 Thank you Alisa and Dene for sharing Copy Run. I think it's a very creative idea and I can't believe that you guys actually had the hustle to do such an amazing project while you're on your full-time job. So with that, I'd also like to thank Max and team for inviting me to this community tonight to share a couple of points as to what it's like to work in technology consulting and also to provide some communication tips. So just give me a few seconds while I share my screen. Sure. Alright, so along the way if you can't hear my voice, my audio or my slides, please feel free to ping. Okay, so today I wanted to go into a bit of the identity capital which is more of the soft-skill side which is quite an opposite of actually what Alisa and Dene have shared. I will not be touching anything on anything technical or anything on code but instead today I prepared a couple of points that ties in with this concept called identity capital which is also the title of my presentation. So I will touch on some insider tips and conclude with some parting words and Q&A if there's time to spare at the end of the presentation. I wanted to give a little bit of an introduction about myself before I dive into these subsequent slides because this would set some context about what I'm going to be sharing about this evening. So for myself, I'm an economics and management graduate. I graduated in the year of 2018 and I've joined Accenture Sins. So I've been with the firm for about two years and three months and my exact title is Functional Cloud Migration Analyst. And usually in the projects that I'm in, I spearhead project management and coordination for different kinds of technical deployments so that could vary from things like cloud migration, implementation of cloud strategy all the way to infra and networking and stuff. So given the nature of my functional role, I usually end up working with quite a lot of technical teams, getting them together and coordinating them such that we all end up going towards goal life. And then along the way, because I'm functional, I will have to translate what's going on in the projects in real time using actionable insights and then pass it along to higher management clients or even business and users that are not so familiar with the technology within the project. So since I've joined Accenture, I've been involved in about five projects as of to date and in some of the projects that I've been in, I've learned how to run deployments using waterfall as well as using more agile methods like scrum and that's true of various widespread of industries all the way from FMCG to oil and mining as well as pharmaceuticals. So given that I've ran a number of scrum teams before, I decided to get myself scrum master certified as of this year. And recently I've been very interested in data-vis tools to improve my presentation when it comes to sharing insights to the clients. So I've become Tableau Desktop Specialist Certified as of this month. And apart from all the projects that I do at Accenture, outside of it, I'm a very active advocate for a number of inclusion and diversity initiatives in the company because I believe that as someone who spends up to 80%, 90% of time working for the company, I wanted to make sure that I'm in an environment and a culture that I like to work in. So I'm usually helping out with initiatives that range from mental health to empowerment. And I'm also passionate about getting more young people into technology and into our firm. So I'm also part of the campus ambassador and I represent the recruitment sometimes from the technology analyst program and outside from all the work that I do at Accenture, I'm also very passionate about volunteering for a couple of social courses and other topics such as skills building, social issues, and using technology to solve problems using creative ways. So with all of that, given the context, I wanted to touch on the content of my talk, which is identity capital. Now you might wonder what exactly is this term about? Probably it's your first time hearing about it. It's not very commonly used. Well, identity capital is essentially the investments that we make in ourselves and the things that we do well enough or long enough until they become a part of who we are. So you can consider it as the currency that you use to metaphorically purchase jobs and relationships and other things that you want. Under this overarching umbrella, this might include your path to your own unique identity which you could call personal branding. So I understand most of you here tonight are developers that hone your technical skill sets in the form of projects and certifications and I'm sure that you've got all the hard skills part figured out and under your belt. Tonight, I wanted to touch on more of that personal intangible bit of identity capital which attributes to how you come across to people. As you hear about the sharing and tips in my subsequent slides, I encourage you to subconsciously be reminded of this term called identity capital and make some scribbles of how you might want to shape your own capital moving forward. I'd just like to share some of the traits desired by the technology consulting industry regardless of whether you are a business or technical resource and these are just based from my observations as a capacity serving under the campus recruitment and as well as from my own project experiences and what I've seen and heard so far from my career journey. The first trait that I like to talk about is actually dynamism and adaptability. In layman terms, it is simply referring to someone who shows positivity even when they're thrown into the deep end but most importantly to be able to rise from the deep quickly and take the lead. Personally, I found it quite interesting when I was interviewing for my role at Accenture. In fact, the role that I was chosen to interview for is a very technical one that required clock computing and networking skills and I had none of that. A few months shortly into the role, I learned that in fact anyone could do the role that I was in. They were just looking out for someone who has the ability to adapt and deliver. And so in the first few months, I did most technical things from software configuration to even API testing. And while it was something not up my alley, but I took it seriously and did it well enough until I was able to gain the respect and trust to maneuver around until I was able to secure project management roles where it was more of my expertise. And shortly then with each new project that I moved to, I built up a higher threshold for unfamiliarity and the adaptability to adapt faster. The next trait is critical thinking. And as you know, critical thinking has become a very vital skill for anyone looking for fruitful professional lives and for people to entrust you with larger roles and opportunities. Critical thinking is a skill that allows you to make logical and informed decisions to the very best of your ability. And in consulting, most of the times you're usually thrown into something that might be completely new to you, but usually people on the ground would expect that you use the resources and contextual knowledge of what's around you to the best and solve problems from there. The next trait is ownership and accountability. So here let me share with you a personal work story that served as a huge learning point for me. Now most times we work a lot with the engineers from the India Delivery Center and these engineers are the ones who not only do the configurations but they write the technical documentations as well. Now what I observe as a business resource is the tendency of engineers to submit subpar technical documentations and this includes things like formatting, grammatical, spelling errors and errors that you can tell that are definitely errors. And I know this might sound like unnecessary icing to the cake. It doesn't really add value to maybe the technology aspect of your work but all of these actually amounts to professionalism and standards of one's work because even for a business resource like myself, I've actually learned the hard way of the importance of following up till the very end for a particular task that's assigned to me and learning how to take even the simplest or most minute details seriously because you might not know, you might end up working for a boss that might give you autonomy and on the other hand sometimes you might even end up working for someone who is an incredible micro manager and that's where these traits come in that shows that it's incredibly important to take ownership and accountability. Now, the next trait is collaborativeness as most times you might be working in silos but in consulting we usually run as a project team and each one has to learn how to be a good team player. And examples of project teams that has collaborativeness really at the core with its ability to function are agile teams like Scrum. It is important to learn how your work can have impact on the other members in your team as well as the overall reputation of how the company that you're working for is being portrayed by the client. So simple things to enhance collaboration can be things like frequent communication. The last trait that I wanted to talk about on this slide is the ability to express yourself in a structured way in projects especially that of delivery and implementation the business resource like myself we don't have the answers to all the questions all of the time. So our engineers or technical resources here are our leaders in the technical realm and from personal experiences one of my craziest deployments I was remotely deploying about 28 APs in our office in Perth and I had to coordinate about five different stakeholders all through audio conferencing and things went crazy when we realized that one of the vendors actually did something that negatively impacted our cut over schedule and here I had to rely on my engineer to provide new instructions as to how to move forward with this reduced downtime but he was so emotionally triggered that he was unable to collect his composure and it resulted in raising overall unnecessary tensions amongst all members in the team. So here I had to step in real quick and do some translating even though things were all in English and put out the fire so from this incident it served as a reminder for me to remain calm regardless of the situation that I may be in and if it may help to actually stick to a structure to express yourself coherently even in the most challenging situations I'll dive further into this aspect of communication in this next slide So number one most business and technical resources are actually guilty of this and that is working really really hard bulldozing through mountains of work and thinking that probably someone will recognize the remarkable work that I've done so this might work for a bit at the start of a career but it's not ideal for a career progression It is imperative to align with your direct report on how you're hitting the expectations and goals of the project or how you might be fulfilling the criteria that you're being evaluated against in performance appraisals So in consulting it is even more critical to learn how to share your achievements given the nature of work and one thing that greatly helped me in my time is actually a simple PowerPoint deck So what I do is I create a simple deck for each project that I'm on and within it I state my project and non-project achievements by monthly basis I then use a simple table I describe the tasks I state the start, the end date I have a status column as well as well as a comment section for me to fill out what I have achieved Within it I also insert a ton of pictures and evidence of my achievements I will then set up recurring monthly meeting invites with my manager and this deck actually formed the structure of my discussions and enabled me to self-promote and get structured feedback really really quickly The next tip is that you are in the power to drive discussions Your opinion greatly matters because no one else in the room can be more understanding or more clear than you yourself who is the person who is responsible for a particular piece of work So keep experimenting Take small steps to learn how to probably interject in a conference call or to find ways to sound more eloquent and find the best way possible to present yourself in the most comfortable manner possible The next tip is about mimicry and in a study that I saw recently is an award-winning study with the Stanford University it showed that there was very strong positive correlation between mimicry and deepen attunement and enhance ability to move others Now people look to cues in the environment to determine who they can trust and one of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether someone is in sync with you or not and the best way is to match their behavioural patterns with our own So from personal experience when I try to speak to clients or if I'm trying to negotiate something I would try to employ strategic mimicry So for example if I'm working with a couple of local clients that are based in Singapore and I know that they prefer speaking in local Mandarin sometimes what I'll do is I'll try my best to speak in local Mandarin during their informal meetings and I will align my tone of voice to their tone as well and what I've realised by doing strategic mimicry is that by doing so the clients that I actually work with even though I might have onboarded onto the project a few months back during the lockdown period and there's no idea who I am and how I look but they were able to warm up really nicely towards me and it was much much easier for me to work with them The next tip is to be proactive to self promote and communicate in a structured way Now one concept that comes in great handy might be a concept that you've heard before which is the STAR method and that is simply start your conversation with what was the situation you were in what was the task that you were responsible for what was the actions or actions that you took and lastly what was the result Now it is important to form personal level connections and it is so so important in the working world to show empathy and concern to your direct and indirect colleagues or simply people that you work with So just last month I sat in a sharing by a senior executive who helped CMO roles in some of the largest FMCG companies in the world and she shared with me a moment in a career where she was high performing and she was on track for the next promotion but she found out that she did not get it and in fact it was given to someone else whom she perceives did not perform as well as she did and when she got feedback she found out that the reason why she didn't get the promotion was simply because the person responsible for a promotion did not like her simply they did not find her likeable enough to give her that promotion So the conclusion here is that relationships really does pay off wherever you go So do form connections especially so right now where many people might be having a challenging time working in the COVID situation and working from home The last tip for communication is to always have etiquette and I realize not only in consulting but in general it is very important to learn things like how to small talk before going into a serious conversation It is also important to learn and master the basics of simple things like learning how to set up a meeting and learning how to be conscious of the emails that you send out etc With that many of you might be thinking okay now with all these tips how can I make a difference in such challenging time especially when most of us are still working from home and away from people So I'd like to share just some quick tips as to how you can add value and perform even in the midst of a pandemic Now pre-COVID all of us were working at the office and at that time one of the key things especially that I was guilty of was to ensure that I was seen as busy all the time But now with COVID and all of us having more flexibility and remote working I'd like to say take advantage of this time that you used previously to look busy to use it to find more productive and efficient ways to add value So for example previously I would take about four hours to create a weekly status deck after my Monday meeting and that's because I keep getting disrupted by people in the office or perhaps people who ring me or ping me on teams and tell me side stuff and that side tracks me from my work But now working from home I'm able to reduce that time I spent on the deck to an hour So I use now these three remaining hours to build a knowledge database for the client which adds value So the next tip is a question on whether is it possible to continue networking and the simple answer is totally it is in fact what you're doing here tonight So many of you are gathered here tonight over Zoom even though you're at home and you are proactive networking which is a great thing So if you want to approach someone for something I recommend to engage in a warm engagement You can totally go in cold which means that you're approaching someone probably from a third party connection perspective But I'd like to remind you to be contextually sensitive especially in this challenging time So if you're dropping someone a ping on LinkedIn just remember to be respectful and start off with something like hope you're well here's why I'm reaching out to you so on and so forth Next, is this a wrong time to be looking out for a new job? The simple answer is no because if you create value companies have needs and they are always looking out for talent So be open to opportunities and LinkedIn is a great place for you to signal to recruiters that you're open to opportunities and right now I think the timeline is picking up a bit companies are opening up and many companies are actually looking forward to hire new talents The last tip is to use this time to reflect on some new identity capital that you might want to have Remote working is a blessing in disguise because you can actually do a course on the site at your own pace so sometimes maybe I take four hours to do something previously but now I only take one hour so sometimes I might be able to take two of the three remaining hours to listen to a course at the site and it's great So things that you might want to check out if your technical resource might be things like design thinking to build empathy and storytelling courses and workshops which really helps everyday communication and helps build your ability to learn how to present more comfortably So with that my parting words are in a summary of three tips The first tip is to always have a plan, have a brand and what I learned is that people who explore and have experience they tend to have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic and the path forward is usually associated with more positive outcomes such as clearer sense of self greater life satisfaction so on and so forth The next tip is to have a good attitude be a doer not just a thinker I think it truly pays off to have you know to learn how to cultivate a learning mindset because no matter how good you are you're constantly always going to be replaced by someone else who might be better than you in other aspects as well as more and more companies who are constantly looking for talents who can keep raising the bar Now the last tip is constant exposure I like to say you know be proactive throw yourself at opportunities even though you might be uncomfortable but what I really feel is that when you devil in something uncomfortable that's where the most immense and impactable learning opportunities actually arise up from it So back to learn and constantly respect people and be humble even after having great achievements So just like what I have in the quote on this slide ambition really comes from exposure If you have been exposed to more then you will expect more So I'm not sure there is enough time for Q&A but if you have any questions please feel free to drop me a ping on LinkedIn or even on Zoom I'd be more than happy to address it offline So with that, I'd like to thank you all for your time to hear about my presentation and I really hope that there might be some tips that you might be able to take away from tonight Thank you All right, thank you Charlotte Yeah, so if you have any questions you actually can ask Charlotte about the presentation I believe soft school is actually important especially as developers we are quite important especially in what we write and also what we express ourselves about soft skills it's very hard for us to actually deal with people especially people who are not from technical background or people who are from a business background as well So importance is actually knowing soft skills is important Yeah, so Michael, do you have anything you want to share about Hi, hello Yeah, it was a good sharing Thanks for showing us a different perspective about software engineering I mean it's in the tech industry we have a lot of people in the tech industry it's not just software engineers and developers but we also have VA's and consultants who help with understanding helping everyone understand the business context So I think we all need people of all sorts in the tech industry and it's important for us to respect and help each other Yeah, who? Yeah, is there any questions for Charlotte? Hi Charlotte, thank you for the presentation Can I just ask what would be the best way in your opinion to actually leapfrog? Thanks for the question I didn't really catch the last part To actually leapfrog Leapfrog? Yes I think from different industries? No, I mean drum impositions Ah, drum impositions So from my understanding as someone who is still considered quite junior within such a large MNC some of the things that I've learned to build up more or less of that reputation and that standing for perhaps me to stand out in terms of performance evaluations are two things So the first thing is actually from a professional angle in terms of the contributions that you add to the projects that you're on So one thing it is definitely showing people that even though you might be let's say assigned minute or perhaps task that you might see as very simple at first don't underestimate it which is one of the problems that I actually faced when I first entered the company I found that I was doing some things that were so simple so mundane and I was thinking when will it be that I will be given more important important work and what I realized is that even though the tasks were so simple in my conversations at first with the managers that I was with sometimes there were simple mistakes in the work that I produced and all these little small mistakes actually attribute up to showing the managers that whether you are ready for larger tasks or not and so as soon as I realized this I really took a different perspective and attitude which is no matter how simple or mundane the tasks might be and no matter you know it might be simple things like formatting or aesthetic things that your boss might be very concerned about but as soon as I fixed all these things and really took care of the task that I was assigned for 101 percent that was when people started handing more serious and more important roles to me and I slowly developed more autonomy to run teams within the projects with little hand holding as much as possible and so with that it builds this consistency and it shows your bosses that you are ready for bigger tasks and that I'm ready to trust you with more things so that's for the professional aspect for the non-professional aspect and as as to how to leapfrog is definitely the point which I've reiterated many times in my slides which is always have a brand always build connections build personal level connections show empathy to the co-workers around you and find ways to be engaged in projects outside of your official projects that shows what you are as a person and what you are passionate about that helps to overall build your story which ties in with that concept called identity capital so with that even though I might be busy with my projects but the reason why I'm doing so many side things apart from my projects like setting up the Singapore Office Mental Health Initiative it's not because I want to have a better profile during performance appraisals but because I'm very passionate about such an issue and why not have a go at it because doing so will give me this role for me to show a little bit of my leadership capabilities which might grant me more autonomy than as compared to let's say being on a project so simple answer it's those two combined together it would provide a holistic way for you to jump from yeah oh but okay so from what I'm getting right it's more about like what you're saying is that it's about working hard and it's also about working smart am I right correct okay so as you said you are working in an MNC so do you have ever encountered any situations whereby you are hitting like the band of the MNCs and you kind of feel like the no matter how well you do or how well you're doing as compared to everyone else you are still within that band and if you are already at that band and the rest of the things it kind of takes is that it seems to be more experience related or it seems to be more time related or you are being ceilinged off by the HR side of things what would what would your option be and what would you actually do in this situation okay so the first part of your question as to whether I've experienced as to you know hitting a particular ceiling for promotion even though I might be outperforming my peers so just to be completely transparent I have definitely experienced it you know no matter how how much I might be performing sometimes you have to understand that given that you're working in such a large firm and especially when there are different situations like for example for myself I've been in two different re-orcs since I've joined the firm so it all attributes to you know the overall I guess results as to whether I meet the next band in my promotion and what I've come to terms is that in in a large M&C it's not all the time that you do get a promotion even though you have outperformed sometimes you must understand that there is a queue there is a queue in front of you and that they do have to promote people that have been here longer around than you have been and I don't think there should be a reason to feel frustrated or angry as to why am I not getting promoted when I'm obviously outperforming my other peers but what I've learned personally is not to take this to heart because organizations have their own structures and their own procedures to follow so you need to just you know showing people that you understand the situation you understand that there should be you know there should be a time where people recognize that you're ready for the next level and hence you will be duly promoted for the next level and if you're not if you feel that perhaps okay it might be something that I'm not hitting to hit the next promotion then I really advise finding out what it is that you're not hitting to get the next promotion and that ties in with the tip in my slides where I mentioned about the need to really sit down frequently with your direct report and show them in a very structured way of the achievements that you have been hitting and sometimes it might be that yeah you show them all these achievements but are you achieving what the hiring managers or the bosses in charge of your promotion are looking out for if not then you really have to sync up and align with you know what is being expected from you from work and what you are delivering and then in terms of second part of your question sorry can I get that again oh actually you answered you more or less answered the main crux of the point so I really admire your strong faith in the system or in the structure of the company itself but I would just like to add that sometimes or rather right there are other forces along the way that are moving that no matter how well you do it could be just be that there might not be enough budget in the particular department or in the particular project so it's something to take note of and sometimes it's better to actually look out for greener pastures as well yes that's a very very good point you hit it clearly on the on the head so yeah budget problems sometimes it's just not enough budget to promote so there's a longer queue and things like that so that really aligns with the point which is to always be open to opportunities no matter at which stage of career you might be at because if there's a better opportunity then why not you know have a shot at it yeah thank you thank you welcome are there any other questions may I shout out okay shout out just now you mentioned you are doing a lot of tasks at one shot how were you able to find the energy to do all these tasks because during the I'm sure I wait is it I don't know no I don't know so during the circuit break I took on a lot of things and I can't complete anything how were you able to you know multitask and complete all this thanks for the question so I understand how you might be feeling you might be very driven you have so many things you want to do but still you realize that eh sometimes you can't you can't complete them so that's the issue so for me maybe I can share a little bit as to how I plan my time so I'm someone who likes to plan in advance so what I do is I actually start off from a week you know like a week one week goals so before I start off a new week I actually think about okay this week what are some of the things I want to focus on so it might be like three to four different high-level things and I don't recommend more than four high-level things that you should be putting down in your weekly plan and what happens after that now you okay now you have like an understanding of okay these are the four things that I would like to complete next week so then you think to yourself okay what are some of the smaller tasks that falls under these large tasks that is required for me to complete those larger tasks so as you write down those small little small tasks of what's required you start to think to yourself what does next week look like first things first is to always set aside priority for your official work that's been assigned to you I don't recommend and you know for going your real work that you're being evaluated against in your current job the job that pays you because that is just very very detrimental to you know you're standing in the firm so that you should never compromise which is the official work that has been handed to you so think about okay in that week what is the official work that's required for you if you know that okay if I know that out of five days I know that Tuesdays and Thursdays are days where literally I might not have to do anything related to the project I'll be able to spend that time on other things then within that given this contextual understanding then in that small task you'll be able to understand which of these small tasks I'll be able to complete and then you think to yourself out of these four large tasks that you've written down does any of them not make sense in terms of whether it fits into your schedule for the week so let's say after the four tasks that you had you narrow it down to three tasks so once you have that three tasks I advise you to break it down further into daily tasks so before a day starts what I usually like to do is I just take a simple post-it and what I do is that I write down four different small things on like a simple piece of paper and it serves as a guide for me for the next day I put it down in front of my computer screen and I you know it's very clear focus on what I need to achieve at the end of the day in order to meet my four tasks that I've set up for myself in the week and slowly I just take off you know the things that I have in my post-it and it really works I and I feel like wow I've really achieved what I'm supposed to achieve in the day and it's not so you know something that's far-fetched because you actually did take into account of how much time you have in the week you understood what could be completed and even so you might have a few tasks in that post-it that might not have been ticked off at the end of the day it's okay because on Monday let's say you have five tasks but you only ticked off three tasks then you know to yourself that oh I only can manage to set aside one and a half hours of time to do side stuff every single day so the next day before the next day when you create another post-it you reduce your activity list from five things to three things and then next day you realize that oh I'm able to take off all three things on my post-it then the next day perhaps if you're flexible enough then you increase it to four things and then you just scale it up and down whenever you want to and how comfortable you are with and hopefully with that Shu Wei I hope that it will be able to you know you'll be able to slowly see that hey you're actually achieving you're achieving aspects of the larger goal that you're trying to achieve okay thank you so simple to say plan advance, divide your tasks you wanted to do don't try to try more than three and four around there and experiment until you get comfortable just planning like a day routine is it yes okay got it thank you no problem thank you any more questions all right all right so um any more questions would the crowd want to talk about yeah hi charlotte um may I ask one more question yeah at the time yeah so I was wondering you've mentioned like we need we you've mentioned the need for self-promotion at work and how important that is and I was wondering if you have any tips and guidance on you know how do you do that without coming across too strong or you know too um individualistic in the team so that would be great if you can share some insights on that thank you yeah no problem Helen great question it's pretty much uh the concern that a lot of people have even within you know the firm no matter how senior you are there's two people who worry about self-promoting they don't want to come across as someone who is like you know too upstairs or like you know whether people will actually understand the context you've been sure to achieve that you know all those achievements and whether people truly appreciate your achievements so with that it's one of the points that I indicated in the slides which is the point on using a power point to document your project and non-project achievements on a frequency that is comfortable for yourself and also for you know the direct report that you're sharing your achievements with um I think you should you shouldn't worry about coming across as you know whatever negative that you think you might come across when you're self-promoting if self-promoting is based on facts so if you're self-promoting on facts and if you have that power point with all those details on the task that you're assigned to um pictures images timeline of how you're hitting all of these and these are just hard facts you're not you're not um you know coming up with a lie you're not exaggerating these are hard facts hard truth that you have achieved based on your hard work and when you when you present this in a structured format this provides this contextual understanding to anyone who might be looking at your power point that are hearing you speak about your achievements they will understand that okay um I understand where this is coming from and and they will have higher tendency to applaud you for your achievements and another tip as to you know how to you know promote and and not have that negative feedback is to be part of the community that you're in try to help shape a working culture within the community or a company that you're working for in terms of helping others realize that it's okay to self-promote and it's very beneficial to self-promote and in fact self-promotion is a political skill set for survival in the workplace and what simply you can do is proactively encourage and praise your colleagues so it might be simple things but um people really do appreciate it when you say simple things like wow today I think you you express yourself much more clear clearer on a conference call or let's say I really enjoyed the slides that you presented today and even helping out colleagues who might struggle in self-promoting or when people are not hearing and interjecting and telling them hey I think Mary has a great idea to share so why not let's hear it so overall this pro this builds up into this kind of uh you know feedback loop where people start to get more and more comfortable of praising people encouraging people and understanding that it's perfectly okay to uh self-promote and it's a great thing it's a great thing to self-promote so I hope this answer answer your question Helen yes it does thank you so much Charlotte no problem all right so if there are further questions just feel free to pin me on LinkedIn um I will definitely respond to them I think we're all good yep I think we're all very good