Project Manager | Project Management Career Coach | Helping early-career professionals (0-5 years) transition into project management roles in the IT industry.

I never planned to work in mining.
I never planned to shift from project management to communications either.
But careers aren’t always linear and mine is proof.

After years in IT and project management, I made the leap into a completely new industry and role, handling internal communications, global training, and office operations.

Now, I document this journey to help professionals see what it really looks like to:
🌍 Transition industries & roles without starting from scratch
🧠 Build adaptability and communication skills that stand out
💡 Reimagine success when you’re starting over in your 30s

On my profile you’ll find:
🔹 Stories & lessons from inside a global mining company
🔹 Corporate career and life lessons
🔹 Honest reflections on career transitions and identity shifts

If you’ve ever thought about starting fresh, moving industries, or re-entering the workforce in a new role, my content is built for you.

👉 Follow me here on LinkedIn for my weekly posts & livestreams, and join the community I’m building for professionals navigating change together.

Mary Tresa Gabriel

Was it scary to move from IT into a completely different industry like mining?

Short answer: Yes. Very.
Long answer: It was scary, uncomfortable, and also one of the most growth-heavy decisions I’ve made.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this transition, it’s this:

Your career doesn’t change overnight.
It changes through questions, conversations, and courage to try.

Moving from IT to mining was more about:

• Letting go of being “the expert”
• Asking basic (sometimes embarrassing) questions
• Rebuilding confidence from scratch
• Translating transferable skills instead of job titles

What helped me navigate the shift (still in-progress) 👇

1️⃣ Owning the beginner phase
Not pretending I knew it all, and being okay with learning publicly.

2️⃣ Leaning on transferable skills
Stakeholder management, problem-solving, coordination, skills travel even when industries don’t.

3️⃣ Having real conversations
Most clarity came from people who had already made unconventional moves.

Career pivots are messy, emotional, and deeply personal.
But they’re also where growth hides.

#Createmomentum

Operations Coordinator at Weir | Documenting my career transition | Project Management Professional (PMP) | Work Abroad, Culture, Corporate life & Career Coach

📖 First book of 2026

This arrived at the perfect moment, just before I put away my Christmas tree.

Dare to Lead is my first read of the year, sent by the Nordic Business Forum, and it feels like the right way to start 2026: with courage, conversations, and intention.

Also, I’m such a sucker for handwritten notes, thank you Heli Hänninen and team. It truly made my day. 🫶 

What’s your current read for 2026?

It’s NOT uncomfortable to me that you moved abroad and are starting over in your career.
That you’re figuring things out, learning the system, and finding your footing.

What IS uncomfortable to me is:

using this as an excuse for 6+ months
not applying or networking consistently
avoiding visibility because it feels awkward
and putting in zero effort to actually get better

Because it’s NOT possible to stay bad if you’re putting in the reps.

I’ve seen people move countries with
no local experience,
no network,
sometimes not even the language.

The confidence they have today isn’t talent.
It’s hours.
Weeks.
Months of showing up anyway.

So please, stop telling yourself:
“I’m struggling because I’m new here.”

That explanation doesn’t age well.
And it expires much faster than you think.

Send this to someone who’s capable of more than they’re currently doing. 💌 

#CreateMomentum

Last year, I realized I had built my entire motivation system around validation at work.

Here are 3 ways I wouldn’t recommend chasing validation as a corporate softie:

1. Waiting for praise to feel competent
No Teams message? No “great job” in a 1:1?
My brain instantly translated silence into you’re not enough.

2. Overdelivering just to be noticed
Every deck, every email, every extra task came with an unspoken hope:
Someone will see this and say I’m doing well.

3. Treating feedback as emotional currency
Good feedback = dopamine high.
No feedback = self-doubt spiral.
That loop is exhausting.

This is how I do it instead:

1. Work from my own standards.
I do a good job because it aligns with my values, not because I’m hoping someone claps.

2. Let feedback be information, not identity.
Useful? I take it. 🙂 
Neutral? I don’t take it personal. 🙂 

3. Give myself credit first.
External praise is a bonus now not a lifeline.

Remember:
If you’re constantly refreshing your inbox for a “great job” message, it’s not a motivation problem, it’s a validation loop.

Building an internal feedback system is one of the softest, strongest things you can do for your career.

✨ If this resonated, you’re not alone. 💌 

#CreateMomentum

Focusing on tiny, low‑effort habits you can stack into your week now is how you stay visible at work all year without waiting for the next “fresh start” or promotion cycle to finally take yourself seriously.

Save this carousel, if you want micro-visibility habits that feel low‑maintenance, low‑overwhelm, and actually doable on a busy Tuesday not a 5am miracle routine you’ll drop in 10 days.

#CreateMomentum

7 micro visibility habits

If I were starting (or resetting) my career today, 
here’s how I adapt Lagom to my work life and how YOU can too 👇

✅ Work within clear hours 
Not because I lack ambition, but because I respect my energy.
Focused hours > stretched days.

✅ Prioritize deeply, not endlessly
One or two meaningful outcomes a day beats juggling ten half-done tasks.

✅ Use systems instead of constant effort
Checklists, routines, and structure so I don’t rely on motivation alone.

✅ Upskill with intention
I learn what’s relevant to my role and next step. (one skill or tool at a time)

✅ Use breaks intentionally
Short check-ins with coworkers, have unplanned conversations. (that's what makes workplaces humane)

What would you add in your current routine to make it a little more lagom?

#createmomentum

How to practice letting others move at their speed:

1. Stop racing clocks that aren’t yours
2. Treat comparison like background noise, not instructions
3. Build a pace you can actually breathe in

Many of us (including me, guilty as charged 🫣 ) get stuck measuring our progress against someone else’s highlight reel.
Promotions, salaries, titles, timelines : they start to feel like scorecards instead of stories.

There will always be someone earning more, moving faster, or posting bigger wins.

Now, REPEAT after me :

Instead of using their timeline as a weapon against myself,
I’m choosing to build a career I can actually enjoy living in.

Slow enough to notice it.
Steady enough to trust it.

#createmomentum

Everyone says being a “soft girl” at work means you’re sweet, emotional, and just lucky to have a good manager and honestly, I disagree.

Not because softness doesn’t matter, but because most women are using it in the "sit quietly and hope they notice" way.

Most corporate women are trying to be the “nice colleague” everyone loves, when in reality, softness is a leadership strategy you can actually build.

Empathy, calm energy, and emotional intelligence are not fluffy extras, they’re the exact skills modern companies say they want in leaders and people managers.​

The more you protect your time, the more high‑impact projects you can own.
The more you document your work, the easier it is for leaders to see your value.
And the more you show up as your soft, honest self, the more people trust you with the big stuff.

Being a soft girl in corporate is about becoming the kind of woman who naturally attracts opportunities because her boundaries, communication, and consistency make her impossible to overlook.

So no, you don’t need to “toughen up” or become a different person to move up.
You need to stop hiding behind “she’s just nice” and start using your softness as your edge.

🤍 Save this if you’re done shrinking your softness

#createmomentum
LinkedIn Guide to Creating

Corporate Softie Narrative

Choosing a “soft” approach at work doesn’t mean doing less.
It means being intentional about where your energy goes.

From a corporate lens, this looks like 👇

1️⃣ Curating peace at work, not chaos
Clear priorities > constant firefighting.
Strong boundaries > being available 24/7.
Sustainable performance beats short-term hustle.

2️⃣ Romanticizing routines = building systems
Daily check-ins, structured workflows, focused deep work blocks.
Not everything has to be rushed to be effective.

3️⃣ Rest as a performance strategy
Well-rested people make better decisions.
They communicate better.
They lead better.
This isn’t softness, it’s operational maturity.

4️⃣ Speaking to yourself like a leader, not a critic
Growth conversations don’t start with self-shame.
They start with awareness, reflection, and course correction.

5️⃣ Investing in what actually nourishes your career
Skills over titles.
Learning over constant proving.
People and environments that support long-term growth.

Ambition doesn’t always NEEED to look aggressive. 😉 

#createmomentum

Week back as a corporate softie in 2026 working as an operations coordinator at Weir Minerals 🫶💻

This Wednesday was my first day back at work after 2 weeks off, and honestly, 3 working days felt like a tiny soft launch back into reality.

✨ What I worked on :
→ Picked up one main pending task: the office extension work
→ Reviewed the 2026 goals to get clarity on what this year is really building toward
→ Started shaping the training coordination work plan, which looks like the biggest chunk of work ahead
→ Initiated planning for the first training of the year [feels good to get the ball rolling early]
→ Began working on the internal communications plan for the year [completely new territory for me 🫣]

✍ Things I learned from my manager this week
1. Templatise articles instead of starting from scratch every time
2. Go to teams with a clear plan instead of asking “what would you like to do?”
3. Be intentional about audiences - refer back to one main repository instead of creating new ones again and again

📖 Resource that helped me this week : How to Create a World Class Internal Comms Strategy with Jenni Field (by Workvivo by Zoom YouTube video)

📞 Helpline to all office admins/workplace folks - When you’re managing an office extension or moving to a new building, how do you handle things going off-plan due to factors outside your control?

PS: Inspired by the weekly wrap-up posts by Morgan, trying my own version here 🙂

#createmomentum

The fastest way to build a real office culture
is to let people be a little weird at lunch.

Why is there this obsession with:
“Lunch is personal time. No work talk. Just eat.”

Every lunch could be a mini offsite.
Instead, most of them become a silent scrolling competition.

And then there are days like the “pump” day.

Let me take you to one of our lunch discussion - we started talking about how pump really works which went to centrifugal pump, Archimedes' screw and what not. 
At end Mauricio just concluded: “A pump is a pump.”

Here’s what these lunchtime conversations really create:
1. They melt the formal mask.
2. They turn colleagues into actual people.
3. They become inside jokes you remember more than most meetings.

I love a focused, productive workday.
But I also love a slightly chaotic, very human lunch table.

Because culture is built when someone says something so random
that everyone forgets to check their phones for 20 minutes.

A big part of being a team at Weir Minerals is you actually enjoy working with & is feeling safe enough to be your weird, curious, honest self.

If we can’t handle that for 30 minutes over food,
I’m not sure how we’re handling real collaboration.

P.S: Do you have a “a pump is a pump”-level quote from your office?

#createmomentum
LinkedIn Guide to Creating

Here’s something people who move countries don’t talk about enough…
(and it has nothing to do with museums, snow photos, or “living the dream”)

A lot of us leave behind careers, identities, and support systems to start again from the beginning.

While many people plan the move on paper (flights, documents, housing), very few prepare for what it does to their confidence, their career, and their sense of self.

It’s no surprise that many of us hit bumps in those first few years. SO : 

It’s okay if your career path looks “messy” for a while.
It’s okay if you feel behind when you compare yourself to people back home.
It’s okay if some days you’re excited to be here and other days you just miss home.

Over time, I realised this:

- You can support someone else’s dream without giving up on your own.
- You’re allowed to grieve the life you left, even if you chose this one.
- Starting again in your 20s or 30s (or later) doesn’t mean you failed; it means you’re brave.
- The “small” wins: a new friend, a local coffee spot, your first job interview in a new country, are not small at all.
- You’re not “just a dependent” or “just a student.” You’re rebuilding a whole identity.

Here’s what I’d tell my past self who just moved:

Be grateful you got this chance. Don’t overthink the next 5 years.
Don’t compare every day to “how it was back home.”
Just focus on building today 🫶 

What’s one thing you’d tell yourself on the day you moved countries?

#CreateMomentum

If your 9-to-5 makes you feel like a replaceable part in a giant machine, this is for you.

Here are my TOP 3 learnings as a corporate softie from Dan Koe’s video on thriving with multiple interests :

1️⃣ Being hyper-specialised in one repetitive task makes you easy to replace and slowly kills your curiosity and joy at work.
- you can stop blaming yourself for being bored and start designing a path where your different skills and curiosities actually work together instead of being squeezed into one box.

2️⃣ Your mix of interests (career, psychology, content, productivity, etc.) is not a distraction; it’s the intersection that makes yourperspective hard to copy, even by AI.
- you jumping between interests isn’t a character problem; it’s your brain trying to collect more dots so you can connect them in a unique way later.

3️⃣ Instead of just binge‑watching or reading, you can treat it as “research” and share simple notes online, turning learning into an asset, not just an escape. (just like this one 😉 )
- you don’t wait to become an expert. You just study, take notes in public, and let that habit quietly build an audience, reputation, and optionality outside your 9‑to‑5.

BONUS - Your personal brand is the space where people come to change, using the same ideas and systems you're using to help the past version of YOU.
- you stop forcing yourself into random “niches” and instead build a space that reflects your mind, helping the past version of you.

Which one of these ideas are you going to act on first ?

#CreateMomentum

Here are a 3️⃣ signs you might be a corporate softie:

Number 1️⃣ : You feel genuinely guilty when you don’t give 120%, even if no one asked you to. Over-preparing, over-delivering, triple‑checking emails, this is your way of coping with the fear of disappointing people. It looks like “ownership” on the outside, but inside it’s your brain trying to keep you safe.

Number 2️⃣ : You need time to emotionally recover after “small” work moments. A sharp Teams message, a skipped thank you, a tense meeting, your body holds onto it for hours. Other people brush it off. You replay it in your head on the commute home, wondering if you did something wrong.

Number 3️⃣ : You think a lot about whether you belong at work. Self‑determination theory says we need autonomy, competence, and relatedness to truly thrive and corporate softies are hyper‑tuned into that relatedness part. If the room feels cold, you shut down. If your manager is kind, you blossom.

You are not “too sensitive for corporate.” You are a sensitive professional in a system that was not designed with you in mind. 

And that’s why I’m building a community for professionals who don’t just want to survive performance reviews and team calls, but want to feel safe, seen, and allowed to be soft at work.

Do you secretly think you might be a “corporate softie”? 

I Help Corporate Professionals Gain Career Clarity & Fulfillment | Founder @Amplify Your Home | Global AI Tax Copilot Strategist @EY

Don't be fooled by my appearance. Quiet, Asian, tiny girl.

In the last decade, I've...

Successfully navigated the corporate giants: Goldman Sachs, PwC, Deloitte and EY.

Built communities, tax and financial models, and automations. (Excel wizard here)

Empowered employees to own their damn careers,

Challenge their norms to do something special.

That's when Problems become Opportunities,

Strategies into Actions.

You are not Alone.

Ready to redefine your career? Let's make it happen.

Mary Fung

Accenture and Snowflake just formed a joint business group. 5,000+ certified consultants dedicated to AI and data transformation.

That's not a partnership announcement. That's a statement about where enterprise AI is heading.

Reading between the lines:

- The big consultancies are betting hard on data infrastructure as the AI bottleneck
- 'AI transformation' is becoming 'data transformation with AI capabilities'
- If you don't have your data house in order, no amount of AI magic will save you

What this means for enterprise buyers:

The consulting giants are building massive practices around making AI actually work. They're not selling AI hype anymore - they're selling the boring stuff. Data quality. Governance. Integration. Infrastructure.

They learned something from the last 2 years: Executives buy AI demos. But they pay for data cleanup.

If Accenture is deploying 5,000 people to this, ask yourself: Is your organization investing anywhere close to proportionally?

Own Your Damn Career | Founder @Amplify Your Home | Head of Synthetic Data & Simulations @EY

10 AI Predictions for 2026:

1. Gemini will quietly become the default AI model — not because it's best, but because it's baked into Google Workspace and enterprises buy whatever comes with the contract.

2. AI agents will be the buzzword of 2026, but 90% of enterprise "agents" will just be fancy if-then workflows with a chatbot wrapper.

3. Middle management will shrink faster than anyone expected. If your job is routing information between people, start upskilling now.

4. LinkedIn will be flooded with AI slop, which will make authentic human writing easier to spot and more valuable.

5. The companies that win with AI won't have the best models — they'll have the cleanest data and fastest approval pathways.

6. Most "AI transformations" announced in 2025 will be quietly walked back, rebranded, or buried in footnotes.

7. Copilot will be on every enterprise desktop, but 80% of employees will use it the same way they use Excel — poorly and rarely.

8. The Chief AI Officer title will peak and then quietly disappear because nobody figured out what it was supposed to do.

9. Prompt engineering will stop being a job title and become a baseline skill, like knowing how to Google.

10. The people who actually ship AI in 2026 will be the same ones who shipped software in 2016 — builders who know that technology is 20% of the problem.

Everyone keeps saying, “AI needs better foundations.”

That’s true.
But it’s not the part people think.

KPMG isn’t warning about missing tech.
They’re warning about missing discipline.

Most enterprises want AI to move fast
on top of systems that were never designed to be trusted.

Bad data.
Unclear ownership.
Processes built for humans to patch gaps with judgment.

So when AI breaks, leaders don’t ask:
“Why was this workflow fragile to begin with?”

They say:
“AI isn’t ready.”

AI doesn’t fail in enterprises because it’s too powerful.
It fails because it refuses to hide the mess underneath.

Foundations aren’t glamorous.
They don’t demo well.
They don’t win internal applause.

But without them, AI just scales dysfunction faster.

The companies that actually win with AI won’t be the loudest adopters.
They’ll be the ones willing to do the unsexy work first:
clarify ownership, clean data, redesign workflows, define accountability.

Everyone else will keep running pilots —
and blaming the tech when reality shows up.

Most companies don’t hire talent.
They hire job descriptions.

And then they’re shocked when they end up with average people doing average work.

Cursor does the opposite.
They don’t ask “What role do we need?”
They ask “Is this person undeniable?”

If the answer is yes, they bend the org around them.
They don’t wait for headcount approvals.
They don’t debate leveling.
They don’t hide behind process.

They move.

Because:
> Elite talent is rarer than clean org charts.
> Process is cheap. People aren’t.

Most companies optimize for order.
The best ones tolerate chaos to secure leverage.

If you hire roles first, you get replaceable people.
If you hire people first, they create roles you didn’t know you needed.

That’s how you build an org of superstars.
Not by perfect hiring processes but by having the courage to recognize greatness
and act before it’s gone.

Goldman’s CEO said AI can now do 95% of an S-1 in minutes.

Everyone keeps asking what happens to the jobs.

That’s the wrong question.

The real question is:
What is the 5% that still matters?

It’s not formatting.
It’s not drafting.
It’s not models, footnotes, or precedent decks.

The 5% is:
• deciding what risk actually matters
• knowing what to leave out
• framing the story regulators and investors will believe
• understanding where this deal breaks under pressure
• making judgment calls no template can defend

The 95% was always execution theater.
The 5% was always the job - it was just hidden behind process and headcount.

AI didn’t remove human value.
It stripped it down to the part you can’t fake.

If your role was built on producing the 95%,
you weren’t senior...you were insulated.

Now the insulation is gone.

What’s left is judgment, taste, and accountability.
And that’s the part most people were never trained for.

That’s the real disruption.

Most “agentic AI” projects fail for the same reason most corporate transformations fail:
people mistake motion for progress.

McKinsey looked at 50 real agentic AI builds.

The failure wasn’t the models.
It wasn’t the prompts.
It wasn’t the talent.

It was ego.

Teams built impressive agents instead of fixing broken workflows.
They layered AI on top of chaos and called it innovation.

Users don’t need Copilot to be visionary.
They need it to be boringly correct.

Once it earns trust, then it can become transformative.

But this is exactly why Copilot keeps disappointing:
the people building it aren’t the people living in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint all day.

They don’t feel the cost of a small error.
They don’t feel the “I now have to double-check everything” tax.
So the product ships features… before it ships trust.

And Satya stepping in as PM won’t magically fix that.

This isn’t a leadership-attention problem.
It’s a proximity problem.

Until the builders are forced to live in the workflow and be judged on accuracy, not demos
Copilot will keep being impressive… and optional.

Trust first.
Then transformation.

How to Position Yourself for AI-First Roles:

> Stop learning tools. Start solving problems. Anyone can take a ChatGPT course. Few people can articulate how AI solved a specific business problem with measurable results.

> Document everything you build. That workflow you automated? That analysis you accelerated? Screenshot it. Write it up. Your future employer can't see what you don't show them.

> Get uncomfortable with ambiguity. AI roles live in the gray zone between 'definitely possible' and 'completely impossible.' If you need clear requirements to function, this isn't your path.

> Learn to speak two languages. Technical enough to evaluate AI capabilities. Business enough to translate them into ROI. The people who bridge this gap are absurdly valuable.

> Find the AI skeptics. The person in your company who thinks AI is overhyped? Befriend them. They'll show you every gap in your thinking and make your pitches bulletproof.

> Build a public track record. LinkedIn posts about AI projects. GitHub repos with experiments. A portfolio site showing what you've built. Hiring managers are tired of 'AI enthusiasts' with nothing to show.

> Apply before you're ready. The AI field moves so fast that job requirements are wishlists, not checklists. If you meet 60% of the requirements, you're qualified. They'll teach you the rest.

AI isn’t limited by capability.
It’s limited by imagination.

We already have models powerful enough to solve problems most companies haven’t even defined yet.

The gap isn’t technical - it’s structural.
It’s the lack of domain context, product packaging, and change management that turns potential into adoption.

Most enterprises don’t need “better AI.”
They need AI that speaks their language - built around real workflows, real UX, and real ownership of change.

That’s why the next wave won’t come from another foundation model.
It’ll come from domain-specific agents - vertical copilots that combine deep expertise with flawless execution.

The real unlock isn’t general intelligence.
It’s the ability to pour capital into problems that were never scalable before.

And the only thing left standing in the way isn’t the tech -
it’s the willingness to use it.

In 5 years, 'AI-powered' will be as meaningless as 'cloud-based' is today.

Remember when 'cloud-based' was a selling point? When companies bragged about being 'in the cloud' like it made them special?

Now nobody cares. Of course it's cloud-based. Everything is. It's not a feature anymore - it's just how software works.

AI is on the same trajectory. Right now, 'AI-powered' is marketing gold. Slap it on anything and watch the valuations rise.

But by 2030? 'AI-powered' will be as remarkable as 'uses electricity.' Every piece of software will have AI embedded. It won't be noteworthy.

The companies winning in 2030 won't be the ones shouting about AI. They'll be the ones who quietly solved problems while everyone else was busy with the buzzwords.

5 Things I Learned Implementing AI at Enterprise Scale:

1. Your data problem is bigger than you think. Every executive says 'our data is pretty clean.' It never is. Plan for 60% of your timeline to be data work.

2. The pilot trap is real. Successful POCs die in production because nobody planned for security reviews, compliance checks, and the 47 stakeholders who need to approve everything.

3. Change management eats AI for breakfast. The technology works. The humans resist. Budget 3x more time for training, communication, and handling the 'but we've always done it this way' crowd.

4. Start with the boring use cases. Everyone wants the sexy AI chatbot. The real ROI is in automating the mind-numbing document processing that costs you 200 hours/week.

5. Your AI strategy needs an AI exit strategy. Models change. Vendors pivot. Build for portability or you'll be rewriting everything in 18 months.

i won't be surprised if this number 10x by now

Salesforce is doing what most large enterprises will end up doing with AI.

Putting it behind guardrails.
Making it defensible.
Slowing it down on purpose.

And that’s ok.

But it also means the fastest breakthroughs won’t happen there.

They’ll happen in startups that can tolerate failure.
Ship messy.
Learn fast.
Break things without a committee.

The best middle ground for enterprises is simple:

Build a startup-style lab.
Give it air cover.
Let it experiment like a startup.

If it works — scale it.
If it doesn’t — kill it quickly.

Big companies don’t need to move fastest everywhere.
They need to know where they’re allowed to.

taplio

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