Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep173: How to apply for a manager level job. Group Mentoring Pt.4

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

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Hey, welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, the best place for you to learn how to become a more valuable 9-to-5 professional. Now, if you have been following the podcast for the past couple of weeks, you would have known that I share behind-the-scenes recording of the actual specific career guidance that I give students in my program who are 9-to-5 professionals just like you to get clear, get confident, and get visible in their corporate careers. So if you haven't checked out any of those yet, make sure that you do that. Now for today's last part of the series, I want to share with you the bonus lessons that I actually include in the Corporate Survivor SA program and that is the 30-day job

search strategy. Now I am super realistic and I know no matter how happy you are in your current job, at some point you might be looking out for new opportunities. And that's why the 30-day job search bonus lessons are bonuses that I decided to include as part of the core program so that you can always refer to these lessons

as and when you think that, okay, maybe this is the time to look out for new career opportunities. So for this particular behind-the-scenes snippet, I share with you one of the challenges that my students face in branding and positioning himself for a much more senior role. And I think this is really a challenge that a lot of job seekers face and that's why they find it difficult to land any new career opportunities.

So hopefully, I'll give you a bit more perspective on what actually hiring managers care about and some of the additional things that you can do to better market, brand and sell yourself as the best candidate. Without further ado, let's dive in. And as usual, if you want to learn more about the Corporate Survivor SA program, then you can always check out www.mayping.com. Let's go. Okay, so now let's move on to the next section. For the next section, we're actually going to talk about the career journey as well as some job search questions so this is one question which i thought was quite interesting so let's look at it together so the student is saying i'm a finance manager at an mnc with nine years of experience want to become the cfo or ceo of an mnc in the future

right now my company is paying me well but if if I want to become a CFO CEO, I need to move to another company and up the salary, maybe 15K. I've applied to senior manager jobs, but only got manager, lower pay than my current pay. Hesha said, my profile is not strong enough and I'm only 30.

I want to get your advice on should I try to gather different experience so I can become CFO CEO. Okay, now this is actually a multi-dimension job search question. So I'm going to kind of break down the assumptions and mistakes, then we'll talk about the strategy next. Now the first thing is actually identifying a very clear career goal. So finance manager, naive or experienced, I want to be a CFO, CEO in an MNC. Okay. Now the next part is saying that if

I want to become the CFO, CFO, I need to move to another company. Okay. I think that that may be an assumption because why I say that is because if you're already working at an MNC right now, that means that you may have the brand recognition already. So maybe you might want to also look into

what are some of the internal opportunities are available. Because if you think about it, you're already in the MNC right now and your goal is the MNC. So having like MNC on your career profile, on your resume is still a positive thing. So I think the first assumption is to not think that you definitely have to move.

And I want to up my salary. Okay, so salary is another dimension to this. So I guess because of the salary, the student has applied for senior manager roles, but has only gotten a manager position. So again, right, if you apply for a senior role, but you only got like one rank lower than you, most of the time, it means that your value positioning, it doesn't commensurate

the next level. So it means that the value, your value positioning or your career summary in your resume or the way that you're articulating that to people during interviews and whatever not, you still sound like you're only like fit for manager role, right? So that's actually validated by what HR has said. So HR said my profile is not strong enough. Yeah, that's actually validated by what H.R. has said. So H.R. said my profile is not strong enough. Yeah, that's because you probably are not writing your career summary strong enough for a senior manager or you may come across maybe a bit more junior. Then obviously sometimes H.R. may take the age against you.

So we may want to be very careful on like, maybe I won't say my years of experience if I think it's going to go against me. Then one thing to be careful of is the question on should I try to gather different experiences so I can become CO or CFO. Now the question around finding new different experiences may be a double-edged sword. The reason is because if you're already on the right trajectory upward, right, in a like, I don't know, finance and accounting area,

then suddenly you pause. After nine years of experience, you go and do something completely different that doesn't utilize your skill set. That one, definitely, you're going to take a pay cut. And eventually, that may not actually help you kind of like move to the next level. So, I think it's okay to consider

what you may be missing in your skill set, but I think it's an 80-20 situation. It's actually better in your current job, you try to find out what other things, other skills that you can learn and go and go to your boss and say, hey boss, for this development plan, I would also like to do some, you know, presentation to the C-Street because this is a skill that, you know, I would like to develop this some, you know, presentation to the C-Street because this is a skill that, you know, I would like to develop this year. So, will there be any opportunity for me to do that? It is better to quit your job and then you go and join a consulting company just because you want to do presentations for senior management. Like, you see when I'm coming here, like, it's

like we're achieving the same goal, but the path, one is actually kind of like, if you go by the, you know, ask for new opportunities path in your current job or in a new job, but kind of in a similar area, it's kind of like an add-on to your skill set. But if you quit and move into a completely different industry, completely different job, actually you're kind of starting from starting fresh, if you know what I'm saying. So I think the biggest problem here, it sounds to me, is clarity. So here's some suggestions of what I think this student can do.

So the first thing is, I think this student needs to go and look into the job search module, week one, career interest and direction, because it sounds to me that this student is more focused on the title and the salary, but not really the domain of expertise. Because if you only go for the title and salary, but you don't have the right skill set,

or rather you're applying for the wrong jobs, just because the job is senior manager title, and potentially you think can offer 15k, but if you don't have the right skills, you're not going to get hired anyway. And then you'll get comments such as this, you know, your profile is not good enough, there are other candidates better than you.

So what you need to do instead is actually evaluate the overall career interest and direction. So if your main goal is to become CFO, you may want to go and open up, look into what skills do CFO actually have. Like people who have made it to CFO and I have clients and students

who are CFOs in companies. Look, I will actually go to LinkedIn and research have, like people who have made it to CFO and I have clients and students who are CFOs in companies. Look, I will actually go to LinkedIn and research some of these people's backgrounds and see what kind of actual experiences do they have. And I can tell you most of the times, right, they are actually experts in one or two domains,

one, two, maybe three domains, but they don't go around into like five different jobs and like five different random things to get to CFO. It doesn't really happen. So it's actually better to identify

your strong skill set and then move on. Now, like I said, there are a lot of variables involved. So for those of you who feel like you are a bit lost

in your job search, I think you can give it a try for maybe one, one and a half months. But if you still feel like you're still lost, you don't know what jobs

to apply, what's going on, I highly recommend you book your one-on-one career strategy call with me. So I can actually help you break it down a little bit more because I think for a lot of students, they tend to, for some reason, I don't know why you guys are like

saving this strategy call for like six months and then experiencing the pain. The part of the corporate survivor is for me to like help you guys avoid the obstacles, not, you know, you guys go through a lot of obstacles

and then like speak to me right at the end so if you ever use your career strategy call then make sure that you book that and then we can talk about it a little bit more but the other thing that it sounds to me is that if you're getting feedback such as like your profile is not strong enough and so forth then you really want to re-look at the resume writing module and really look into your career summary because most people's career summary are actually really bad and and i will tell you that nine years of experience if you cannot get a senior manager role it's possible you can get a senior manager because i have actually clients who have who are in senior manager who are senior managers with less than nine years of experience so i think that it sounds to me your career summary is not

very good so you may want to look into whether sounds to me, your career summary is not very good. So you may want to look into whether if you just read the career summary, do you sound like a person that's deserving of a senior manager role? So whatever I say right now may sound a little bit abstract, but what you can do is that you can actually go through the group mentoring call for November 2022,

the salary negotiation workshop. So in that workshop, I actually did share a very practical example of one of my clients resume, who was already a senior manager, but didn't manage to get even any senior manager jobs. In fact, she got discounted for manager roles. And the biggest problem was actually her career summary. So you can go through this lesson itself, because this will, the salary negotiation workshop is where I go through step by step on pure value positioning

to make sure you don't get underpaid. So you can actually kind of like go through this one to see whether, if you're also making some of the mistakes as well. So of course, you know, if you don't get all these right,

then your interview is not going to go well, blah, blah, blah, and stuff like that. So I would say this is kind of like the starting point. Then once you kind of get these right, then you can practice your interview skills and so forth. So I think that's to me the root cause problem. Okay. Okay. Now we are very intense session and I want to spend a bit of time to hear from you and maybe just a quick commitment about your next 30 days. So,

you know, again, you know, all these, the six steps, plan your career. So far, 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 course itself, the three-step framework, plus of course, mentoring calls like these.