Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep91: Should you negotiate a job offer? My BIG mistake.

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. Welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Career online and offline podcast. So in today's episode, I want to tell you why you should always, I mean your monthly salary, your benefits, your annual leave and everything else. So basically the entire compensation plan.

Starting point is 00:00:53 One of the biggest mistakes I see when working with my clients and really talking with a lot of corporate professionals out there is that there is this misconception that the monthly salary is the most important thing. And this was a mistake that I made for a very long time. So in the earlier half of my career, I've always been very focused on just increasing my monthly salary. So I didn't really think about the annual compensation plan. I didn't really think about the other benefits and basically like the other elements within the entire compensation plan and what a big mistake it was because the fact that i didn't actually understand the entire compensation plan basically created a bit of a massive problem for me later on in my career because when I was jumping from one, or rather moving from one role to the other,

Starting point is 00:01:51 because I was just so fixated on the monthly salary, there were certain career moves that I made where the entire compensation plan for the whole year wasn't really the most attractive, even though the company could pay me a very high monthly pay so it was a really big mistake because at certain point in my career when I moved to certain roles and it's definitely something that you need to take note is that how you negotiate your overall compensation plan for this current job, it's going to affect your next job and your next job and your next job. Because in most instances, HHS will always ask for your salary slip, right?

Starting point is 00:02:34 So a lot of times the job offer, right, the new company's compensation plan will make reference to your earlier um yeah to your earlier salary slip so this was definitely a mistake i made because there were certain roles that i took that i really didn't know how to negotiate and a lot of times i also just trusted the hr person or the recruiter to just give me the amount that i thought i deserve or you know if it sounded like well you know that's the industry standard probably it's pretty okay or I basically bought in a lot of nonsense that people told me hey you know it's a good career opportunity hence you know you should take less money or we can't give you a lot of increment because it's a good opportunity so if you're nodding your head and say oh yeah i mean probably i will also take

Starting point is 00:03:28 less pay if i can learn something let me tell you that that is actually the wrong mindset to have and that was a mindset i had a very long time and eventually what happened was that like it really affected my ability to um to get paid what i'm actually worth. So throughout my career, the problem was that because the earlier part of my career, like the pay was, I mean, I didn't really work out the pay properly. So that meant that even though I was taking up more responsibilities,

Starting point is 00:03:58 probably I was rising up the corporate ladder, I was taking up a lot more roles, the responsibility and the seniority where I was at, I didn't feel that I was being compensated fairly, if that makes sense. Because when you take on more responsibility, you take on more accountability, you're responsible for so many things, there is a certain amount of money that's actually worth it, which is why we are all in a job. I want to make sure that we are also compensated fairly for the amount of effort um you know time and energy that

Starting point is 00:04:30 we put in but because of my like poor planning and poor negotiation skills and like you know lack of courage of like really having that um conversation with hr on my compensation plan what that meant was later on in my career, there were actually more frustrations because when you are at a certain like salary, right, in the current job, it's going to be a little bit more difficult to negotiate unless you get a promotion. And even if you get an in-job promotion, sometimes like the jump is not very high compared to if you join externally, or even if you get an increment, it's probably not a lot, right? Unless you actually get a

Starting point is 00:05:11 promotion or you're like top, top, top flyer, and it also depends on the performance of the company. So basically what I'm trying to say here is that there are a lot of variables that you cannot control once you sign the job offer once you join the team so it's really important that at the point of right before you sign up sign up you know sign the contract right sign the employment contract you really need to make sure that you negotiate and i can share a very quick story with you and this was something that my ex-boss told me and i know he listens to this podcast so if he's listening to this he'll know who i'm talking about this and one of the very big lessons that he taught me was something that he actually said to me and he said that mayping it is actually your fault that your salary is not

Starting point is 00:05:59 as high as where it should be because you didn't learn how to negotiate earlier on in your you know your past jobs and right now even if i want to give you a very very high pay right from a percentage standpoint and like you know company policy or whatever it's going to be a lot more challenging and that would then mean that your your pay is going to get capped at a certain amount to meet all these whatever whatever policy. So there was something that really resonated with me because up to that point, it didn't really hit me that, hey, maybe it was actually my fault that I didn't know how to negotiate or rather maybe I wasn't courageous enough or I didn't know how to go about it. And I just expected that people are just going to pay me whatever that I was worth without actually sitting back and really asking myself how much is a fair amount of like you know

Starting point is 00:06:51 salary plan or a salary package that is really worth the value that I'm adding right the good job that I'm giving because one thing you need to remember is that like the ability for you to do a good job, it is not related to how many years of experience that you have, right? For somebody who has worked for five years, but doing the exact same thing every single day, it's not better than somebody who has worked for like three years, but they have been doing like different things and they are top performer and they have like, you know, demonstrable achievement. So it's not something that is tied to the number of years that you have worked.

Starting point is 00:07:29 However, if you don't learn how to negotiate from the start, then it would definitely affect your ability to actually get compensated and get paid what you actually deserve. And that was really something that was quite frustrating for me for quite a while and I I'm actually really thankful to my ex-boss for um sharing this very important lesson to me it was really something that he pointed out to me that I didn't even think about right it didn't even cross my mind and I thought that was a really really important lesson um at the midpoint juncture of my career and from then on every single time I moved to a different company every single time I was allocated you know bigger responsibilities

Starting point is 00:08:13 every single year at the end of the performance year I always always negotiate I always make known what are my expectations for the next 12 months and how I like to be compensated. So I always negotiate hard because that was really a lesson that I learned. And I actually wish that I learned this lesson a lot earlier in my career. But anyway, the fact that I learned it is much better than not learning it at all. So that is why nowadays, for my clients who are job seekers, I always teach them how to negotiate. And because honestly, if you don't try, you don't get, right?

Starting point is 00:08:56 100% you don't try, you don't get. And for some of my clients, they have actually seen really good successes as well. Like one of my clients, she got an increment of 39% annual compensation plan because she negotiated. Some of my clients were initially they were asked to take pay cuts because they were transitioning across industries. They didn't have to take a pay cut. In fact, they could still make sure that they were compensated a little bit more than what they were making in the previous industry or the previous role. So really, the ability to negotiate is so, so, so, so so so so important can you imagine taking like 50 of the pay how are you going to climb back up from there it's going to take you a very very long time so just make sure that you understand

Starting point is 00:09:36 the impact of like not negotiating and how that can really affect your career many many many years and you may eventually get stuck in multiple companies or multiple jobs not really making what you deserve in terms of the value that you can bring and i think that is something that actually is very unfortunate and for those of you who are working in a full-time job your year-end performance review right which is normally in november or december is the best time for you to actually have that conversation with your boss doing your annual performance review as to what is the overall value that you have brought to your team to the department to the company for this you know past 12 months and where do you see yourself growing in this company and basically how you're going to get compensated for the amount of work

Starting point is 00:10:22 all right you know whatever that's planned for you next year. It's a very delicate conversation, but I think it's a really important conversation to have. And for my clients, I actually go through with them a little bit more detail on how to have that conversation. But for today's podcast, the point I want to make here is that you must have that conversation. The best time to have that conversation is right before you sign the offer letter. The next best time to have that conversation is right before you sign the offer letter. The next best time to have that conversation is during your mid-year or annual performance review. And if you are not having those value conversations, those negotiation conversations,

Starting point is 00:10:56 then don't complain later on when you don't see progress, when you feel that your position is stuck you feel that your pay is stuck because um just to quote my ex boss it's your fault so uh some food for thought in today's episode and i hope that this episode actually inspires you to really want to take have that courage right to take the first step and to really start negotiating because you will really be able to see how it can really help you along your career journey as well. So with that, I wish you all good luck and all the best with your negotiation. Cheers!

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep91: Should you negotiate a job offer? My BIG mistake.

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