Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep44: Education vs experience? How to DECIDE.

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 which is better, education or experience. So recently, I've been working with quite a number of people. Some of them are students who are fresh graduates. Some of them who are students who are pursuing their MBA, looking for better career opportunities.

Starting point is 00:00:56 There are also some of those between their 30s and 40s who are looking for a career transition and have taken up a specialist course and so forth. So the natural question that I got asked quite a bit is what kind of certification, qualification, program or degree that I should take if I want to get into this area, right? And I think, you know, me being in Asia, it's even a much more common thing. And one thing I did observe is people, whenever people are looking for a career change, the very initial question that they ask is, can I take a qualification? Can a paper qualification give me higher chances? Right. So in today's podcast, I will answer, I'll share with you my opinions and I'll also share with you what I have done for myself. Right. So hopefully this gives you a little bit more perspective on the need and ultimately it is up to you to determine what is the best for your career.

Starting point is 00:02:12 So when someone asks me, do I need to take an additional qualification? It really depends on where are you at in your career journey. So never, never forget that experience is really the real teacher. A paper qualification can only teach you as much, but it's the ultimate experience that allows you to show real value at work. So qualification may get you in the door, but experience keeps you there and allows you to thrive. So I think it's really important to get a balance between both. So if students come to me and say, hey, do you think I should pursue education before I start working?

Starting point is 00:02:53 Well, if you have the financial means to do so and you really enjoy the subject and you are okay to take a few years backseat while your fellow peers are out there working. I'd say go for it. But make sure you are very clear what is the return on investment, what is the cost that basically you are giving up to spend a few more years studying and not accumulating that real-life experience. However, the other day I also got one question from one of my LinkedIn connections. He said, okay, I started working in a small company, but I got a bit of a scholarship to pursue a professional qualification. Should I just give up my job? So what I told him is very

Starting point is 00:03:38 simple, right? There are clearly some qualifications that are really important, like the one that he shared with me, but he can also do it part time. He can also do it part time. Yes, it may be taxing, but it's really up to you to determine what's important. Right. And actually create time for that. But if you are one of those who are thinking of giving up a job directly to study, whenever the study opportunity arises, I want you to think long and hard again.

Starting point is 00:04:09 So right now, the economy is not doing great. To get a job, it's not easy. So to give up a job, again, to go back into university, I think you really need to think about what the economy would potentially look like when you finally graduate or finally finish that professional qualification right and interestingly for the ones who are more experienced meaning people who have already been working in their late 20s 30s and 40s and even 50s

Starting point is 00:04:38 i also see this very similar pattern so they will rush to take a qualification however when i have a conversation with them most of the time through my career coaching session what i notice is that they have no clue about their strengths and weaknesses no clue at all what they have done well couldn't articulate their achievements to me they are totally not sure at all so if you have worked for 10 20 or 30 years but you have no idea what value do you bring to your organization, what makes you think that taking one additional cert will allow you to easily transition to another area of business and allow you to transition

Starting point is 00:05:17 that successfully and be like you want to hire you. Because the proof is really in the pudding. You must be able to get clear on your strengths and weaknesses, what you are good at, what allows you to be successful in your current role. I mean, we define success in many, many ways. But if you are able to be clear on, okay, these are some of the skills, my qualities and characteristics that allow me to do this job well and what are the ones that I can actually transition to the next role. I think we need to start from that because recently I really met quite a number of clients like this and it really worries me because they can invest a lot of money in a new qualification but I am not sure what success will look like for them. Because if you

Starting point is 00:06:06 don't have self-awareness, it is really, really difficult to predict future success because you can't reflect and project, right? I mean, if you guys are interested in episodes where I talk about self-awareness, you can check out the one right before this. I think it's episode 43 where I share a little bit more about how your personality affects your job but okay so now I want to share a little bit more about I mean for me education wise what's this experience so personally I have not taken an additional qualification once I graduated from my accountancy course. So as you guys know, in 08-09, I completed my ACCA, which is the Chartered Certified Accountant of the UK. So really, that was the last time I did any studies at all. I started working in an audit firm, collecting experiences necessary for me to get the accounting license. So I got my ACCA of the UK

Starting point is 00:07:08 as well as applied for the Chartered Accountant of Singapore both in 2013. I got that but that didn't really require much of a study. It was just pretty much working experiences, right? And since then, I've actually transitioned to many, many roles. I moved into an internal audit role without requiring a cert from the Certified Internal Auditors Association, which is a really, really popular cert for internal audit. Nonetheless, I still emerged top performer because I knew what I was doing and I had the exact skills to execute an audit efficiently, effectively, as well as managing across the three continents that I was pretty much in charge of.

Starting point is 00:07:52 Later on, I moved on to Standard Chartered Bank where I was in the compliance function. So when I was in the financial crime compliance, how I got the job was my working experience in EY before because I was auditing banks and so forth so when they when the headhunter the company HR came to me they said hey we really love your experience in EY and the visa experience where you were working so many offices that's really good we like that not once they asked me so are you an accountant do you have a degree in compliance you have this and that none None of that, right? But the experience needs to speak for itself

Starting point is 00:08:27 because I had the right experiences with the right companies, the right exposure. And more importantly, I had very good soft skills. I could speak really well, articulate really well, and so forth. Those are really, really important skills that they would want when you are dealing with internal stakeholders

Starting point is 00:08:44 or even with standard charters clients, and up to this point i have not gotten the um so if you're familiar with the financial crime compliance base you will you will know this qualification called which is for the anti-money laundering specialist course i have not taken that to date. And gradually I moved on to business management and business management, actually running a group of a team and teams that all had ACAMs, all had this qualification that I didn't have. Right. So why did I decide not to go for it? Had a conversation with my boss and he said that, you know what, you are already at the next level. There is no need for you to take this course because it's more basic, and what you need to work on and continue sharpening is your leadership abilities and so forth, like strategic thinking, those are the things that

Starting point is 00:09:34 will really help you to move forward, at least leveling up continuously to the next level. So qualification, education is only up to this, up to one point. So I've managed to transition across different, different areas in the finance, accounting and banking world without really requiring like the mandatory qualifications. But what people don't talk about and it's not easy to quantify is the soft skills. Because you can have, because I've worked with many, many people who had the right paper qualification, some of them are are MBA but they could not even talk to me they could even tell me

Starting point is 00:10:09 what they've done they don't report on time they they can't express themselves so all these are actually much bigger problems that you need to start resolving so the power of your personality the power of the soft skills are the ones that will bring you all the way. So before you jump into another paper qualification, I would highly encourage you to do an audit of yourself. And why I say audit is because I used to be an auditor. Do an audit on your strengths and weaknesses and the transferable skills that you can position yourself for the next role. So if you guys like more resources, check out other episodes in my podcast where I talk about self-awareness,

Starting point is 00:10:49 the top 10 soft skills, job versus personality, lots of lots of episodes there. So feel free to check that out. And if you feel like you are still blurry, everything is foggy, not sure what am I talking about, but you do want help, then reach out to me,

Starting point is 00:11:07 message me on LinkedIn and let me know how I can help you. Happy to chat further. So in the meantime, all the best and remember, remember to balance education and experience. So good luck guys. Cheers.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep44: Education vs experience? How to DECIDE.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.