New Grad Handbook Assisting every new graduate achieve an optimal start to their career.

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Take Calculated Risks To Enhance Your Career Progression

Thomas Edison is famously quoted as saying “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Maybe that is ok if you’re an inventor but if like most of us, you’re not, then 10,000 failures is most likely to result in you losing your job! This means that most of [...]

Everybody Screws Up…It’s How You Respond That Sets You Apart!

Most people will subscribe to the old adage that the best way to learn is from your mistakes.  Certainly, there is no time at which a process is more focused upon than when somebody breaks it.  Which means that from mistakes come improvements that would otherwise have been forgone.  Wisdom tells us that forgone, they [...]

Get Creative with Repetitive Tasks to Accelerate Your Progression

Have you been duped?  Did you spend hours tackling tough application questions followed by days doing company research, before then going through weeks of individual and panel based interviews that dug deep into your soul for a scrap of evidence upon which to cast you aside?  Did you do all that, to take a job [...]

Making Difficult Conversations…well, Less Difficult!

It is inevitable that at some point you will find yourself participating in what can be best put as a difficult conversation.  The when? where? why? what? and how? will all remain elusive until it strikes and by then the only thing that will matter is how you act.  In the case that you are [...]

A Quick But Wise Career Choice…

It’s that time of year when final year under graduates are intently focused upon what is likely to be their last round of examination and paper submissions before they escape the confines of education to tackle life in the ‘real world’.  For a small number, one of the few places on a recognised graduate training [...]

A Focus On Quality, Not Quantity Will Bring Success…and Titles!

I was recently reading an exert from Mark Sanborn’s excellent book, “You don’t need a title to be a leader” in search of some inspiration for a current objective I have. I should like to state at this point that whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of the book, that a title is [...]

Is Your New Role Really Best for You?

I have received a number of questions recently from new grads facing dilemmas when faced with new opportunities offered to them by their current employers.  For most, sideways moves into equivalent functions have been asked of them as companies enforce role changes in response to changing business demands.  Others though have been pitched as development [...]

Managing Your Junior Manager!

Do you sometimes step back and wonder why your manager made a particular decision? Do you ever find it hard to understand why your manager is asking you yet again to complete a task by hand because she has not reviewed the macro you wrote to do the job for you? Is it [...]

A Graduate Entry Scheme Could Actually Hold You Back!

If you’re not one of the new grads to enjoy a first taste of life at work via a large multi-national corporation’s graduate entry scheme, I imagine you could feel somewhat disappointed? After all, given the competition for places on these schemes, surely they must offer participants unparalleled advantage? For a start, don’t [...]

A Low Bar Is Never Prestigious

I have spent the day wondering whether I missed the point of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog entitled “The new post-college prestige job is retail”?  I know I didn’t miss the patronizing words on emerging adulthood and the somewhat bizarre suggestion that an individual who doesn’t know what they want to do in their 20’s [...]