2018-19 NACA LDP 2nd Group Meeting

The 2nd LDP group discussion took place on Jun. 9 at Techtop office. 14 attendees joined the meeting, with mentors, mentees and speaker Amy Yang, Marketing GM from Coca Cola. This time, the working committee decided to run in small group this time to encourage closer and in-depth discussion as well as build closer connection between mentor and mentees. The topic theme is “How to do branding and manage transition”.
The meeting started with Amy’s self-induction and her career highlights with mentors to build on and arose questions, insights around the theme with relevant topics. During the 2 hrs meeting, people shared, built on and had a truly hot discussion around the theme topic.
All mentors came from different working experience, industry background, however, in terms of the common topics as personal design, branding, communication, working ethic, all of them shared some similar growth learning and insights.
Firstly, most of the mentees did not had the chance of mentoring or got intensive training in their own early career years, when they look back now, they all believe it is highly necessary the young profession can start their early career design from the very beginning. It’s also lucky nowadays young profession have more formal tools and company systems to start the practice, like working out a vision/mission, personal branding statement.
Secondly, all mentors agrees that not matter in which industry, it is imperative to build strong technical excellence or function strength in the first 5-8 career years. This is the fundamental root of further grow in one’s professional field, gain confidence and build personal differentiation.
The third finding was very interesting. About half of mentors loved what they do from the career beginning, another half developed love for what they were doing. But all loved what they do throughout the years. The basic conclusion here is one can only get great achievement when putting love and passion into their work. They also objected of changing the career and job function frequently trying to locate passion, as you may lose the interests in the repeating searching while lag behind of the current job skills development.
As of real practice, we probed 3 key areas by “branding and transition” in the sequence to discover, build and develop with interval effort and external leverage. Design yourself, know Where to play and How to Win, and Take Initiative. We captures in a separate meeting memo to follow up within LDP team.
We also placed 3 simple homework for the mentees to work out and suggested mentees can include in the next discussion with mentors.
Thanks for Pamela’s Dong’s proposal, LDP will have a small group session on “Intercultural Communication” on Jun. 30. And we’ll also set up a Reading Club led by Mike Deng on relevant and supplement topics around LDP objective. Team also proposed to create a wechat group for faster connection……by Jenny Tang