Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep172: How to get recognised and paid your value. Group Mentoring Pt.3

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

✅ Get FREE GUIDE, newsletter, join career program 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Corporate Survivor™ is the ultimate career course for 9-to-5 working professionals, just like *you*, who want to enhance corporate world mindset, skillset and strategy so you can NAVIGATE + GROW your career with clarity, confidence & opportunities... 🚀 ⚡ 📌 ABOUT THIS PODCAST: Welcome to Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — ex-Corporate Leader turned Career Coach & Founder of The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, Mei Phing shares her corporate world insights, experiences and wisdom so you can grow your 9-5 career with clarity, confidence and opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/freeguide ✅ NEWSLETTER ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/mondays ✅ CAREER COURSE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡

Welcome back to the Corporate Survivor Podcast. This is Mei Ping, and if you've been following us for the last two weeks, you know that I'm in a special series of sharing behind the scenes of what actually happens during my monthly group mentoring calls that I host for nine to five professionals who are students in my career course, The Corporate Survivor. So the last two weeks, we talked about step one and step two of my three-step framework that I teach to help you become more confident, competent in your career. So today, let's talk about step three. And step three is all about how to get visible with personal branding.

Now, if you've missed the earlier two episodes, make sure that you check them out first because one big mistake that a lot of people make is they want to get visible, but they are not clear on what exactly they're supposed to be doing. They're not even confident in what they can do and the worst thing is that they don't even have the right skills to do a good job. For step three, we are really going to focus on how do you brand yourself, how do you speak out and how do you stand out both at the workplace as well as utilizing LinkedIn as a platform. The main goal is to make sure that you get recognized for all the hard work that you're putting in so that you don't feel stuck or underpaid throughout your career. So this is also the question that my student has also asked

and you'll see how I've given her the guidance on how to better navigate and better position herself and some of the tips that I have to make sure that she doesn't get stuck in her career journey. So let's dive in. And I want you to hear the student's question and then the response that I'm giving to her. And as usual, if you find that these lessons are very beneficial, then definitely check out www.mayping.com where you can learn more about the course and more details about the program. So without further ado, let's dive in.

Let's move on to the next section. Let's talk about phase three, which is get visible. Now, this one is something quite interesting as well. So recently for this particular student, had a performance review, you know, got very good feedback from her colleagues and support, and would like to also plan a conversation with HR regarding increment. So normally for year-end review in the future, for you guys, if you can, try to do it from mid-November onwards, you should actually get started on this process. So that will be with your manager.

That will also include gathering feedback from your colleagues or clients, but specifically if you have, or colleagues within the team, or another department, basically, whoever who is willing to put in a good word for you, then try to get it as soon as possible. So get started for this process, maybe early November if you can, mid-November at the latest, make sure that you have that conversation already. Now, I want to share a few advanced strategies as well.

So in this situation, there is a mistake, and the mistake is planning the conversation with HR on increment. So for those of you who joined the Salary Negro workshop last month's mentoring call, remember what I said, HR is the admin, HR is the facilitator. So HR is usually not the person who can agree to an increment. It actually all comes down to your department head. So your manager, a director, if you have, or department head who's ultimately going to sign the budget. So having a conversation with HR,

usually you will find that you won't get the answer that you're looking for. You won't even get a general answer. Usually, it kind of goes in a circle, and then you walk away feeling pretty good about it but if you really break down that conversation you probably didn't get the answer that you are actually looking for because unless you get a commitment on when it's going to happen what are the next step that is going to happen that means it's not going to happen so you can definitely go through the november set november's mentoring call just to kind of refresh yourself on each person's role in the process to help you out a little bit now last

thing is that um i don't want you all to just you know get caught in waiting for that increment from your company because you know when you ask right and then you don't get a direct answer, it's very frustrating and also it's annoying. And it also makes you feel that you are not valued. So what I would recommend is immediately, given that you, you know, you've gotten good feedback, you've already done the performance view, you literally have like the latest achievements. So what I want you to do is actually directly

go to your LinkedIn profile and update it. This is to remind yourself that you have a lot of value that you can give. So this is actually very important from a mindset standpoint so that whether that conversation, you know, whether eventually you get the agreement or not, or you maybe have to wait for next year or something like that, you at least know that say, no, I know I've done a good job. And yeah, maybe if the company gives it to me, I can plan it around for next year. But I would like someone else to also see

that this is something that I have already achieved and I've added onto my experiences. I've added onto my skills and exposure and increase your value as well. So never just like too focused on only your company. Like I think it's an 80-20 thing. And particularly, you know, on LinkedIn, you don't have to like focus too much time on it,

but every time you have maybe a new certification or you are able to, you know, work on a new project or there's something that, you know, you're going above and beyond in your role, like you should try to reflect it in your profile. Usually December is the pretty good time to do that. Okay, so that's the three-step framework. Okay, so today is a bit more long-winded, but a lot of the stories that I've shared with you actually kind of came from my own personal

experiences as well. Like, for example, in the past, right, I was kind of doing a lot of like, you know, auditing and internal audit, external audit and stuff like that. So personally for me, I found that it's not a role that's very value adding. And my logic was like, there are hundreds and thousands of like auditors out there, right? And the biggest struggle for a lot of auditors

is that they will stay in the audit space because it's very difficult to do something else, right? Whether it's fear of mindset or whatever. So I find that like, I'm always in a position where there are thousands of competitors who have the exact same skill set as me.

So that didn't sound like something that made a lot of sense to me. So when I joined Visa, I specifically joined Visa because the payment space at that time in 2013, it was something very new. So I thought that, okay, this is something that I think

can grow in the future like from an industry standpoint. And more importantly, for this role, I got to travel to so many countries. So my coverage was Asia Pacific, Middle East, Central Europe, and Africa. And I could travel to like more than 20 countries with this job alone. So I thought this could be a differentiation factor for me. And on top of that, I also had like other experiences aside from, experiences aside from just the audit and financial services industry. This is a very different industry where I could do procurement, contract review, anti-bribery, all these things that I felt that I would like to add on to MAPING's positioning point. So I actually thought about it quite a bit before I joined.

And when I joined Visa, everybody told me it was a stupid decision because that time, I remember 2013, like no FinTech, there's no FinTech. So a lot of people say it was really stupid. Like, why would you not stay in banking? Blah, blah, blah. But I actually did go through a very logical process on like how, how I could like build up my value and like make my profile even more valuable because I now have something that a lot of people actually don't have. So when I joined Stanchart, it was in a business advisory compliance role. So kind of like moving away from pure cost center

to something that is like closer to the business. And it was also very niche that the portfolio I worked on was a very new portfolio. It was very new. I could build new things and so forth. And I also had FaceTime with senior management. Initially, it was just with managers and then with senior managers.

And eventually, I also worked with business CEOs. So eventually, that was also how I managed to move into the revenue-making arm because one of the business CEOs liked me a lot. And eventually she asked me if I would like to move over with a promotion, of course. So like, think about how you can kind of like move forward, not just, you know, going up the career ladder, but continue to move forward in a role that can become way more valuable. So always continue to build your position.

Always ask yourself, what makes you different from other people with the same education background as you? What makes you different from other people who have the same kind of working experience than you? What more new stuff you can do or something maybe a bit different that in a room filled of like 200, in a room filled of like 100 people, you can say that, yeah, but I have this, they all don't have

this. Okay. Okay. Now this session seems to be intense, but you know, again, you know, all these, the six steps, plan your career so far of like one, two, three, four, you can find it in the job search bonus. And then five and six is usually something that we cover in the call course itself, the three-step framework, plus of course, mentoring calls like these. So we will have some time for some recap and live Q&As.