are you actually attracting or rather creating career opportunities for yourself? So specifically, if you are on LinkedIn and you cannot find career opportunities, it just means that you are doing LinkedIn wrong. And that is one thing that you may also want to consider LinkedIn as a really, really great platform for you to find more career options and find more career opportunities as well. So if you have any questions that you want to, you're wondering about or anything that you want to know from today's episode or what I think and so forth, yeah, feel free to share in the chat. We probably have a little bit of time. I can answer some of the questions that you may have. So feel free to do that right now and let me know. And if you want

to listen to the replay of today's live stream or any other previous live streams, I uploaded on Spotify as well as YouTube so you can easily access the recordings over there. So before we jump into some of the questions, I just wanted to answer a few things that you guys talked about. So for those of you who've been asking me like where do you get the like career planning training and tips and so forth, you can go to this website www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. So this is the six-step career, how to plan your career training that I did live starting from last year.

And then this year in April, I did multiple live sessions as well. So if you happen to miss any of those sessions or you're looking for a career change right now, or you're thinking of how do you explore more opportunities and so forth, you can check out this free training at www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. Then the other announcement is for those of you guys asking me

how to create new opportunities, even if you're working and you don't want your boss to know that you're looking for a job or exploring career opportunities, this is actually something that I teach in my course, The Corporate Survivor. So you can go to www.thecorporatesurvivor.co. So in the link, there is going to be one video about five to six minutes where I go through the core structure and towards the later modules, I'll also explain what are some of the things

that I also teach in terms of helping you with your personal branding as well as creating and attracting more career opportunities for yourself. So if that's something that you want to do, you can definitely go and click on that one. But other than that, I'll be very curious to know, like, do you guys still use Facebook? Is it still like a thing now? Because I don't really use it as much because I feel like it's not as related to careers. Personally, for me, it's not as powerful

as LinkedIn is in terms of career growth, professional learning, job search, and so forth. Because LinkedIn is really the platform that I teach my nine to five professional clients in terms of how they can build a strong profile, do the right networking, do the right job search, all on LinkedIn. So that's definitely a platform that I focus on more. But we really love to hear from you. Are you on Facebook? What kind of social medias are you on which kind of social medias do you find are more beneficial for you in your career like are

you mainly on linkedin or are you also on facebook you know instagram tiktok and are you actually gaining any benefits from it right because that is really one of the things you know if you're honestly if you're on a social media platform yeah and you're just having fun, that's okay. But if you can't, if you find yourself, like, getting stuck in that entertainment, then don't mistake, like, education, don't mistake entertainment for education. So now, I'm going to comment a little bit on social media, because that's, like, one of my passion topics, right? I do share, okay, in all honesty, I do share tons of like career tips career advice you know job search tips across multiple social media obviously linkedin being the main one and my youtube videos but my podcast

is on spotify i do share on instagram particularly on instagram stories some behind the scenes tiktok i share a lot of quotes as well. Then, aside from that, you know, bits and pieces here and there, mostly as a lurker on the other smaller platforms. So, yeah, I mean, you know, what's very interesting, actually, I noticed that, like, okay, this is my personal experience, right? It may be very different from you, depending on whether you're a nine-to-five working professional or you're coming from a very business angle. So entrepreneurship is not something that I talk about on my social media platforms. So we're mainly talking about the corporate world here.

And I noticed that I find that people on LinkedIn are generally more serious about their career. Maybe because when people come onto LinkedIn, they are thinking about their careers, right? Not so much entertainment, even though LinkedIn right now is a bit of a jumbled mess. I can't find a better word for it. It's probably a bit of a jumbled mess. But I do think that when people come onto LinkedIn, people are in a more career growth or like more serious about their job search, I personally find. Because versus like different social medias or like different platforms that I'm on,

I find that the questions that I get on LinkedIn in terms of like my DMs are like more thought out. So these are people who really have thought through their problems and really want to find a solution. Versus on different platforms, so other platforms such as YouTube, you know, Instagram TikTok, and a few others, I find that the quality of the questions are like, okay, maybe that's not the best way to put it. I think the mentality or rather the mindset of wanting to get help seriously for long-term career success is not there. It's more of an entertainment. And I also find that the difference between like the people who ask for help on LinkedIn, generally speaking, versus the people ask for help on other platforms is their seriousness of wanting to take action. And also,

like how much are they willing to really build a solid foundation in their career? Like on different, on I guess other platforms, I find that the questions that I get is just like, maybe just give me the answer. I don't want to listen to anything else. Just tell me, is it A or B? But unfortunately, like, you know,

I'm sorry if I'm the one to burst your bubble over here. Like if you want to be successful in your career, like it's a journey. You need building blocks for long-term career success. Like that is just the reality.

And anyone who tells you otherwise, yeah, I don't know what to say, you need building blocks for long-term career success like that that is just the reality and anyone who tells you otherwise yeah i don't know what to say but i can only tell you that from my own corporate experience and you can see a lot of that on my linkedin there needs to be a strategy and there also needs to be hard work so working hard versus working smart is a topic that i talked about in the first episode of this live stream. So if you haven't caught that one, you can definitely check that one out where I explore a little bit more. Work smart, work hard. Which is better and which comes first?

So that's actually a pretty interesting live stream. So if you haven't checked that one out, you can listen to it on Spotify or check it out on YouTube. But yeah. All right. So I see a couple of questions. So let me try to answer But, yeah. All right, so I see a couple of questions. So let me try to answer some of them. All right, so the first question, where do I find the podcast platforms?

So like I said, YouTube is where I publish the video versions of it. Otherwise, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts are really popular platforms to listen to, so you can definitely do that. Then a comment from Archie over here. Yes, that's where I catch the current news. Okay, so the current news as in, like, are you checking it on Facebook,

LinkedIn, or Twitter? Because I find that Twitter is a pretty good platform to catch on, like, the latest headlines. But I sometimes also find that, like like it disappears very quickly as well. Personally, I feel LinkedIn is a little bit slower on that sense, but I do see the LinkedIn news team trying to do like the daily roundup,

the daily updates, which is really great. So I'm starting to catch on those as well. I think those has really helped me to not just catch up on the current news, but also think a little bit further on how these current news can be a really

good lesson or rather career lesson for a lot of my clients as well so that's something that i want to put in a little bit more effort to do and hopefully to be able to also share my perspectives on current news what i think of them and more importantly how you can apply the lessons to your own career because like if you're not getting anything out of it then like it's just gossip right all right all right so i hear a comment from justin yes facebook is still a thing mainly for b2c definitely linkedin for career yeah i i do i do agree um personally i have been on linkedin since 2012 so that's more that's about 10 years and i have seen linkedin evolve from just a pure job search platform in the early days in like 2012 2013 when i first got on the platform versus now you know to be a little bit more holistic to cover about you know work culture and other elements of social media i

think it's i think linkedin is as a platform is evolving i do have a feeling that linkedin is still finding their way. So LinkedIn for careers, I think it's a long-term thing because the foundation of LinkedIn, and in case you don't know, I'm going to share with you a nugget that I usually share in my free trainings as well as to my one-on-one clients in paid sessions. LinkedIn was initially created as a job search platform. It was a platform to connect recruiters with job seekers. So if you understand the way that, why LinkedIn was created initially, you'll also notice that in a lot of LinkedIn's infrastructure,

it is very driven for job search, right? As well as career growth. And that's just the reality. So in today's live stream, I'm not going to go into like the details and like the settings on like why I'm saying that it's a career growth slash job search platform, but that is actually the foundation of how LinkedIn is built. So for those of you who may be wondering, hey, Mei Ping, like nowadays LinkedIn is a bit of a mixed bunch, right? There's just so much going on,

should I even spend time on LinkedIn or should I just like move to other platforms to improve my career? Personally, I still think that LinkedIn is a really, really good platform because there are a lot of more serious recruiters, right? Hiring managers, right? HR, they do hang out on LinkedIn and that is where hell they find their candidates. So even up to today, I think that you can find entertainment and you can get quick bits, right? You know, rather quick or small bites of

different educational content. Like for me on TikTok, I share quotes, right? Career quotes. On Instagram, I share I do share like shorter form videos and like longer a little bit more quotes as well. But I think only on LinkedIn,

I can really share with context a lot of my corporate experiences that may be helpful for you if you are also in the corporate world, whether you're a fresh graduate or you're somebody who's aiming for C-suite. A lot of my advice are from my personal experiences and maybe you can resonate better.

And I find that this more longer form advice just doesn't work on those other platforms because people are looking for entertainment, right? They're not really looking for a lot of education, right? And I also completely agree that the formality is very different on LinkedIn as compared to other platforms. So I think a lot of it is really the mentality, right? So if you come into a platform like looking to be entertained

after six o'clock, after your working day has ended, you are also not going to focus on learning something professionally. You're probably going to just be on the platform to relax and that's okay too, right? Like we all need time

to relax and so forth. So I think a lot of it actually do still come from the fact that what is your mentality when you go on a different social media platform and don't honestly don't deceive yourself like if you want if you want to go to like different platforms just for entertainment like that's fine but i think don't deceive yourself that you know just that one short thing on tiktok for example,

you can learn everything. Because most of the time, careers are not built on like a one-sentence quote or like a 10-second video. It's a holistic thing that takes time and yada, yada, yada, all those other things. So it's really like, honestly, up to you whether you are serious to build your mindset, you build your skill set, as well as improving your networking as well. And that may not necessarily be something that you can learn.

I mean, you can learn, but you can't really master it through a 10-second TikTok video, right? So question, it's really for you on, you know, do you want just like quick reminders and quick motivational quotes, right? Motivational career quotes that get you pumped up every day. But is it really setting you up for long-term success? I think only you can answer that question. So anyway, in conclusion, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Don't rely only on your boss or only on certain platforms to look for a job. You should be open to it. But at the end of the day, you should have a strategy, you should have a career plan, and you shouldn't just magically hope for something to happen because in most instances, probably not just going to magically happen. Good things take time, even if that's not what you want to hear, but good things do take time.

Good things take planning, good things take strategy, and good things also take perseverance and consistency. That's just the reality of things. All righty. Okay. So thank you so much for joining today's live stream. So this is a 30-day live stream. I'll be going live tomorrow at the same time.

So if you have any topic suggestions or pieces of news that you come across and you want me to share some perspectives, send it to me on my DM and then I'll consider it for an upcoming live stream episode. So aside from that, as I said earlier, for those of you who are texting me saying that you're looking for a job

and you want to learn how to do that better or you are in your current job but you want to upskill, then you can just go to this free training, www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. So you will be able to go through the step-by-step on what you need to be aware of as you plan out your career, starting from career clarity all the way to the end for work skills as well as career growth. So with that, I will see you tomorrow. And if you haven't checked out my podcast, Grow Your Career Online Offline,

I think you can see the logo probably here. Grow Your Career Online Offline, it's on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or the video version is also on YouTube. So I have like more than 100 episodes. So hopefully it helps you in your career. And if you like it, hopefully you can share it with a friend and it's a lifelong companion for you as you continue to improve your career in the corporate world till then i'll see you bye