Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep41: How to identify your skills gap. It's a PROBLEM.

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 want to talk about how to identify your skills gap and more importantly, how to actually fix it. So skills is something that I am highly passionate about because from an early stage,

Starting point is 00:00:49 I realized that I could do so much more and I could go so much faster if I could just identify what I'm lacking. So when we hear people saying that they are very stressed out, right, they can't do their job well, they are unhappy. And basically, the major root cause of stress is really feeling lack of control, right? And, you know, after working with so many people across 43 countries, I've also traveled personally across 37 countries. I have learned something really important. And that is the major cause of stress is just feeling a lack of control and the lack of skills. So it's not about, you know, getting motivation, rah, rah. I mean, I guess that helps sometimes, right, to get encouragement get inspiration but we can't constantly be seeking

Starting point is 00:01:46 motivation and inspiration from other people because that that's just not realistic and you know the best motivation really comes from within the best confidence comes from within right and how can you how can you get that kind of motivation? A lot of time after working with many clients and also discovering it myself, it's really leveling up your skills so that you naturally develop that confidence of being able to execute better, being able to do a better job. Then that continues to build on that confidence and that continue to help and like snowball in a very positive way so more more interestingly is how do we even first identify the skills that we need because you know i've seen a lot of job seekers in particular and as well as younger

Starting point is 00:02:38 professionals i think you know getting very interested in learning and learning is a good thing and nowadays you know learning is a massive business in itself right lots of learning courses you know trainings webinars blah blah blah and i mean to be honest i also run master classes so i understand that people are really interested but i think what i am more interested in is, are you actually learning something about yourself after attending all these courses? Right. And how are you actually putting them into place? And I've spoken to many participants of after my sessions, as well as, you know, people who are just like what I call course junkies. Right. They are webinar junkies who attend like so many of them. And I found that a large number of them find it very hard to articulate to me

Starting point is 00:03:31 what were the skills gap that they managed to identify to begin with and therefore attended those webinars to try to learn something, to fix or level up that gap that they have. So a lot of times like they attend because, you know, it's fun, right? People tell you that learning is good. And don't get me wrong, learning is good. But learning for the sake of learning is not good, right? You need to first know what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are your challenges that you're trying to solve before spending time and effort attending a class. So today, it's about how to identify your skills gap. So a couple of tips here, right? Number one, you should get a sense

Starting point is 00:04:18 of what your personality is. So one of the really popular free personal tests that I would recommend is called the 16 personalities. So it's the Myers-Briggs by Carl Jung. So you can find a free test in, I think the website called 16personalities.com is free. So it basically analyzes your character or your personality across four dimensions. And that's something that gives you a natural clue into your natural strengths and weaknesses just based on your personality and character. So if you were to do nothing, this is just naturally that's pretty much going to happen. So I do have a podcast episode talking about my ping method, the first P that's personality if you want

Starting point is 00:05:05 to check that out for more details you can do that after this episode so first taking that personality test because most of the time we are we can point out other people's problems but most of the time we can't really see our own problems so the best thing thing I always recommend is that just to take a test for it to be objective and for you to have also a more objective view when looking at some of those points and really asking yourself, okay, is this true, right? So after taking the test, right, identify some of your skills gap based on your natural character. So this is like based on natural personality, right? Ask yourself, is this is like based on natural personality, right? Ask yourself, is this true?

Starting point is 00:05:48 And to what extent is true? And try to think of like examples in your life or your career where some of these problems had occurred or had actually occurred, right? So I'll give you an example. So an introvert naturally finds it more difficult to express themselves. So I have clients also telling me that, you know, they find it very difficult to express themselves. So I have clients also telling me that, you know, they find it very hard to explain their work to their bosses, they feel afraid to speak at meetings. So these are problems that is sort of inherent to your personality, but doesn't mean that it cannot be fixed, right? You can identify that as a skill. So the skill gap that's there,

Starting point is 00:06:26 it's communication skills that needs to be leveled up. So that's a kind of a very quick tip, but definitely very effective one that I've used for myself. The other thing is, after taking this little skill set, you need to really sit down and spend time to reflect. Because what's missing in the world nowadays is time for reflect. We are so caught up in the do-do-do that we don't really spend time asking ourselves, okay, now that I've done this, what went well? What went wrong? And even when you identify what went well and what didn't go so well,

Starting point is 00:07:02 go one step further and ask yourself, were there any skills that I'm lacking that would allow me to do better next time, right? So don't take, you know, failure as just general failure, but how can you learn from this, right? And most of the time, honestly, it's really down to some skills that you don't have. You know, people tend to ask me, you know, how do you move up the corporate ladder so quickly? I spent 11 years in the corporate world. I started during the recession in 2009. I got a job at a very, very small company and gradually, I would say that with proper strategy of wanting to grow my career, as well as taking every opportunity possible to level up my skills. Some not really by want, some because the situation just happened and I had to

Starting point is 00:07:53 deal with it. And I just, you know, picked up the skill and just went on with it. Right. So if you're interested to learn a bit more about my career journey, you can check out my podcast episode 30. And I have a five-day series talking about every single job that I've done in the past 11 years. You can check that out in my podcast later on if you're interested. But what I'm just saying is this, by identifying a gap, a skills gap, it tells you one good thing. And that is, it can be fixed. You can learn. Because if you're saying that oh you know i'm just really bad at this right it's natural you know i'm naturally bad at this that you're

Starting point is 00:08:29 stopping yourself from i guess giving the opportunity for yourself to make an effort to make it better so by by identifying it as a skills gap it just means that you know by with the right techniques with the right tools, you can improve. And that's something that I work with a lot of my clients nowadays, mostly one-on-one, but hopefully in the future through group trainings as well. Because I think a lot, really self-awareness is the key, right? If you don't have self-awareness, you can't sit down, reflect and ask yourself, why, what am I not good at right and what do i need to do or have i've tried this but not happens like just not being able to really reflect think about

Starting point is 00:09:14 it it just shows like a lot of lack of self-awareness so um like i said um self-awareness is your real superpowers you might want to spend some time developing that. One other tip, if you really have no clue, totally no clue about your skills gap, is to ask your friends. So ask some of your friends, your colleagues, right? Maybe your bosses, team members. You can just ask, okay, I'm just getting some feedback from myself. I just wanted to know in which areas do you think I can do better at so that's a very good question which area can i do better at and listen to what they have to say and please don't get defensive right just listen

Starting point is 00:09:56 um the best is you even write it down so that there's it will look more objective than just listening and get getting agitated because nobody likes to be told what we're not good at. And that I completely understand. But getting a different perspective definitely helps. You know, there were also times that my bosses told me that I needed to develop some skills that I didn't realize that I needed. But those were really, really valuable tips for me. And even for them giving me some tips on how I should do things instead and really

Starting point is 00:10:26 opening my thoughts and opening my perspective to something else. So that's always really, really valuable. Okay, so the key message here is this, right? If you can't identify what your gaps are, then you will not be able to go through and take the relevant learning or practice that will make it better, right? So always start by reflecting, right? Take on some of the tips that I shared and put down a list of what you're not so good at, right? If you still have no clue what I'm talking about go to my website www.gotapeng.com go to the live 75 masterclass piece and in there you will see the 12 skills

Starting point is 00:11:13 the 12 skills that is really the baseline that's needed for corporate success I want you to rate yourself from 1 to 10 and then we'll go from there and then look at the ones that you rate the lowest. So if you want to have a listen on it, you can check out my podcast episode 1 to 11. And just based on listening to the episode,

Starting point is 00:11:36 again, rate yourself from 1 to 10 and see how you go. So I hope this episode helps. And if you have not connected yet please do connect with me and if I can be of any help to help you level up or even identify your skills gap to begin with feel free to reach out we love working with you all right take care and I'll see you I'll see you next time

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep41: How to identify your skills gap. It's a PROBLEM.

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