Words With The Weployees

Meet Weployee of the Week - Mei

4 Min Read
Sara   |   July 8, 2019
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My Background

I’m Mei Chin Ee, I’m from Malaysia. I was working at a Training Consultancy back home for 16 years. Over the years there, I helped to develop the financial processes and by the end, I was actually managing the whole department. We were responsible for the delivery of profit and loss reports for Senior Directors in balance sheets on a dashboard. But we were getting consistent feedback that it was difficult to visualise, so I played around with the data and templated some new graphical reports - so that the Directors could develop insights more easily and visually see how far we were from the strategic goals.


Coming from a Chinese family, finance is considered a valuable and dependable career path so I graduated in Business and Accountancy. I love working with numbers, but I also have an interest in story-telling and I believe numbers can actually tell a lot of pictures. So instead of going for a certified program, I actually went into my masters and I focused on Marketing and Finance. These two disciplines aren’t often put together - Finance and Marketing are like the Yin and Yang - but combining numbers and insights can actually tell a very powerful story for stakeholders. Often Senior Leadership team members don’t have a lot of time to read individual items in spreadsheets so data-visualisation is so important these days. I think when you see pictures, whether they are colourful or graphical, it will totally change the readers outlook and affect the insights taken too. When these pictures come together, we start to embrace more ideas – what if this becomes that and what is the outcome if that changes to this. The possibilities are exciting when I’m able to capture someone’s attention or tell a story in the first 10 seconds of a meeting instead of watching their eyes glaze over after 10 minutes of studying spreadsheets. The stories coming from data like this can affect important business decisions and can help businesses develop bigger stories and deeper insights.

 

Moving to Australia

I moved over to Australia in March 2018 and started looking for a job the usual way. I engaged a few recruiters and started sending out endless copies of my resume. I applied to countless LinkedIn job ads, and even phoned around and contacted companies directly. I wasn’t getting any replies, and in most cases, I didn’t even get a response to tell me they had received my applications or that they would respond to me within a certain time frame. But one of the days as I was doing my normal routine - sending out my resume, and chasing people up, I came about Weploy and jumped onto the website. I liked that it was an IT technology company that had an innovative, very human-centric approach to recruitment and noticed they were looking for Finance staff. Given my background, I felt it was something I’d like to contribute to. 

To my surprise, Weploy came back to me very quickly – within the next three hours, I got a reply to move onto the next stage and of course that definitely motivated me a lot better compared to not having any replies at all!

 

Working as a Weployee

I passed through the enrolment process and have been working as a Weployee since November 2018. It has opened doors that were completely closed, despite me knocking over and again. I was consistently told that I wasn’t suitable for roles without Australian experience, and in banking especially there are stereotypes and expectations of how your resume should look, and what kind of person you are. But the question for me was – If I don’t start from somewhere, I’m not going to go anywhere! So, I guess when I set up with Weploy and was given my first assignment even though it was just a day or two, I think it was really good just knowing how the Australian market works and how employees work here in Australia. It’s really different back home in Malaysia where the culture is still a little different, so I think in that sense it was really good to be able to experience different employers and to see how different companies work, being that I was with one company for the last 13 years.

 

The Benefits of being a Weployee

I love that with Weploy, it doesn’t matter what industry or country or background you’re from, the relevant information is what’s important and everyone is considered the same way from the same platform. Equality is pretty important and I don’t fit into the expected requirements for a finance role in Australia. But having said that, Weploy actually gave me an avenue to be able to walk into new businesses, experience different roles, and meet different people to know that if that’s something that I want to do long term. So one of the first roles that I had via Weploy was in HR. I was helping an HR department to migrate data from one platform to another. They were trying to transfer over 1000 data points and had a deadline to complete the project within three days. Going in to support the HR manager, I was able to remove a lot of the operational tasks associated with the project so that she could actually focus on something that was more important. She could manage her stakeholders within those three days and I was able to help to tick the data migration off her list. We were both able to play to our strengths for a satisfying outcome. 

 

The Weploy Difference

My data visualisation skills give me an analytical view which enable me to see the big picture strategy and where it could be improved. Experiencing how an HR department works, however, I was able to learn even more skills to take with me into my next role. Being part of the Weploy community, I am able to support teams and contribute, not just in finance - but in any area that needs help. Alongside this, I am also consistently developing new, complementary skills and experiencing differing working styles, systems and environments. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a normal recruiter again!

 

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