Jessica Yang: Finding the True Measure of Your Potential (Controller at TELUS)

hi Jessica thank you so much for joining us today we're really excited to have you we are just going to go through some questions and just learn a little bit more about what you do Jessica and how you got to where you are our first question for you is can you share a little bit about your educational background and your career journey and how it led you to where you are today yeah sounds good I'm glad that I'm here and in terms of my career and how I become a controller today I think it started

a very very early stage of my life that my dad has shared with me a quote it's actually a very famous quote it's when one door closes another window opens so when I see that quote looking at it more so when one door closes P you life find some other opportunities and say yes to those opportunities when they present themselves and in the meantime don't worry work on yourself improve yourself and never give up so let me give you example when I attended the number one high school back in China I didn't lunch in a

glamous university as everyone expected but I didn't give up I learned an opportunity that I can learn English for one year back in China and then come to Canada and study so after a year of study English I actually got admitted to University of MOBA and fun fact is that University of Manitoba is actually ranking much higher than the rest of the University back in China so stepping one step back has actually helped me to achieve my goal a little bit later but a better results so another example again is that when I graduated from

University of MOBA with Bachelor of Commerce honors degree double major in accounting and finance I started as a cashier because I didn't really have any working experience so I said yes to this opportunity and start socializing my dream of of becoming a an accountant and the store manager knows my dream and started help me to networking and socialize with different people and sooner enough I got a cost analy position at the second largest mining company and my accounting Journey started from there uh when I look at my journey of accounting and finance I would say

there are three different areas I started as an accountant and uh spent two years to learning the full cycle account counting and at the same time achieved the CPA CGA designation and then later on I joined tell us and took on this corporate development manager position is actually doing merger and Acquisitions and I took on that position is because I just passed the CFA level one exam and I want to get some Finance uh related experience so that's why I said yes to a kind of like outside of accounting job and after doing the mer

acquisition for three years I said yes to this senior strategy manager position to manage the capital expenditure for our Talis Business Solutions team during those time I also achieved the CFA destination and then early this year I got promoted as a controller so coming back to the Finance and Accounting team within Talis again as a controller and it's a first people management position and what I do is to help the leadership team to understand how the accounting treatment on the revenue side of things because technology is ever involving and there a lot of new products

and services that needs accounting Specialties expertise to know how the revenue get recognize so yeah it's very challenging job and a lot of ambiguity situations but I really enjoy this position and also it's a people management position so I learned a lot this year of how to manage people and it's quite a challenging but I really enjoy it I would say for my career I really agree with one sentence that I'm reading this book called hidden Potential from Adam Grant I actually have the book over here with me and uh I will read this one

sentence and it says the true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you've reached but how far you climed to get there so it doesn't matter if life takes or not turn on you or what you wanted to do hasn't happened yet P your life and work hard on yourself and compete with yourself every day improve yourself but never give up your dream will come true maybe in another better way yeah that was a great piece of advice and I really like that line from the book it sounds like an interesting

one maybe I'll pick it up and read it one day so kind of segue into my next question which was can you provide us a bit more of an overview of your role as a controller at tell us and what are some of your day-to-day activities and operations yeah for sure so I would say say like my understanding of Talis has two different big part one part is managing the consumer side of things so how I understand is like when you and I walk into a t store and get a mobile phone and with a

plan that's counted as a consumer side it's the individual consumer come to the store and another side is the TS Business Solutions so I'm mainly working with TS Business Solutions where our customer is from uh businesses so it has different three three different segments it's public sector and the commercial sector and also small medium businesses and also on the accounting uh reporting side of things I'm mainly looking after the profit and loss report and on the profit and loss I think the general ones are Revenue direct cost and then lended add to direct margin and

then all PX and then it's your IA and then after that is capital expenditure and some other ly items so because Talis is so big and as a controller at tell us my responsibility is very specific so uh it's commercial and public sector and only looking after the revenue and the direct cost lending at the direct margin so that's my portfolio and my day-to-day can be very different um but majority of the work is month end triage and budget for people who doesn't really working at accounting and finance area I think month and budget probably

going to be very easy to understand but the triage I think is very tals terms so what it does is the same thing it's budgeting for the rest of the month in the next year and then we are really focusing on the next month and next quarter to make sure our month and lending is L very closely to our Target and that leads to another responsibility of my day-to-day is to analyze the variances when the amend lending is not really landed on our our Target so our team has to dive into the data and find

out what are the drivers for the differences so another big piece of my job is to help the leadership team to understand how the revenue are being recognized because as a what what I've mentioned earlier technology is ever evolving and T us is also diving into the new technologies and offer our customers with new Solutions and how do you recognize those revenue is depend on the accounting team to provide a ruling and help the leadership team to understand that it sounds like you're very busy every day but sounds interesting and it's obviously bringing in some

of the skills and experiences that you've learned before so besides your background in accounting and finance why did you take on a position such as a strategy manager and how does that help with your career development my life is not always straight line like I take turns and to go see some other stuff I think to take on the Magan acquisition and also the strategy management position at the beginning is just because I was study the CFA and it makes sense for me to get some Finance related experience but when I looking back to it

I felt like all the positions that I have been on there are a lot of skills that you can learn in all the positions and uh lot of skills and especially the soft skills actually can be transferable and it's actually Bo up my uh confidence because when I was working at this uh strategy team not everybody have the accounting background so I can offer that piece to the team and share the knowledge that I have so it boost up my confidence quite a bit and the same thing like when I coming back to the finance

team as a controller because I've done the strategy positions and I can zoom out and not just looking at the numbers but think bigger think what's the big picture so this is kind of maybe a a suggestion for the people who are young and I suggest you to go to different positions and learn different things it will definitely help you down the road and this is one of the things uh my teacher has told us when I was very young she's saying like when you learning or doing different things is like you picking up Stones

when it's dark you never know those are gold so whatever you learn put your full heart onto it learn it and one day it will be very useful yeah that was another great piece of advice so given that you have a lot of success in your career and you continue to really learn a lot and develop as a professional have you ever felt impostor syndrome yeah 100% I think impostor syndrome is such a popular topic this year everyone is talking about it I definitely conter impostor syndrome for sure especially this year when I took on

the controller position because it's the first people management position that I I'm taking off and I I started managing like four to five people within my team and their English is the first language the grow up over here they're super smart High performers and then like back in my mind is keep talking to myself as like English is my additional language I didn't grow up here who am I to manage those people so that spinning is like oh my God this is a lot and give me some anxiety so funny enough this year I also

hosted a imposter syndrome webinar with one of our EVP within Tas for our finance team and during this research of learning the impostor syndrome there are some techniques that you can use to help you to to overcome this impost syndrome feeling uh so one of the things I felt like it works very well for myself is to treat myself as a friend so as as long as I start thinking oh uh Jessica is my friend and now she got this controller position and started managing 4 to5 people I feel like oh yeah right she worked

really hard to achieve that position and she also learned a lot go through a lot of training to learn how to start managing people and I felt like she really deserved that position and I think she can do a great job of it so that's really like light bop switched up and I was like oh this will really help me to understand to be aware mindful of what is in part syndrome and recognize it when you're uh experiencing it and treat you as a friend and talk positively to yourself instead of negatively because we tend

to talk negatively to ourselves but talk positively yourself and then that will help a lot on the impulsive syndrome that's also another great piece of advice it's something I never thought about but when you really do think about it I feel like most of the time you're always congratulating your friends and giving them kudos to doing something good but most of the time you kind of beat yourself up a little bit so that's something that I'm definitely going to take into my my own life as well and based on accounting and finance and being in

that industry what are some skills and qualities you think are very crucial for someone looking to enter okay I will pick the top three that uh I think are very important so the first one is a proactiveness and curiosity so a lot of times because of the new technology is evolving so fast now and the data is huge amount of data coming in every day so most of the time not everything you've done it before so it's always a kind of ambiguity situation so give you example early in my uh career and development my manager

gave me a task saying like hey do this one and uh it's not that I don't want do it it's the fear that I'm going to fail my manager or fail myself that I cannot do a good job of it but over those years when I look at it it's not that it's just your fear so overcome your fear and dive into the problem that you never done it before maybe no one has done it before but dive into it have confidence and looking for resources around you and ask or manager if you really don't

know where to start but start somewhere start asking people and start asking how can I tackle this question or how can I solve this issue and then on and on you will find the information coming in and people start helping you and then if I felt like I'm a little bit off track or something I would come back to the manager saying like hey this is what I'm thinking what I'm going to do and I just want to check in with you and see if I'm on track or not and they will give you some

guidance and Direction and who to reach out to and get some training on it then after you finish the task most of the time I find for myself if I dive into it and solve those problem I actually can do a great job so it's a great accomplishment at the end uh the great feeling that that you have so I find it's just the fear of preventing us to take on something that we never done it before we we have that a hesitation so ignore that fear acknowledge it but ignore it and come to the

task itself and really think about how to solve those problems and be proactive be curious asking questions and I think that's a great quality and skills you can have with actually lot of positions right now the second one I would say is pay attention to details because we're talking about numbers and we're using a lot of Excel files so pay attention to details make sure you're speciate is always accurate and you reporting data is also accurate so pay attention to details is really important I think for the accounting and finance related positions and the last

one I would say is data analytics and automation because the amount of data we're encountering especially in the big companies it's a lot so Automation and including like learning how to do the micro python would help to automate some of the processes so instead of spending five hours how can you spend less time to just working on the numbers and more thinking about what is the number telling me where can I help the um business team to generate more revenue from accounting perspective so I think those are the three good qualities or skills that you

could have to get a very good accounting and a finance position that was awesome I think those are all qualities that are very related to those rules as well so given you mentioned earlier that technology continues to evolve every single day and we are constantly having to catch up with that in terms of AI how do you think that will affect your work and are you afraid that it may take over your job one day yeah I've been talking with a lot of like Finance and Accounting people on the AI topic and it's again it's

a very very very popular topic of recent years and um I would say no I'm not afraid that AI can take over my job I actually really want AI develop so well that it can take over the repetitive side of the work and then here's my wild dream if AI can do that I hope I can only work three days and I have four days off so I can do something that is connecting with the people hang out with my friends and have more time to learn some something uh else and experience life right because

we have limited time so I want to experience more of life so in terms of AI I think I always look at it as a tool for for myself like for example chat GPT I use it to check the grammar mistakes that I'm making or if I'm stuck on some questions I would ask chat jpt to give me some ideas then it inspires me to find out my own answer so really leverage those new Technologies and understand what they are and incorporate into your life every day and then you will not feel like it's a

huge monster come after you your job you actually more feel like oh it's my friend I can leverage I can use it and another very important piece is that find a community with AI like within Talis we have ai team help yourself to be inside that team and shape this thing like shape how you want to make sure the AI has working your way to make your life easier so yeah of course I'm not afraid of it and I'm hoping it can take over the repetitive side of work and excels compose all the data together

and I can have like four days off and do something creative maybe learn a dance or something yeah I definitely think that it would probably be a while if it were to ever take over your job but again like you said I feel like now especially since everyone has access to it it's definitely a good tool to use that can really benefit us and maybe perhaps make the quality of our work better as well so has its pros with that that was my last question for you today so thank you so much Jessica for joining

us I had a lot of fun and I got to learn a lot so thank you so much and have a great rest of your weekend yeah thank you so much for having me and I wish everyone a happy holiday and a moving upwards in 2024