Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep69: Get visible at work and landed a full-time position.

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. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of my Got A Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you want to grow your corporate career. So we are in my 30-day client success story series

Starting point is 00:00:42 where I'll be sharing with you guys 20 client successes that clients have worked with me over the past year and the achievements and really the change that they have been really able to make in their career since working together so i hope that these stories can inspire you and will empower you to really start thinking about your career in the long term and also to understand that no matter what problems that you're facing in your career right now there is a solution and you can definitely overcome it because if my clients can overcome them then I'm sure that you can overcome them and achieve the professional goals that you have set for yourself all right so today I want to share with you a client who, one of my clients who worked with me

Starting point is 00:01:30 to achieve a conversion from a temporary contract staff to a permanent staff. So this is to me quite a big achievement for him because as we know with the pandemic, a lot of roles, I guess a lot of positions, there is a growing trend, I think, particularly where my client is currently based. He is in Singapore working in the financial services and banking industry. And one of the things that banks like to do during economic or financial crisis or pandemic is they like to offer contract staff right they like to hire contract staff instead of hiring a permanent staff it's actually quite common in the industry and when my client first

Starting point is 00:02:18 came to me he did wanted to work on career growth and what does it mean for him because he has been in the financial services industry for about five years and it has been quite a challenge for him to get any full-time jobs. And in fact, it has affected his career a little bit because every time he goes for an interview, then the hiring managers tend to ask okay why are you constantly on contract and is there any particular reason why you didn't get the conversion so that is actually quite an uncomfortable question to answer even though it's really not his fault that you know most banks are not exactly hiring i guess full-time positions based based on his specialization right so when he came to me he

Starting point is 00:03:07 said um right now i am in a contract role in this bank and i do like the role i think that you know there are a lot of opportunities that i can learn from it however the only pet peeve is that it's a contract role and i really want to get a permanent role because as a contract staff i don't get that much employee benefits and that's something that is important to me which is fair enough because i think it's a good thing that he does know what he wants in his career but unfortunately the circumstances is that he's not really getting what he wants which then creates a little bit of frustration so i found out a little bit more about you know the structure of his contracts and so forth and what we eventually decided to focus on for the

Starting point is 00:03:58 next six months so he started working with me in may of last year. So we agreed that, okay, over the next six months, what we are going to try to focus on is to get him that conversion into a permanent staff. So one of the core areas that I started working on was helping him on was really around communication, because he is quite an introverted person. And one of the questions he asked me was oh how do i um how do i make jokes and like try to be you know really good friends with my colleagues because i'm kind of shy so i'm not really used to these things so one of the things i really had to work with him was like how to communicate in a very effective manner without trying to you know trying to be like a comedian or something like that which

Starting point is 00:04:45 really is you know doesn't match his own personality and he finds that this is really difficult for him to do but how to communicate effectively with his various team members as well as his boss to make sure that he is visible right because you there is no way you'll get a conversion into a permanent staff if your boss does not know who you are your colleagues don't really remember you because if they don't remember you then how can they um vouch and validate for the kind of help and support that you've been providing them so that was something that he really had to step out of his comfort zone and the other thing i also worked with him was like how do you structure updates and

Starting point is 00:05:25 schedule sessions with his direct manager to really try to get some feedback and of course visibility in a more practical way right so making sure that his boss knows who he is what he has been doing a lot of his progress so all these things like we need to be able to navigate that because if you leave it to last minute to the performance review, then it really is too late. And this is actually a mistake that a lot of people make in which they don't really plan and move towards what they're looking for. Be it for this particular client is a conversion to a full time staff, but maybe for you, it could be something else. But it's all about career planning determining the right strategy and then taking action so the other thing that i also worked on for this particular

Starting point is 00:06:11 client is to really work around his workload management so initially he also faced some challenges of not being able to communicate delivery on time i wouldn't say that he couldn't finish his work in fact he did meet all the kpis but the problem was he wasn't communicating to the relevant people that he did finish his work on time and he did complete everything based on expectation and timelines so i want you guys to recognize that if you have finished your work and you don't tell anybody about it then uh nobody knows and even if you were to work so hard to finish your work actually it might not mean anything because in corporate if your boss or your team leader or your supervisor doesn't know that you're finished the work then guess what in their view you have not you haven't actually done anything which is then defeats your entire you know time

Starting point is 00:07:09 effort and energy that you have poured into completing the work on time so that was actually one of the challenges that this client faced so the other thing we also worked on was getting him on special projects so that he again can raise visibility so one thing i want you guys to recognize is that if you are looking for a promotion or a no conversion something that's you know a step up from where you are right now exploring new opportunities within the current job is a really really good way to get visible as well as to grow in your current role even if it doesn't work out in this current role is something that you can take on in your resume and you know a contribution that you can make in your next company so so we explored some projects available eventually he did get on this special project which was

Starting point is 00:07:55 pretty high profile and he was really the main person helping out his manager so what that meant is that he now has one-on-one access time with his manager, which is then great, right? So right now we are like multiple phases of making sure that he gets visible is one thing, but making sure that his boss recognizes his positive skills and so forth. So the good news is that, like I said, we started working in May. Then the good news is that in late September, on October October when he had the one-on-one performance conversation with his manager his manager actually told him that hey you know I really think that you have very good qualities and I'm actually going we are going to offer you a full

Starting point is 00:08:37 time position but you just need to give me two months because we need to go through a lot of approvals to try to get that so if you're comfortable with this then we will proceed and of course he was really really excited because that was the whole main goal that we were working towards and he actually got that confirmation just three four months of working with me and and his boss is now saying that hey i know that you know it's not the easiest for me to get this conversion because you know headcount problems and blah blah blah but we are we you know we are willing to fight for you so i'm gonna try to go for this um full-time conversion and we'll see how that goes but we really really want to retain you so let me give you guys a very interesting update so of

Starting point is 00:09:22 course he did get the permanent conversion and everything was finalized paperwork everything was finalized in november yeah november which was really the six month mark of us working together and he was very very very excited for sure and interestingly what was very interesting that when he joined this bank in a contract position he did join with other three contract staff right so it was it was basically four of them and eventually what happened was that the contracts for the other three people were not renewed so now his friends who came with him from the same agency and same contract now they are not not converted that means that suddenly you know they don't have a job so he was telling me that oh maybe i'm so grateful because like i could be one of them and you know

Starting point is 00:10:10 it's not a good feeling when your contract gets cancelled because there's a lot of anxiety being a job seeker again so i think he was really really happy that you know he managed to get that full time conversion and even from then from then on his boss gave him really really positive feedback on his soft skills which is again a massive turnaround from where he was because he was so quiet and nobody knew what he was doing to a point where his boss is saying hey you know you're very responsible i see you know we got very positive feedback from different stakeholders and clients of you so a lot a lot of positive feedback and even from then on that was last november and even up to today since then he has been given more portfolios to work on and nowadays

Starting point is 00:10:52 he's actually shadowing his team leader in managing the broader portfolio for asia pacific as well so it was actually a really really big move for him and even nowadays we still do our coaching sessions every six weeks just to make sure that he remains on track and he also remembers what he is working on what he's focused on and nowadays and our goal for the next six months to the next performance review is to make sure that he gets a promotion to senior executive because he's already doing the work and right now we just need to work on positioning because last year the goal was making sure that he got the permanent conversion to a full-time staff and then this year our goal is to make sure that he get that promotion that he actually deserves so that's it a very quick story of this one client whom personally i'm really

Starting point is 00:11:39 really proud of because to me he proves to me that it doesn't matter right you're in a part-time job you're in a contract staff you're in an it doesn't matter right you're in a part-time job you're in a contract staff you're in an agency doesn't matter because if you get visible and you get visible with in the right way showing your value improving your skills industry knowledge your boss is going to recognize that and of course you need to be proactive to grab the right opportunities that work for you so my client managed to get this this opportunity or rather this conversion at least a commitment of the conversion within four months of working together within six months he signed the dotted line got a full-time job and right now he has been given

Starting point is 00:12:15 way more portfolios to work on right a lot more responsibilities and more importantly we are even talking about working towards a promotion at the year end. And that's something for him in the past 12 months didn't seem very possible because at that time, he was just worrying about whether his contract would be renewed every three months. And lastly, I also want to share another big achievement for him is that when he got the permanent conversion, his agency, because he was a contract staff, he was associated with an agency. His agency told him that, hey, actually, you are the first person in the agency who ever ever got a full-time conversion because nobody has been able to do that so he was really really excited really really proud and i definitely feel very very proud of him as well so um yeah that's it for today's story i hope that

Starting point is 00:13:00 this story inspires you that no matter where you are in your career whether you're in a part-time contract staff and so forth there's always room for you to improve there's room for you to get visible in the right way and there's room for you to convey your value that somebody else right a manager team leader director believes in you but and believes in you enough to fight for you so i hope that this story has inspired you and empowered you to really strategize and take action so with that i'll see you guys in the next episode cheers bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep69: Get visible at work and landed a full-time position.

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