Critical Self-Reflection

Ying Li, 05 April 2022

The careers I aspired to since I was a child were always changing, and I always wanted to try something new, but I was never able to learn much more about it for various reasons, either on my own or outside. In various student activities, I have been in charge of micro movies make-up and directed an audio drama, but I have also had a lot of experience on stage or in competitions. I have been in charge of design and marketing, research and management in various group projects. I am also now active as a self-publisher of dance and daily life videos on a Chinese YouTube-like user-generated video content platform called Bilibili.com, with a total of over 200,000 views.

However, every time I stand in front of a professional field, I fail to find my own strengths, as if I've wasted too much time trying new things to become proficient, or even particularly interested in one area.

But I am not completely directionless at the moment, but the decision is very late. I would like to reflect on my thoughts about my future development in view of my own internship experience, both in terms of position and industry.

Thinking of my position

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I attended the Career Mentoring Programme at the University of Westminster where I met a mentor who was very similar to me in terms of personality and professionalism, and it was he who helped me to identify the direction I wanted to try in my career path. I explained my situation to my mentor and the conflict I was in and he made the point to me that I do not need to be obsessed with I was only learning a little about everything and was not able to be as good at one specific area as others. Rather, it should be the other way around, that I know something about many things, but others are only good at one.

Then we found out, that perhaps coordination, the management, or planning roles would suit me better. Once I started to think differently, I began to rethink my work experience at Shenzhen Soocas Technology Co., Ltd. Guangzhou office. I was responsible for content marketing planning at my internship company, and I was responsible for design management in Final Project production at my school. But I make it a habit to focus on what I do outside of my position as a way to think about what I need to do to better collaborate my work with people. For example, at the beginning of my internship, my leader put me in charge of doing brand case studies of similar product companies to assist them in upgrading their brand stories. I would ask what they were looking for in terms of focus - for example, founder stories - and then I would take notes to analyse the patterns in how the target brands articulated their founder stories, and use that as the focus of my case studies. Rather than piling it all up and submitting it let the next person who takes over consider what the focus is. At the time of my leaving, although I had lost many opportunities to communicate with colleagues during my internship due to nervousness and anxiety, my supervisor commented that although I was often silent, I could be seen to be a responsible, conscientious and logical person. I like to find the pattern and plan with reference to it. During the first month of my internship due to a personnel change and not having a dedicated employee to guide me through the content marketing process, I was so frustrated that I even thought about leaving more than once because of the confusion of my work. But when I started my second month and a very good content marketing employee came back on leave and took charge of me, I felt much better. People around me comment on my amazing sense of responsibility and purposefulness, and my habit of double-checking that I have understood what others are asking for correctly. But at the same time, my colleagues have reminded me not only once that sometimes being too strict with myself and not asking for help could get me into trouble. It can be as small as being in a bad state and causing a small thing that my manager has reminded me of more than once to still not get done, but as big as potentially making a mistake at work (although still not).

Thinking about it altogether, my greatest strength is that because I studied a generalist major, together with keeping my curiosity about what other people do, I have learned more or less about what different jobs involve. This, combined with my own ability to plan and my gift for spotting patterns, has been the driving force behind my development in the direction of coordination and management.

Thinking of Industries

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Moving on to the industries I would like to develop, I have always been interested in the cultural and creative industries as well as the education industry, although I have never formally worked in one of these industries. I have done company research on this and have come up with my own summary of the current situation of these two types of companies in China, i.e. the country where I want to work.

(Types of Educational Companies in China)

(Types of Cultural Companies in China)

I find that the types of companies I am interested in are all product-related, whether they are in the educational product categories in the educational industry (including course design, educational software design, educational website design, etc.) or in the cultural creative industries (including cultural creative products, cultural creative software or games, etc.). And there is a particular interest in companies related to digital products.

Although I have not worked for a similar company, there are commonalities in the logic of how product companies work in terms of operations, marketing, branding, and even product. I have come to this conclusion because I have also done research on specific positions.

(Marketing jobs in general)

These marketing or design positions have a variety of names. Different companies even have different title names for the same position, so I have used the job descriptions to summarise them in three perspectives: function, field, and role target. The different functions are more about the hard skills, for example, design jobs require knowledge of specific design software, marketing jobs require data analysis skills, etc. Different fields require different professional awareness, for example, advertising requires knowledge of how to produce advertisements, the laws of content, etc. Finally, different targets require more different soft skills, such as the ability to co-ordinate, communicate with clients, teamwork, etc.

After the internship and the Final Project experience, my objectives are more aimed at trying out different functions and finding the right one for me. So initially, I put the above table together just to make my next job search less confusing. But now that I have a new goal, maybe I will do all this to gain experience to eventually try my hand at coordination and management jobs. I know that what I lack most in myself as a manager or leader is the ability and confidence to manage, so this is what I want to learn more about in the future. Familiarising myself with the multiple jobs in the industry and developing management skills are not two separate things that need to be done. My mentor said to me that once I have a clear understanding of my role and have gained more experience I will naturally have the confidence.

In my final year of undergraduate study, deeper exposure to professional knowledge has made me realise that there is much more unknown to me than I had thought. I have therefore changed my goal from a static to a dynamic one, and my goal is to discover a goal. This may seem like a reversion back to the 'discovery' stage, but I prefer to believe that it is a cyclical process. I was presented with a new challenge before I decided to reconsider my professional path all over again. And in order to reach that goal, I need to continue to experiment in many ways. Since I already see myself as someone who knows a little bit of many things but is not proficient, I could know more.