How to Succeed at Your First Professional Job

You’ve finally earned that shiny new—and expensive—college degree. All of this wonderful knowledge wants to surge into action at a real job. Do you understand the incredible changes and challenges you’ll face?

The First 17 to 20 Years

Since the age of five, you have spent most of your waking hours in one classroom or another. As your elementary, high school and college career progressed, you may have believed that you have learned to face pressure and deadlines.

In the classroom, you probably have learned to successfully manage the pressures and requirements of academia. As you got older, you had term and research papers to write and, of course, mid-term and final exams to ace.

However, even with an extensive research project, you typically received the assignment in September with a deadline two to three months into the future. Professional work deadlines are usually much shorter and pressure-packed. This is but one example of the dramatic changes you need to understand, accept and master.

The comfort of the classroom is over. You may have had one or several part-time jobs during your classroom career. However, in most cases, they have done little to prepare you for the requirements of a professional job.

First Job Challenges

You’ll notice one major change immediately. This “feature” typically appears to be a series of challenges, but all focus on one primary difference between the classroom and the workplace.

When you were in the classroom, your performance affected only you—for better or worse. Your achievement did not affect your classmates, your university, your professor, or anyone else, except your parents if they were writing the tuition checks. In the workplace, your performance affects your team, department, boss, and the company as a whole. Hence, your work will be scrutinized much more closely than when you were in the classroom.

Unlike professors who rarely care whether you attend class or make “A” or “D” on an exam and generally allow you to decide what type of student you will be, your behavior in the workplace, particularly as a first-time employee, will be evaluated daily and closely.

You are now one link in a valuable corporate chain. The weakness of even one link can cause this necessary chain to break. Until you prove yourself to be a strong new link, your supervisors, co-workers and senior management will monitor your performance closely.

Get as comfortable as possible with being watched so closely, by multiple people and throughout the work day. Like someone watching over your shoulder, this challenge may be quite unsettling at first. However, if you simply accept this reality, understand why it happens and learn to ignore the Big Brother aspect of your peers and bosses, you’ll be able to reduce it to “background noise.”

How to Succeed at Your First Real Job

Like all good tips, these suggestions should work for most members of the workforce. These tips also work when you change jobs and face new employers, job duties and corporate cultures.

• Be on time (or a bit early) for work and during lunch hours and breaks.
• Dress correctly without over- or under-dressing for your workplace.
• Watch and listen to everything happening around you to learn about the job, the company and its corporate culture. Close observation of all behaviors around you offers valuable insight of acceptable and unacceptable actions at your workplace. You’ll learn whether your new employer values creativity, outspoken or reserved employees, strict or lax procedures, tolerates late arrivals, etc.
• Avoid participating in gossip or whining at all costs. Even if you learn some valuable information from this “scuttlebutt,” neither comment thereon nor contribute to it.
• Be gracious to everyone, regardless of their position on the organization chart.
• Ask, ask, ask, then listen, listen, listen. Question everything that you don’t understand and listen closely to the correct answers.
• Treat all deadlines, major and minor, with respect and never miss one.
• Locate a mentor. Like learning about your employer’s corporate culture, this tip shares top billing on the list. An experienced internal mentor can take your career and place it on the fast track, as this person will take a personal and professional interest in you.

Learning about your new employer’s corporate culture is critical. As you observe how things get done, you’ll learn behavior rules that work in your company. You’ll also probably witness actions and behaviors that simply don’t work at your workplace.

You may witness some corporate culture rules that you dislike, i.e., everyone comes early and stays late, and some you like. The key is to understand your employer’s corporate culture so you can behave appropriately and perform effectively.

Treat your first job as the beginning of an exciting journey to success. Learn the rules as fast as possible. Adhere to these rules meticulously. Do your best every minute of every workday. You’ll become just as comfortable as you were in the classroom for so many years.

Source:
http://careerplanning.about.com/cs/firstjob/a/post_grad.htm