Early Career Lessons Worth Learning at Any Time
When I reached six years in my first job, I realized that I had spent as much time as a full-time worker as I had a university student. I got to thinking what I had learned in that time. What had the university of life taught me in those few years. Here are a few of the highlights in no particular order.
Motivation
A job that aligns with your personal values and passions will make getting up each day and spending 8+ hours working less of something to be dreaded or feared and more of joy. The better the alignment the less like work it will seem to you.
The first thing you should ask yourself is; ‘what are my values and passions?’ Is your mission to own a business? Do you want to work a steady 9-to-5 job that simply pays the essential bills? Do you want to push the boundaries of an industry?
If you’re unhappy, chances are that whatever you spend most of your time doing—most likely your day job—doesn’t align with what you value most in life. Even if you happen to be making a lot of money, that doesn’t guarantee you will be happy where you work. If you aren’t aligned with your personal values, you can still be completely dissatisfied with your situation.
Who and Where
Who you work with matters as much as where you work. When I was still a student I interned in several very different industries as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. At first I had a hard time understanding why I enjoyed my internships so much but I still didn’t feel like I wanted to return there full-time after graduating. I now know that I happened to work with great people. Even though the industries didn’t capture my interest enough to want a career there, the people made the experiences enjoyable and valuable.
When people find themselves lucky to be at a place where they love not only what they do, but who they do it with, they often stick around. A company with a lot of long-term employees is a great sign in today’s age of moving jobs every two years. Those employees are blessed with a high level of satisfaction doing something that aligns with their motivations, and they are doing it with engaging people that keep even the dull days interesting.
Relationships
Directly related to who you work with are the people who have influence over your career trajectory. Chances are, some of the biggest decisions about your career will be made in a room without your presence. If the people in that room aren’t willing to go to bat for you, then it’s unlikely you will make it as far or as fast as you would like. It’s the people in our networks that help us succeed in life and our careers. No one can simply work in isolation and expect to go far. By genuinely building your relationships you are investing in emotional capital that can yield big returns in the future. Be careful, if you’re only brown-nosing to use people for your own gain, that will be immediately apparent. Approach your work relationships with sincerity, and both parties will stand to gain from it. Don’t forget, you may have an opportunity to go to bat for them as well!
Your Plan, Your Career
Despite recognizing that others have influence on your career, it didn’t take me long to realize that I am the primary driving force behind my own progression. If I didn’t take the reins and bring up my career goals with my manager, it was going to a be a topic of conversation once a year at our performance reviews and then, the focus tended to be on the last year’s performance as opposed to how I wanted to grow in the next three to five years. If I wanted to have meaningful conversations and turn those conversations into action that helped propel my career forward, I had to drive that myself.
Start with a Plan
If you’re company doesn’t provide a framework for creating your own development plan, take it into your own hands and make one. It can be as simple as four steps.
Establish where you are. This is my role and responsibilities, this is what I do well, and this is what I need to improve.
Outline where you would like to be. Look more than just one year ahead. Do you want to be promoted in your current job function? Do you want to try out management? Do you want to move to another function?
Create meaningful goals that will help you not only succeed in your current role but take steps towards your target position or skillset. Frame them in the context of the projects planned in the near future.
Establish metrics. How will you know if you are successfully meeting your goals?
Establish Quarterly Career Discussions
If you don’t know when to have these conversations with your manager, put something on the calendar. One-on-one meetings are often full of the day-to-day details that have to be addressed right now and it can be hard to step back and talk about the bigger picture. Scheduling a separate time to discuss your career goals and aspirations gives you the space you need to really focus on the topic. If your manager doesn’t already have these conversations set up, you will be managing up and helping them help you.
Easy is Not Always Better
Within the first few years of my career I was put on a project where I had a lot of ownership. I was the sole mechanical engineer responsible for a stand alone unit and so I had a lot of autonomy, responsibility, and was challenged. I happened to be on loan to another group on a very different side of the company than my real team. It was a fantastic opportunity to grow as an engineer and network with people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. After almost two years on the project, the team I was on loan to wanted to make things official and build the mechanical capability in their group.
I was offered the option to switch teams and keep running the project. Initially I was very interested. I talked with my potential new manager and he gave me all the pros. I would be the technical lead and I could potentially become a manager soon and build out a team underneath me. It seemed like the fastest way to a leadership opportunity! The only problem was that despite the career opportunities it provided me, I didn’t love the project. It wasn’t the most exciting thing going on at the company, and it wasn’t why I joined in the first place.
I talked to my current manager about the position and he walked me through how our current team was a better fit for my long-term career goals (he knew because I made it a point to share them). Even though I would temporarily be a smaller fish in a bigger pond, that pond was growing rapidly and bringing with it room for more fish and for more fish to get bigger. Most of all, the project was awesome. I would be contributing to the flagship product and had the potential to gain a lot visibility for my work as a result. I resigned myself to a longer transition to the management track than I wanted but felt like it was the right choice.
I focused on doing great work right where I was. I continued to discuss my career goals with my manager to let him know where I wanted to go. Fast forward less than two years later and I ended up as the manager of that same team—a larger, higher profile team that was a huge win for my career progression. It was exactly where I wanted to be and so much better than if I stayed with the easier, seemingly fast-track to my career goals.
Imposters Abound
You’ve probably heard of the phrase ‘imposter syndrome.’ It’s that feeling when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and you feel like you should. Maybe you’re new to the role or the company and it feels like everyone else knows what’s going on and knows exactly what to do. Meanwhile you are keeping your head low and hoping no one notices that you’re making it up as you go.
Guess what? Everyone is making it up as they go.
Every single success story started at a point where they were making it up as they went too. That’s how you learn, that’s how you get better at what you do. Each time you face a challenge you’ve never seen before and tackle it, you’ve created another task or skill that won’t be new the next time. Some people make entire careers around being able to face unknown problems. If you do that enough, you may even find you have a knack for it. The learning curve can be an uncomfortable place to be but it means that you are growing. Learn to enjoy it!
There’s Always More...
What lessons did you learn early in your career? What lessons do you wish you had learned early in your career? There’s always more to learn.
