Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep187: How my clients change careers successfully.

Episode Date: October 9, 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 ⚡

how to make a successful career change with me, Mei Ping. Sometimes when we want to make a career change, want to look for a job, it can feel very demotivating, it can feel very frustrating. So here's some inspiration for your next few months. So this is actually a client that I worked with since a very long time.

So she said, you know, extremely happy to have met you, get myself committed in a career growth journey with you. Can't wait to get you posted on my new role. So this is actually a client that I met in 2021. So when I met her in 2021, she was working in a SME and feeling a bit overwhelmed. So she told me that, you know,

maybe I want to work in a big company and I've really been to multiple interviews, but I find it very difficult to pass the interview. what do you think am i doing that i am doing wrong so that was how we met in 2021 so during the one-on-one call i told her to tell me right what were the questions that were asked and she also told me answers and i told her that okay no you don't answer like this because hiring managers don't like it so i helped her to restructure the answers and eventually she managed to join an mnc and it's a household brand if i say you know it so she did then after that right she focused on doing well at her job so she did really really

well at her job and eventually of course she still followed my linkedin advice making sure that she had a very good linkedin profile So eventually, she actually got the best of both worlds. So she got an internal promotion with a 20% salary increment. And at the same time, she was also headhunted on LinkedIn to join another MNC, another global brand with 39% salary increment. So sometimes it can come to a situation whereby you kind of get the best of both worlds. But the thing that you don't see is the path of self-improvement, the path of learning how to adapt, learning how to upskill, learning how to talk to people, learning how to present even though you are scared, like learning how to talk to someone who is more senior than you, learning how to, like, you know, recommend proposals or learning how to do report writing in a way that makes sense.

Like sometimes these things will take some time. So sometimes we see people, we see the success of the career change, we see the success of the new job, but you don't see the effort that the person put in. So for this particular client right now, she is in my career program, The Corporate Survivor, and she's also attending the monthly mentoring calls so the monthly mentoring calls are sessions that i run for students who are basically nine to five professionals like you and there's an opportunity for you to submit a question ask a question about your latest career situation to get my guidance and advice so this is something that we do every single month and for october it's going to be a special job search workshop.

So mainly focused on getting opportunities. So I just wanted to demonstrate to you that it's a journey. So, you know, if you're at this point that you feel that, oh, passing an interview is the biggest challenge, just want to show you that maybe sometimes what you're missing is just that little tweak. Then once you have the chance to join a new company, there's always a chance for you to do well and have success in the new company, right?

So don't give up, don't give up. Because as I said, this client I met in 2021, now we are already in 2023, moving to 2024, and she is still working with me just in a different capacity. In the past, we did a couple of one-on-one calls, and nowadays she's in the program, she's self-learning from the lessons,

and she's attending the monthly mentoring calls. different capacity but still focus on career development because career growth is is long term right okay let's move on to the next one okay so this um this is actually from a client who is a lawyer who wanted to move from a legal firm to MNC. And similar to my career journey as well, where at one point in my career, I wanted to move from an accounting consulting firm to MNC, to a corporate world, but I was really afraid and I didn't know how to do it. So this was actually the same situation

with this client who was a lawyer. So when she came to me, she has already applied for many, many, many jobs. She went for multiple interviews, but she found it very difficult to even get a job offer. So the problem that we diagnosed together was the fact that she was very good at her job, but she couldn't really explain it or articulate about her good job. So yes, her resume has the legal qualifications and stuff like that, and it's kind of fake, but she didn't feel yes right her resume has like the the legal qualifications and stuff like that and she is kind of fake but she didn't feel confident in her resume and therefore when she

went for the interview she always failed because she felt very she felt very nervous right conveying what she could do and she also didn't know how to convey in a very structured way so anyway these are actually skills that can be learned so after that she managed to get the job then this was actually the message that she sent to me um starting her new job so this is uh still the first few weeks of her new job so she successfully moved to a bank um in um avp position so she said i just want to say a big thank you to you again i reflected on my career journey and realized it was actually pretty unpleasant but the usual culture of that field her legal field as compared to the current one i feel so

blessed grateful to have met you when i was lost and not sure what to do at that time no one was there was no one else around to provide any useful advice and she came over my podcast and yep still new at this job but i feel so. Continue to improve to allow me to pass the probation successfully and a big thank you to you. So here's what I want to show you in the sense of whatever transition that you're making, whatever career change and career move that you're making, there'll always be challenges. But it's more important to look ahead or whether the change is worth it. If it's worth it, then you invest your time, effort, and energy to make it happen.

Like this client, when she first joined my program, she's already spent months applying and spending all her time attending interviews but couldn't pass any of the interviews. So eventually, we joined the program, we did our strategy call together and she got the job really quickly.

So that's a lot of, I would say say time and mental energy saved then she could then refocus her energy on really starting the new job to the best of her abilities and she's actually now doing really well in her job it's been almost a year already so she's doing really really well so sometimes it's kind of like starts with the courage of like getting the right advice and learning the right things so you can implement that as well so sometimes overthinking doesn't really help because as she said here right she's been like trying to ask people around what to do but no one was able to give her the good advice

and therefore she eventually started doubting herself so that's the thing that like we will quickly want to like move out of it okay next one so this is actually from a client who was on a career break after working for two years so this is a situation of like starting a job after graduation two jobs and not knowing how the corporate world works so this client quit both jobs after working about one and a half years each so about total about two years of experience she quit both jobs due to the same problem which is the fact that she was lost and she felt that she couldn't handle the job and she quit if you are not successful in a certain new job or a career change we really want to reflect as to like what

am i not doing correctly because to quit a different job due to similar reasons that is a red flag that's like you need to do something you need to do something because there may be something that you're not seeing it's like a blind spot you're lost in some way but you can't quite pinpoint what's the problem right so that's something that you really want to do so um so for this client she joined the program and she used the job search lessons remember i said my job selection is called the 30-day job search lessons so she actually found a job in 30 days and the biggest change is that is what she told me right she said you know thank you you know i came to you when i was completely lost grateful that you were there to guide me to my career path and i really thought the one-on-one call would solve my problems but it's just a band-aid solution the core problem i had was addressed in your course

and i managed to rectify it and improve myself from that your justice program really helped me a lot i didn't expect to get results so fast your course honestly best investment i made in myself can't thank you enough how good is the course will continue to watching the videos and progress well in my career so to me right this this client shows you and you know shows me as well that once you have the right insights the change can happen very quickly you know for this client right she was on a career break for about one and a half years and every day in the career break is not getting better because she still lacked clarity she's still lost so the longer the career break continued the the more lost she felt and now she's feeling more anxiety because can you imagine your parents are like nagging you to go and get a job at the same time you feel lost and frustrated so that was

actually the situation where she was in and when she approached me she really wanted to just do the one-on-one call and i explained to her and say that okay let's let's kind of like revisit actually what went wrong with the job because if you have quit two jobs due to the same reason then there might be something that you're not seeing. And since you're a young professional and it happens to 90% of young professionals is because you don't understand

the corporate world. So I actually recommended her to sign up for the course instead which actually helps her go through this step by step. So after she went through all this, she's like, okay, now I know what's the problem.

It's because I didn't do A, B, C, D, E correctly and that's why I'm struggling with this, B, C, D, E correctly. And that's why I'm struggling with this. So once she saw that, then when she jumped into the job search program, she was very clear on what she wanted. And she also made an industry change. And in the new role that she got,

even though she has been on a career break for one and a half years, right, she actually got a 40% salary increment. So it's still possible to make a career change, to still get salary increment even though you have been on a career break for some time.

But how you do it is so important. Okay? So I'll just share the last one with you. So this was actually a client. She's a pharmacist

and when she first connected with me, she didn't really understand LinkedIn. So she asked me, she said, Miping, are you sure LinkedIn

can really help me to get the next job opportunity because Because I don't really know how to use it, right? Then I told her, just because you don't know how to use something, that doesn't mean it's not useful. So we need to really make sure that you're setting up your profile correctly and you can attract opportunities and so forth. So that's exactly what she did. So she sent me a message, it was a couple of months ago. She said, I followed through your Corporate Survivor course, I made changes to my LinkedIn profile and I got headhunted. They found me through my LinkedIn profile. So changing into a different industry with a 30% pay rise. Now this is from someone who, when she first came to me, she's like, Miping, I don't understand this whole LinkedIn thing. How does it work?

And, you know, a lot of my friends are on it and they don't know how to get opportunities and I'm still not sure like what to do with it. So I said, okay, what I want you to do is

you can join the program and I would like you to get started with the job search lessons and pay a specific focus on the exact step-by-step I teach on revamping and optimizing your LinkedIn

profile. Because what I teach are things that I have done and up to today, I'm still getting opportunities as well. So on October 14, I'm actually going to run a two-hour job search workshop for all students in my program. And what I have told everyone is to actually make sure that if you're joining the job search workshop, to make sure that you spend some time looking through the Corporate Survivors Job Search bonus lessons. So in here, there are 20 lessons in there around career interest and direction, like revamping resume to highlight achievements, which is everything I talked about just now,

then how to utilize your LinkedIn, job search strategy, interview skills, I would actually highly encourage you to go through this entire job search bonus lessons that are already in the program. So if you're my client and you plan to join the workshop that we're going to do on October 14, please make sure that you spend some time to review some of these lessons first. Because sometimes when we are so into the job search process, it's very hard to see maybe certain areas that we are missing. So I highly encourage to like go through the lessons again just to see whether are there any gaps right that we kind of like forgotten or got distracted or maybe it was a bit of an oversight during the application process that you can still improve because for this job search lessons actually it's lifetime access so that means that like the moment you join you you have this module for the rest of time um it's also online you can access it 24 7 and you can refer to the lessons

as you need so i will highly encourage you to do that so when so that when you come to the um the workshop on the 14th um that's going to be october the 14th then we can really tackle some of the core challenges and some of like the myths around job search and i can definitely share with you more details around like how hiring managers are looking at your situation and share a bit of that because i have hired people from like fresh graduate all the way to director level when i was at standard charter and definitely the way that like hiring managers are looking at certain things um it's not really like general knowledge i think i think a lot of advice that you get out there are just things that you know recruiters say or hr say which are still important

but at the same time they are not the final person who will be signing the job offer right they are not the one who's like going to give you the job they're just like an administrative facilitator right to pass your resume to the hiring manager so the hiring manager is like the head of department the senior manager or the director who is um doing who's actually like hiring for their team right so this is like part of like uh resource and budget so that was something that um i did when i was in standard charter so actually kind of like looking at the overall team the requirements and then and then you know hr is just like um the party that you know helps me to to do the job posting like on behalf of the team and on behalf of the company to to get the talents to apply so like you really want to make sure that like you are thinking it through and really trying to

understand like what higher managers are looking for and that's something that i do share in detail so if you're already a client in my career program i highly recommend you revisit the job search bonus lessons. There are literally 20 lessons in there and you can go into the specific section that you need. So for example, if you feel that there is some issues around your value positioning, so maybe the way that you articulate your value is not clear and that's why you're not getting interesting roles, then make sure that you go through the week one to make sure that whether the areas that you are looking at, is it precise enough? And then make sure you also go through week two

to see whether the way that you're selling your value in your resume, is it clear or is it all over the place? Because just because we write something in our resume, it doesn't mean it's good enough, right? You want to be very precise about it. So definitely these two lessons I would recommend. Then if you're struggling during the interview phase, then definitely look into week four.

So the way that I teach how to answer interview questions are exactly what a hiring manager wants to hear. So when I was interviewing for my department and my team in the past as a senior director and head of department, these are the answers that I really want to hear, at least structured in this way. So I highly encourage you to go into like week four

to reflect on the way that you're answering questions because we have so many lessons in there and these are like the common questions and I definitely share some insights as well. So I hope that you can take some of the lessons

that I've shared with you in terms of like making career decisions, taking long term around your career path and really following the steps on seeking out new opportunities and learning how to better adapt and perform and become successful and with any job change right so any role any job any industry any boss for any company is you want to make sure that you increase your chance for success at every single role