Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep39: Creating content online. Should you?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. In today's podcast, I explore whether will creating content fuel or harm your corporate career. So this is a very interesting topic because of the rise of professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn. So in fact, nowadays, LinkedIn is way more popular for younger professionals to hang

Starting point is 00:00:52 out and even older professionals as well, right? So it's a wide spectrum of people networking on this platform, looking for opportunities. And with that, we also have service providers such as marketers, consultants, coaches, and other people who are looking to grow their business on such professional platforms. So with the mix of all these people from different kind of backgrounds, and obviously looking at one common thing and that is content on LinkedIn, for example. And because of the rise of content and of course you have the entrepreneurs such as coaches, consultants and service providers actively creating content,

Starting point is 00:01:42 it does create a little bit of a competition or in a sense, a lot of inspiration to the guys who are working in a corporate job. So is that you? So are you that person who is a professional, who having a corporate job like a nine to five, getting very, very inspired by all this content and sometimes pretty controversial content at that. And feeling like you have to also create content to get attention because that is what all those personal branding gurus are telling you. Right. So is that you? So if you are are you are that person right so the podcast today will definitely be very helpful for you because i will be talking about whether these such such content will actually feel as in propel your career forward or it will actually harm your career so coming

Starting point is 00:02:40 from someone who who has been an i've been a hiring manager when I was in Standard Chartered, I've interviewed many people, looked at many, many resumes. And let me tell you a big secret. When HR or even the hiring managers, before we make a decision to hire, because of the globalization era right now, a lot of us would go online and Google your name. Yes, we do Google your name and whatever comes out across the social media platforms, whether you think it's privacy or not, as long as it's on the public platform, it does affect the judgment and the perception that your future employer may have of you, right?

Starting point is 00:03:29 So we'll now talk about how this may harm your career first, right? So coming from this simple example, and it definitely has happened before, when I was hiring for one of the positions, we received quite a number of resumes and we shortlisted to about five candidates. My team interviewed all five candidates. And when the push comes to shove, right, before proceeding to the next round, my team did a Google on all the candidates. And guess what?

Starting point is 00:04:02 One of the candidates, he had left some sketching reviews on social media. It wasn't LinkedIn at that time. It was Facebook. A sketching review on a service provider, basically a rant about how he was cheated and it was unfair. And guess what's the surprise at the end, right? It ended up as a misunderstanding, right? So whatever the story was, anything that you put out there it is up for judgment

Starting point is 00:04:27 whether you like it or not that's reality and that's something i tell all my coaching clients so you want to be cautious of what you put out there and if you're wondering the end of that story for that candidate no we did not perceive the next level of interview because every single company, every team wants a team player. We don't want to lose canon. So, I mean, that's a very, very honest view coming to you from someone like me who has hired people from all over the world. I used to have teams in Singapore, India, Malaysia. I worked with people from 43 countries. So that's reality guys despite what the

Starting point is 00:05:06 other personal branding gurus are telling you so you want to be cautious of that not saying that you shouldn't but you want to be cautious of that and the other thing that a lot i see a lot of young professionals do and even older professionals as well is getting in this content competition of getting likes, right? All the likes, the comments, the fluffy stuff. So I just want to also be honest, if you want to create content that is interesting, most of the time it has to be controversial. So if something is controversial, clearly not everybody is going to like it. There will be, you know, someone that's going all for it really in love with what you say there will be also people who think completely differently and if you are looking to advance your career opportunities and look for more job offers and so forth then this this little

Starting point is 00:06:02 controversial content will become a liability and 100% it will become a liability. And 100% it will become a liability because we don't want to hire someone that we don't really know what's going to come out from his or her mouth after this. And we also don't want someone that eventually may not get along with their colleagues because they may want to stir up some controversy to get attention. Because you want to get attention online, that's fine. But what you want to be cautious of is how that is going to translate in the workplace.

Starting point is 00:06:33 You know, I always tell my clients, how you do one thing is how you do everything. It is going to be really difficult to split your online personality because you're trying to do personal branding online versus how you're actually going to behave at work because it's that same mentality that you know inspired you to to do a certain thing and to get involved in content like i said right which will harm your career so those are two really really big examples you know, something that you may want to really reflect on because this is a really worrying trend I'm seeing, especially for the guys who are not even in corporate yet. They are still students really creating a lot of controversial content because they have been following a lot of personal branding gurus.

Starting point is 00:07:19 Guys, these people are marketers. They are selling you personal branding. They are selling you these things because it advances their business a lot of them do not actually work in a proper corporate right and i this is really a worrying trend that i see a lot but obviously i cannot reach out to everyone so my advice to you guys is really like think through the purpose of you creating that content and not so much about how it's going to add value to other people. Think about whether it's going to help you. It's going to help you or it's going to harm you, right? That's the most important question. Okay, so now on the happier side, how will creating content fuel your career?

Starting point is 00:08:03 So the biggest point is this what kind of career do you have what kind of career do you have and and also where are you right now in your career so for example you're trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry right or you are somewhat related in the business side of things right so you could be in business development and so forth then yes definitely creating content drives a lot of attention to what you do and what your company can can do for them so these are really really helpful for people who are insurance who are in real estate so well i mean they may not be in a traditional nine-to-five but they are there is an element of their business where they have to get involved in sales and marketing. So I call these people solopreneurs.

Starting point is 00:08:53 So even they may be connected to a company, but it's really their own brand. And people buy because they know who they are and what they can do for them in terms of customer service. So these ones, you definitely want to have a content strategy so that, you know, like people say, out of sight, out of mind, right? So for sure, that's something that you guys want to think about. So the other thing is that you may be someone really senior as a C-suite or director looking for your next big role at a big company. So creating content and sharing your expertise via content online does help a lot because hiring at the senior level is just beyond the resumes about value and it's about results. So the more people can know about the expertise that you have, the views and your strategic views

Starting point is 00:09:39 and so forth, it does help. So for you guys who are in the c-suite or aspiring c-suites then i will highly recommend that you do get started with a content strategy regardless of how their content method would look like whether it's a post it's a video it's an article it's a sharing and so forth right so get started with that however again like i said if I said, if you are currently working, you know, pretty much 9 to 5, climbing the corporate ladder or pretty much just starting out, then you can still create content, definitely. However, you may want to limit the scope of your content. So you may want to share stuff that demonstrates your skills or your expertise or your experience and try to steer away from the controversial stuff because I don't think that's going to

Starting point is 00:10:29 help in the long run despite what the personal branding gurus are telling you. So really, really think about the real purpose of you sharing the content from your perspective, right? How it's going to impact you. Yes, it definitely is going to impact someone else and that's what all the gurus are telling you but i'm telling you to take a different perspective how is this going to impact you is it going to fuel your career or is it going to harm your career that's really the most important decision making that you need to make whether it's content whether you're creating content or you're engaging content because i have also seen people who

Starting point is 00:11:04 comment on other people's posts some of them are really really good comments like shows really good attitude shows that they have learned something then i think it demonstrates that person's character very positively but at the same time i also see people leaving very sketching reviews on other people's posts and that immediately throws me off and i asked i asked myself do i really want someone like that working in my team creating a bunch of controversy so so i'll end with this um because this is really a highly requested topic and i have seen too many people get getting caught in that trap so i'll leave with this that one question on whether

Starting point is 00:11:43 creating content will help or fuel your career, like think about it from your perspective. And recently, I have been launching live masterclasses on how to be your LinkedIn profile, as well as how to create content for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. So if you're interested to find out more, connect with me on LinkedIn, where I will publish all the upcoming events on my profile page. And aside from that, if you guys need one-on-one help, reach out to me also and happy to share more details. And all in all, I wish you guys good luck. And for my Got A Pink podcast, new episodes every Thursday.

Starting point is 00:12:19 So don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next week. Cheers. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep39: Creating content online. Should you?

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