Event Report | Career Advancement in Challenging

The latest Irish Chamber of Commerce (Singapore) Women with Ambition event series did not disappoint with critical career insights shared from 3 of Singapore's highly accomplished business leaders.

A full house at Singapore's Grand Hyatt heard Mercury Creative's Joyce O'Dwyer, SRT's Charlotte Nors and Microsoft's Lisa Halim tell their career stories and discussed the hurdles and obstacles they have come across along the way.

Questions posed to the panel included:

What had been the most challenging part of their career to date and why?
Describing a game changer moment in their career - what was the action and what did they learn from it?
What was the best and worst decision they've ever made?
If they could do things all over again, would they choose the same path themselves?

Joyce O'Dwyer gave very clear advice on trusting your gut instinct when it comes to making decisions and also talked about how Singapore has given her business opportunities that she knows would be far harder to come by in other countries.

Lisa Halim talked about how she made a big move from the travel industry into technology first with SAP and more recently with Microsoft and stressed the importance of transferable skills. She has found managing change has been the biggest challenge in her career so far.

Charlotte Nors has taken on the top job at SRT - now the buck stops with her. The key to her success is the fantastic team she has behind her. While this may be a small team on a permanent day to day basis, when it comes to big productions like Shakespeare in the Park, this involves hundreds and the commitment from everyone in the lead-up and during the event never fails to amaze her. She also was adamant that you've got to love your job. She said, "Like what you do and you'll love doing it".

All speakers agreed that you must always hire the right people. Your head may tell you that they may not be the best, but your instinct will tell you that they are right for you and your business.

This, of course, was just a short summary of the great conversations that took place between our speakers, guests and our energetic moderator Chris Reed of Black Marketing.

We are extremely thankful to the Irish Chamber of Commerce for allowing us to sponsor such a prestigious event and we look forward to welcoming you to the final event in the series taking place in September. Details to be released in the coming weeks.

Finally, thank you to our wonderful speakers who gave up precious time to tell their career stories so they could hopefully inspire and encourage others whatever stage in their career they may be.