What I Learnt 6 Months into My SGUnited Traineeship

It has been 6 months since I started my SGUnited Traineeship with a local bank back in August 2020.

It's a halfway mark and I thought it'll be nice to pen down what I have learnt or experienced so far.

Kind of like a good midpoint check on my progress and plan.

If you are currently working as a trainee and would like to share your experience, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to us to share your experience.

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1. Slide presentations the school never taught

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I thought I was a good presenter until after my first couple of presentations to my boss, I realised I sucked at it.

Note: Everything the school ever taught you about presentation slides, throw it out the window. 

I'm saying this as a guy who went to both a business school and an IT school.

I was considered a good presenter back in school, praised by most of my lecturers and scoring high on almost all my presentations.

Entering the workforce and having to make my first presentation to my boss, I was like "how hard can it be?".

Turns out it was really tough, simply because it was very different from how schools made us think about how a presentation should work.

Standard School Slides Format

The school slides generally fall under this format, in that sequence.

1. Start with a narrative or what you want to find (2 to 3 slides)

2. Explain the numbers you did/found (2 to 3 slides)

3. Give the conclusion/steps/actions to take (1 slide)

I did just that, and literally, I got the "so what? what's the purpose of this?" from my boss at the first 3 slides.

I literally went to the last slide, showed the conclusion, then got sent back to work on the numbers again 🤷‍♂️.

That didn't end up the way I expected.

Long story short, after a few rounds of such "so what?", I went to learn how professional people (like Mckinsey) did presentation slides.

It was completely different from anything the school taught.

I learnt from YouTube how to create consultancy-kind of slides and actually paid for a course on it (which BTW is not SkillsFuture claimable cause apparently it's not a "skill" the authorities find "technical" 🤷‍♂️).

Below is the video that I learnt from to create consultancy-kind of slides. Thought it would be useful if I put it down here for you to watch and learn.

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Recommended Read: Why You Should Max Your CPF Retirement Sum Early

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2. Slow decision-making

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As with any organisations, once it starts to get big, bureaucracy and controls start to set in to rein in the chaos, which at times also meant that decision-making becomes very slow.

Although I had previously written that I think companies should follow Mark Zuckerberg's motto of "move fast and break things", I no longer think that this motto fits ALL companies.

Can you imagine that your bank account or payment stopped functioning because a bank was progressing so fast that some of its features/products were breaking down?

So companies that are dealing with serious mission-critical products/services should not adopt that whole "move fast and break things" mindset.

However, that's not to say "don't move and keep things."

We still need to make decisions, make bets, and bet on macro trends.

And instead of waiting for 100% of information clarity before making a decision, sometimes it's best to make a move even with just 70% information clarity. 

Sometimes what causes lost opportunity is the time to wait for that 30% of the information to come in.

Like Jeff Bezos said, there are 2 types of decisions, and most decisions belong to Type 2. 

But large companies have the tendency to use the Type 1 framework on Type 2 matters, which slows down progress and leads to frustration.

So it's important for companies to understand if their decisions are Type 1 or 2, and applying the corresponding decision-making matrix.

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3. Too many meetings

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Meetings can be packed end-to-end from the start of the day to the end of the day.

Real work can only be done after 6pm when no more meetings are schedule (if you are lucky)

How would it be possible to not work overtime (OT)?

I used to think that it was the lack of manpower that result in overworked staff.

Now I realised, we are not overworked, we are just over-meeting.

If we reduced the number of meetings we have, we might just have enough time to do some real work.

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Recommended Read: 8 Years of Investing: How a Hedge Fund Manager Wannabe Became Just Another Singaporean

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4. It's not about learning

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 I think a lot of people get into a job thinking "alright, I think I am going to take this job because I can learn a lot from this role/position/job/etc", and I personally don't believe in this kind of thinking.

I personally (it's just my opinion) think that it's better to pick a job that I can excel in, and then see what I can learn on my own during my time with the company.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that you shouldn't learn anything on the job. You should still learn how to do your job right (the nuances and whatnot).

But join a few companies, and you'll soon realise the hard skills (systems, software, tools, applications, etc), are things that you can learn, and probably are not able to bring them over to another company because they probably have other systems, etc.

Instead, it's the things that are not in the SOP, like slides creation, or positioning of offerings, etc, that is portable across most companies, and are things that you pick up along the job, usually without someone guiding you.

1. It's a company, not a training institute. 

I always think in terms of "what can I offer you?" instead of "what can you offer me?"

I think a better offer would be to go in with a mindset of "this is my skills, this is what I can do to help you grow your business. Let me try", than one that is "I know I am not skilled for the job currently but I'll work hard and learn and do my best.".

I'm not saying the latter is bad.

But I'm just saying, if I'm an employer, I would think that the former is a much better offer than the latter. 

You do your best to push the company forward, and try and learn something on the side.

Not the other way round, try and learn something while pushing the company forward on the side.

Is this a hard and fast rule? Of course not!

It depends on situations, just like what Sir Richard Branson says.

2. Learning is personal

It's interesting how Singapore is now pushing people towards lifelong learning.

It's like once people graduated from school and entered the workforce, they immediately stopped learning - which I do think is true, due to circumstances (commitments) and the whole "That's it I'm done with school".

When actually if you look at really successful people, they are always learning.

We like to think learning has to be proper, it has to have a school, have a curriculum, and it better gives me a certificate at the end of my course.

But when you look at successful people of our times (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc), I don't think they take courses on the side.

But they are constantly learning.

It doesn't have to be from a school, and it doesn't have to be formalised at work.

If you are keen to learn, you will learn. 

If you are not keen to learn, anyone who has been through school will know that nothing will ever get learnt.

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Recommended Read: 9 Things I Learnt from my Internship at GIC

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Conclusion

I like my current role. 

It's a mixture of marketing, ops, analytics, programming (although added on subsequently without additional pay 🤷‍♂️).

It's a wide variety of things to do daily, which doesn't bore me, a key reason why I chose this role over other offers.

And I do think there are still quite a lot of things to learn (which is great).

But, as I always say, there are always rooms for improvement. 😉

And PS: to anyone from my company reading this, please don't not convert me after my traineeship ends 🙏🤣

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