Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep42: Avoid getting stuck in your career. Do THIS.

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

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 avoid getting stuck in your career. Most of the people I talk to don't seem to have an idea of, you know, the outcome or where they want to be at in their career. And unfortunately, because of this lack of career planning, career strategy, whatever

that you want to call it, most people end up getting stuck. So they may end up in a job for longer than they would have or would like to. They may end up getting stuck in a position without any progression or a promotion. And basically ending up creating less and lesser value for themselves and for their employees as well. So this is becoming a very very common issue because currently I am working with a wide range of clients and this is a very common topic that I really hear across the board. So it's happening to the guys who have been working for a year, three years, five years, 10 years and even 20 years. And this is a concerning issue because in today's job market,

you want to make sure that you are adding the most value possible and you can really only do that by having a career plan or career strategy. Otherwise, you may end up getting stuck in your career at this time where options to move on or progress may become more and more limited. So what's the first thing you need to do to avoid getting stuck to begin with? Number one, self-awareness. Self-awareness is really, really critical because if you are not even aware or can't even identify the signs when you are stuck, then you will not be able to take any action at all because it hasn't come to your realization that you are pretty much in this stuck situation. So I would advise everyone, and if you're listening to this right now,

really ask yourself, are you still learning anything in this kind of role? Have you made any better stakeholder relationships, stakeholder connections this year as compared to when you first joined? What's anything new that you have learned? What are some of the things that you actually stood up and said, okay, you know, I can take on this, let me volunteer. Anything like that at all? If no, you want to start thinking of your next career move or even

the career strategy if you maybe intend to stay in this current role. So there's no issue of staying in the current role as long as you know if there are any specific skill sets and lessons or certain experiences that you still want to gather, right? So there's absolutely no problem with that. But not knowing is the problem. Like I said, if you don't know, if you can't identify a problem, then there will be no solution. I mean, how can there be a solution

when you have not even identified the problem to begin with? So always have self-awareness and self-reflection as well. A good juncture to do a self-reflection is every three to six months and if not, doing the annual performance review when you're having a conversation with your boss, your team leader or mentor and getting some feedback around how well you have done and what other areas of growth that you can look into in the next 6 to 12 months? So this will give you a very good indicator as to the areas that you can still develop. And also if there's any space for you to continue to progress in this specific role, or maybe in this specific company, or even maybe within the industry as well.

So many, many points to consider. So as I was saying, I have recently been working with quite a huge range of clients and I would say that in terms of getting stuck, there are essentially three categories. Number one, you may be a fresh graduate or someone who is just looking to transition in general and you feel stuck in decision making. So that's how to pick the right job. Is this the right one for me? Does it help me to progress? So these are some of the common questions that I would normally discuss and kind of go through with my clients and I encourage you to also think through these questions and try to answer it for yourself to

see whether if that's clear enough that may help in your decision making in terms of picking your next role the second one is basically the guys who are very ambitious so these these of my clients they are high performance they know what they want to get out of their job and they are continuously investing time energy and sometimes financially to work with a coach like me to upgrade their skill set so that they are ready time to practice, to build a very strong foundation for the skill set that they need for the next level. So the biggest problem most people face is that they get to a certain level, be it a promotion or so forth, they get there and then they realize, oh, I can't actually do this job because it's too difficult. I never picked up the skills. And that's when they struggle because now at that point,

they need to deliver their expectations, basic deliverables, at the same time carving out time out of their schedule to then start practicing their skills that ideally they should have done before they have taken up the role. So these are ambitious people. They know where they want to get to. So what I work with them is mainly like harnessing and sharpening their skill, mastering certain skill set that allows them to navigate a very complex workplace, be it team

skills, leadership, stakeholder management, and so forth. And there is this last group as well. And this last group I would say is really the biggest issue i see amongst clients that i work with is the guys who are already stuck so like i said right these things if you can avoid it do take proactive actions to to really plan out your career plan out the learnings that you have so this group of clients that i work with are already stuck some of them are with you know around five years in their career, some 10, some 20 and quite a few of them chose a kind of transition to a role that was not suitable for them and then they had to transition back or then rethink, restart and so forth. Some of them, they spent too much time in a certain company doing the same job for basically five to ten

years and right now they want to do something else and they're really finding it impossible. So these are some of the common challenges. What I would say is that it's not impossible to transition, but it's definitely more challenging. So for these clients, I mainly work with them in terms of positioning their values and experiences in a way that their next employer still find them of value right and there's something for them to offer even though they've been in certain roles for many many years there were also clients that i worked with that has been in companies for 20 years and now certain industries are not doing well in this current economy and they have to transition.

So it is very challenging, not just the repositioning, right? But I think for the client's mindset as well, to make sure that they have a continuous growth mindset, I think that is really critical. So the challenge I want to leave for you is really ask yourself, know where are you at in your career right what skills have you picked up what skills can you still pick up in this role and if there are any opportunities for you to maybe take up leadership roles manager roles and really continue to grow in in that sense like is there still a pathway for you to progress because you can pick up all the skills that you want but if there is no space in the company or no space in the team then then it's

almost an impossible task or at least for the next couple of years so these are things that you want to make sure that you are clear right at the onset before dumping in all your energy to deliver value. So these are some of the quick tips and hopefully the perspective helps because I'm seeing it happen to a lot of people and I hope that more of you guys who are listening do take note of this and if you can, avoid it because trying to fix it definitely is way more challenging than proactively avoiding this situation from happening to you. So here's a word of encouragement. If you don't plan, then basically you're planning to fail, right? And this is very cliche. I'm sure everybody has heard it.

But sometimes we don't let it really resonate and ask ourselves, if you don't take action and you don't start thinking about these things then will getting stuck in the career in in the career happen to you and do you really want to spend the next 20 30 years doing the current current job that you're doing right now so that's really food for thought and i hope you take some time to really let it sink in, right? And hopefully that helps in your next decision, whether it's choosing a new career or, you know, staying on and progressing in your current career. So I wish everybody listening to this a massive, massive good luck. And if I can help you in any way to position your career strategy or achieve more career

growth online or offline, feel free to reach out. I'm available across various social medias and I look forward to connecting with you. Till then, good luck, all the best. And I wish you guys, yeah, massive all the best in your career. Cheers.