Spotlight on Women: Chantel Liu
At Valentia Partners we focus on making our workplace a more diverse and inclusive environment for everyone. Operating in a male dominated industry, we wanted to shine a spotlight on our women and enable them to tell their stories of success and what inspired them to pursue a role in Management Consulting. Below you can read more about Chantel’s experience.
Chantel Liu | Consulting Analyst
What inspired you to pursue the career path that you are on?
After graduating from the university and starting my first job, I wasn’t entirely sure what career path I would like to pursue. But as I worked longer, I got to understand myself more, e.g., my strengths and weaknesses. As I worked in my previous job, I enjoyed helping people solve their problems by gathering information from various sources or asking relevant stakeholders. Therefore, I decided to pursue a career in the consulting industry where one of the major tasks would be helping companies to solve their most challenging issues.
What does a typical day for you look like?
My typical day starts with drinking a cup of warm water and making myself breakfast. After finishing breakfast, I would walk to the office, or I would just turn on my laptop if I work from home that day. Then before starting work, I will make myself a cup of coffee to officially kickstart my workday. Then I will briefly plan what I would like to do or should do throughout the day by making a to-do list. After working the whole day, I would usually cook myself a delicious dinner and finish off the day by catching up with some reading/ podcasts.
How do you continue to grow professionally?
For me, to grow and improve professionally is to treasure every learning opportunity at work and try to improve and learn as much as you can. Every day at work, you will face different challenges and difficulties or even make mistakes, and I believe these could be important elements to understand your strengths and weaknesses so that you could be able to continue doing the things you’re good at and to work on the things you still have rooms for improvements.
Tell us about an accomplishment you are proud of?
One accomplishment that I’m proud of would be completing a master’s degree with the result that I aimed for. When I think back to the time, I was doing my master’s degree, It was quite challenging, especially in the second semester. I remembered I had multiple deadlines in a week and a few group projects to submit within a short period of time. I had to complete a 24-hour exam where I had to perform various quantitative and qualitative analyses and wrote a proposal. At that time, I thought it would be impossible to finish all of the work and exams, but I did it eventually and graduated with the result that I aimed for.
Tell us about a woman who has made a positive impact on your career?
My ex-line manager from my first job after graduating from university is one of the women who has made a positive impact on my career development. She is a very experienced person in the department and very often she would just sit at her seat quietly, working hard. She taught me a lot of things, from the more technical skills at work to the soft skills on how to communicate and negotiate with stakeholders. Even though she is a quiet person, whenever she wanted to make a point/ speak up during meetings, everyone would listen and adopt her suggestions/ feedback. She is one of the role models that I would look up to and I have learned a lot of things from her as well.
How do you define success?
I believe that the way to define success does not essentially need to be objective/ quantitative e.g., reaching a certain KPI or having a certain measure to weigh against. To me, success is about achieving a goal that you set for yourself/ something you at first thought would be difficult/ challenging but you did it anyway.
How do you achieve balance between your work and personal life?
The key thing to do to strike a balance between work and personal life would be good time management. A simple task that I would do every day and at the start of the week is to write a list of things that I would like to achieve or do personally and at work. Having daily/ weekly to-do-lists is very helpful to brainstorm what tasks or things you would like to do for the day and week and to plan ahead and make sure that you make time to relax instead of only focusing on working.
What advice would you give other women starting out in their career?
I’m still very new in terms of my career, so I may not be the best person to advise other women. But what I would remind myself constantly is not to be afraid of making mistakes and to improve consistently. Making mistakes is inevitable, especially at work, what’s the important thing is to learn from them and make constant improvements from the mistakes that you’ve made. As the book Atomic Habit suggested that we all should try to become better by 1 per cent every day and by having this constant and consistent improvement, you will become so much better a year later.
What has been the best advice you have received to date relating to your career?
The best career advice I’ve received would be not to be afraid to ask questions. I used to keep a lot of questions to myself and tried to solve them by myself either by looking them up online or within the intranet of my previous company. My ex-line manager noticed this pattern of me and gave me this advice during one of our feedback sessions. She told me that it is okay to ask questions and sometimes it would even initiate a new idea and a new discussion which could lead to a more innovative solution to a problem/ task. Till now, I constantly remind myself to ask more questions when necessary and be sure to reach out to people if I have any questions or difficulties.
What do you enjoy most about working in Financial Services?
The most enjoyable thing about working in the Financial Services industry would be the exposure that I’m able to have. In the few years of working in Financial Services, I would often meet different people from different levels and different departments, often in meetings or town halls. On these occasions, they would often share their knowledge or insights from the perspective of the department they are working in right now or from their previous experiences in the Bank. I would often gain a lot of knowledge and understanding of what the other departments of the Bank would be like or a general high-level understanding of how different people would present their thoughts and what their thought processes are.
What makes a great leader?
A great leader to me would be a person who is not only able to lead the team to get tasks/ the job done, but also able to have positive impacts professionally and personally. They would not only talk about how to achieve things but serve as a role model and would be able to inspire the people that work for them to learn what they would do certain things or to make them a role model.