For those still not sure if risks are worth taking at all, read “No Risk, No Fun? People who take risks more satisfied with their lives” from Sciencedaily.com and then come back to this blog! I know we’re focused on career development here but look at it this way, if you don’t take any risk at all, you cannot possibly enjoy your career and to be frank, it’s not going to develop into much if you only follow the status quo. Innovation is what drives business forward and innovation by definition requires some risk taking. You have to try things to see if they work. If they do, you could be next for promotion and if they don’t, well you just have to fearlessly get back up and find something that does.

So here’s how it works. Imagine that you have a deposit box and into that deposit box go credits when things go well and debits when they don’t go so well. Everything you do either adds to the credits or the debits and your balance is how well you’re doing. Knowing what you’re willing to risk really depends upon what you think you could lose. Be prudent. There is no way to move from second year in Sales to CEO in the immediate term. Credits must be built over time from multiple successes. There is though the possibility of catastrophic failure that could result in your immediate departure from the company. Therefore, in your early career, you take appropriate risks (ie: small) in order to build a steady stream of credits into your deposit box without risking too many debits. The more credit you have, the greater risk you might take in the future.Identifying innovative opportunities is not difficult. Every company has processes, especially those completed at junior levels that could do with re-working. And remember, you’re not looking to change the world on day 1. You simply need to demonstrate that you have the capacity and capability to identify areas for improvement, create changes that improve them and implement them with maximum aplomb! Always a good first step once you’ve identified something that you think you might do better is to ask an expert. For example, if you think that developing a small database of client preferences with open access to anybody in your team could prove worthwhile when cross selling, then buy a colleague a coffee and introduce the idea in a ‘wouldn’t it be good if…” moment. Some positive re-enforcement is always good when at the idea stage whilst a barrage of negative warnings reminding you of confidentiality issues might be helpful to prevent you going too far too soon with the development and marketing of your work.

Whilst planning is often everything, for small credit building enhancements experimentation is probably your best friend. Once you’ve confirmed that something is a good idea, start trying it out. If the database idea has potential, start collecting data points on a spreadsheet and using them in your daily work. From this, you’ll quickly get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. The positives stay whilst the data that’s worthless gets the chop. Once you’ve designed and experimented with something that is showing signs of success, start recording data. Work through 10 client communications without the aid of your spreadsheet of preferences. Then work through with it. Record the results, both your own personal feedback and that from clients…yes, you should ask them whether your service has improved.  With some early positive data, now is the time to approach your manager. Prepare a small 1-page presentation and ask for 20 minutes of their time to discuss a new idea that you’ve put into practice and seems to be delivering, based upon personal experience and client feedback, small improvements. Tell her that you want her opinion on what you’ve been doing as if she likes it, perhaps she could introduce it to a larger test population or at least let you offer it to your direct colleagues.

At this point, you’re nearly there. You’ve already impressed your manager with your innovative ideas and design improvements but now it’s time to close the deal. You must work with a small number of your colleagues and collect results. Do this diligently and objectively. The fact that you’ve now brought your manager into the situation has relinquished blame from you in the event of major failure. Important now is to accept constructive feedback to your ideas and allow them to grow with the feedback and the input of others. If you too vigorously defend your original idea even in the presence of better or complimentary ideas, you will not get the buy in from your colleagues and you work will die before implementation. What you retain responsibility for is the reporting back of progress, successes and areas for the idea to be further developed. If you do this, and successfully implement a change improvement, you’ll bank some well-deserved credits allowing you opportunity to increase the scale of your next initiative.

Not every idea will work so smoothly though and there is a chance for failure at any point. If you fail at the first hurdle (ie: your client reminds you that your service stinks and for all your ideas, you still forgot their purchase order from last week) then keep the idea to yourself and tell nobody. If you fail at the ‘what if’ stage, then again, say nothing but refine your idea until you have the chance to review it again. If your manager explains to you why your idea is doomed to fail, thank her for the feedback but use the opportunity to ask her what she thinks could be done to improve things and then agree to report back to her after you’ve investigated more fully. And finally, if your idea fails in implementation or broader testing then take the feedback and understand the reasons before proudly declaring that at least you’ve found 1 thing that doesn’t work, now you’re going to find what will!

Risk taking is necessary for all who wish to progress their careers. Edison had the advantage of having so many credits banked that ideas which failed 10,000 times still didn’t detract from his success. Few of us, especially in the early stages of our careers have such a reputation in place and so a methodology that minimises our risk yet demonstrates that we have the capacity for appropriate risk taking and creativity is important for success. Working through ideas and conducting small tests to prove concept is an important first step. As is then socialising ‘what if’s’. Managerial buy in based upon some early results hedges your personal risk before you go too far and then objective assessment of implementation results gains you team buy in and stickiness for your idea. But remember that on occasion you will fail. If you have reached the stage where it is results from the team that bury your idea then so long as you’ve got your manager’s approval for their involvement, then you’ve lost nothing but like Edison, you have learnt something that doesn’t work. Be proud of the process you went through and get back to finding the next innovative idea to try.

Of course, I have to caveat my introduction by stating that if you’re guilty of gross negligence or willful neglect, then frankly, there’s no saving you.  Only you can tell whether this is the case but hopefully, it will not be.  And so, like everybody else who has ever built a career, you’ll need to face up to the problem you’ve caused and ensure your handling of the situation leaves a positive impression of your character with those involved in the post mortem investigation.  First and foremost is transparency.  Be 100% open and honest about what happened.  If you skipped part of a procedure, admit it.  The reality is that a procedure that can be easily ignored is not a particularly reliable one.  An investigation that understands where people can skip tasks can suggest additional checkpoints to prevent such behavior.  If you conceal the truth or play down what actually occurred, you’ll mislead the investigation and the necessary improvements will fail to materialize.  Nobody wins if this happens.
Secondly, don’t be a passive bystander to the investigation.  Those that are investigating the problem are not the only people capable of suggesting improvements.  Your detailed understanding of the process under review and the problem you caused makes you a prime candidate for knowing the best way to prevent it happening again.  Make sure you are recognized as being proactive in developing the preventative measures to stop reoccurrence.  And thirdly, think outside the box of the particular incident under investigation.  Where else are similar procedures or processes in existence that could have gone wrong in the same way?  A new method of error prevention applied to the process in question could be equally applicable to other processes you’re aware of.  Ensure your manager is aware of the potential to cross fertilize what is learnt from one specific investigation to other similar and equally at risk processes elsewhere in your department.

Finally, do not becoming a shrinking violet!  It’s important to remember that everybody has bad days at the office!  Your mistake does not mean you are stupid, incompetent or incapable of high performance.  Do not let something going wrong impact your confidence level and the positive contribution that you make in other areas of your job.  Some humility is appropriate and an apology for error is never amiss.  However, it is likely that your error will not be the only one you make during your career so if you’re feeling depressed and anxious about the consequences, toughen up!  You’re going to need a thick skin to be successful in your career and getting over the days when things don’t quite go right for you is an important skill.  Tomorrow will bring new opportunity and you’ll need to be confident in your own ability to grasp it!

Mistakes are inevitable and so understanding how to behave when you are the cause of them is an important step in your career development.  Recognizing the potential to make good from almost all errors is critical and once realized it’s worth exploiting the opportunity.  Honesty and transparency are first and foremost, followed by a proactive and willing approach to implement measures for future prevention.  Consideration of where similar situations exist and could be at the same risk will demonstrate to management your broad view and so if you can retain a humble but confident presence through the investigation, you may well actually demonstrate your readiness for more senior roles – where there’s even more to go wrong – ahead of when you might otherwise have been considered.  This isn’t to say that you should be seeking ways to screw things up but being prepared to appropriately respond when they do, will help you turn a potentially negative situation into a career enhancing one.

Well if yes, don’t hit the ‘comment’ button quite yet for there are often reasons afoot for why you’re doing what you’re doing.  Sometimes, they’re poor reasons like nobody else would be willing to do the job so the boss palmed if off on you.  This is unacceptable and if this is the case, then you need to pull the boss aside and thank him for the opportunity that you’ve been given but suggest you’d like to train a new victim immediately.  However, if you’re working for a reputable organization, often the most basic roles are those that bring you closest to the customer, the transactions that generate revenue and the detail that you’ll have to train your eye to focus on if you’re going to get anywhere in the future.  It is often quoted that ‘retail is detail’…frankly, so is every successful business on the planet.

This does not mean that you should spend the next year suffering repetitive and un-challenging duties.  Like almost every situation that you face in the early years of your career, it is an opportunity.  When I faced the seemingly futile task of managing a never-ending stream of client order issues in my first job, I decided to record the data and review it on a weekly basis.  In a relatively short period of time, I was able to begin identifying root causes to repetitive exception types.  1 month of analysis, a colorful bar chart and a quickly drafted presentation meant I could ask my manager for a quick meeting and demonstrate my initiative, analytical prowess and communication skills.  By taking a seemingly boring task and setting myself an objective to understand it’s cause, I was able to identify how a simple behavioral change in our organization would reduce the number of exceptions by a material percentage.  Of course, my manager was quick to ask for further analysis and carefully check my work (it was the first time I had presented her with anything like this and how on earth could a kid 6 months out of school have worked this out!) but once she was convinced of the work’s validity, I was rolled out to other departments to have them change their procedures, while she proudly walked into her manager’s office to declare that she’d made a key discovery that would eradicate a particular client exception, reduce manual processing and improve our customer satisfaction ratings.  Of course, she took the praise for the finding but I was immediately recognized as somebody capable of helping her career.  Nothing is more likely to accelerate your progression than accelerating your boss’s!  Pretty quickly, I was not simply processing exceptions but had been given a new, more complex task, of course with the expectation that I’d do the same type of analytical exercise and return more beneficial findings.

In reality, this has not always been the case and there have been times when my efforts have not been so effective or swiftly rewarded.  However, there has never been an occasion where anybody who does nothing with a task they’re assigned differentiates themselves from a career perspective.  If I had been constantly ignored after expending such efforts, I would have quickly known that the company was not for me.  But if you’re working anywhere worth it’s reputation, this will not be the case and you should focus on finding the measure to track, the results that you need to suggest an improvement and of course, the colorful graph that your boss will understand and can in turn present to their managers!

Think about it like this.  The application process for graduate entry jobs demands that you answer futile questions about your achievements.  You willingly spent hours completing them.  And in doing so, you demonstrate creativity, you identify aspects of your character for a prospective employer to investigate further and you present yourself in such a way that your prospective employer demands to see more of you.  Why would you expect your first job to be more than what you have demonstrated you can do so well?  The key is to approach every task you’re given with the enthusiasm that you applied to your application.  For by doing so, you’ll learn the detail of your business, develop analytical abilities that spot trends and lead to material change and you’ll practice the communication skills that you will be so reliant upon as you progress up within your organisation.

Firstly, your DCP must address your personal response mechanisms.  As an example, let’s assume that through your eagerness to impress your work colleagues on a project you have taken the initiative to drive meeting agendas and distribute work.  You have even taken responsibility for updating senior management on progress.  Then suddenly during one of the project team meetings you have set up and are leading one of your colleagues responds to your group update by stating his disagreement to your approach and asking the question, “who made you the boss anyway?”  For those with a shorter fuse, their natural mechanism might be to retaliate, “well, given that you’ve been incapable of showing any leadership in this project, I thought I might as well try to”!  Or for those conflict averse individuals, their natural mechanism might be to simply ignore the comment…something likely to wind up the perpetrator even further!  Being aware of  your natural response mechanism puts you in a strong position to avoid immediate behavior that panders to your emotional need rather than acting in your best career interests.  And so once you’ve identified what your natural response is likely to be, all you have to do is recognize it before it comes out of your mouth (or doesn’t in the case that you’re an avoider!) and stop your natural response getting out before the second part of your DCP can be initiated.

Part 2 of the DCP is simple, it’s your response!  Having successfully stopped yourself responding emotionally, now you can execute a clinical response that will serve your best interests.  Your response must therefore achieve 3 things; recognize the issue raised; nullify the issue through a re-statement of your intent; and facilitate the continued inclusion of the individual who raised the issue in continued productive discussion.  To achieve all of these things, it is critical that your choice of words be impeccable.  Under emotional intensity poor wording can be like adding fuel to the fire rather than extinguishing it.  The only language that is therefore appropriate is temperate.  Phrases that demonstrate empathy with the issue raised are useful to start with.  In our example above, a response that begins, “Well nobody, I hadn’t realised I was coming across like that” immediately demonstrates empathy with the concern raised.  An immediate second comment should follow to completely disarm your aggressor.  It achieves this by restating your intentions, “my goal is simply to help us all achieve the objective of this project”.  Your immediate third comment should be an olive branch that allows you to continue but ensures the environment that you are creating remains an inclusive one, even to the individual who initiated the difficult conversation, “I have some further updates that I should give now but we should then set up time to look at how we’re working as a team to deliver our goals.”

Of course, on paper this seems simple!  The reality is though that very few people master the art of managing difficult conversations and the results are devastating – resignations, poor productivity, etc.  The only way to improve is to be prepared and that, as with most things, means practice.  A DCP is not something to be thought of and then filed in the back of your mind.  A DCP must be practiced.  Learning to replace natural phrases with temperate ones is something that takes time.  If possible, use a friend to role play situations that are relevant to your workplace.  Equally, have your friends push your buttons with scenarios that are likely to elicit an emotional response from you.  By learning to recognise how you’ll likely behave, you can learn to step back from a knee jerk response and effectively plan to empathise, disarm and include as you continue with your work.

The difficult conversation is an inevitable part of working life and something that will impact you on many occasions through your career.  Whether you succeed or fail, especially as you progress to more senior levels in an organization will very often depend upon how you react.  Emotion must be left at the door as temperatures rise.  In its place must be put clinical, practiced responses that leverage temperate phrasing and components that allow you to respond in a way that best serves your career needs.  The DCP facilitates this by providing a framework within which to recognise your natural tendencies and replace them with more objective and productive responses.  You shouldn’t enter into conversation without one.

If you’re lucky, you will actually find that the first job you land opens your eyes to the breadth of functions, opportunities and challenges that exist in most companies.  If this is the case, even if you tire quickly of your early responsibilities, you’ll be able to soon assume others.  However, if you find that no matter where you look, what you do or who you speak to there really is absolutely nothing that makes you want to turn up for work in the morning, then you really are going to have to find something else.  The problem though is that this time you’ll need to find something that you’re going to enjoy or you’ll end up looking for something else in another years time.  Such job-hopping is not attractive on your resume!  And so to avoid this, it’s worth asking yourself a few simple questions about what you really want?

For example, if your goal is travel then there is really little point working for a local supplier with no aspirations for expansion?  What you need is an established multi-national corporation with a track record for international mobility.  If you want job security, it would be foolish to join an industry directly impacted by a boom and bust economic cycle.  And if you like small intimate groups as opposed to vast networks of acquaintances, then perhaps you’d be better at a small to medium size company over the global conglomerate?

At the beginning of my career, I took time to write a simple list of my early goals.  These have naturally matured over the past 15 years but when I graduated I wanted the following:

1.)    Travel
2.)    Money
3.)    All absorbing, exciting work
4.)    A built in social life
5.)    Long term opportunity

As I was interested in travel, I knew I had to work for a company with international offices.  As I wanted money (actually, I needed money – I had student debt to clear!) I knew I needed to work for a company that offered the potential for large initial rewards.  My love to be absorbed in my work meant I needed something demanding and because I was living away from home, I needed something with a social life built in as well.  Finally, I had one eye on the future and wanted something where a foundation could be laid for a long-term future.  The result was to join the Investment Banking industry.  Over the course of the next 5 years, with these simple objectives as a guide, I was able to live and work in Hong Kong, Switzerland and the UK.  I was also able to pay off my student debt.  I certainly had an exciting job where I worked with millions of dollars every day and during times such as the Asian crisis in 1997 was able to witness demonstrations outside the Hong Kong Stock Exchange while working 24 shifts to help minimize risk during times of horrific market volatility.  Such demanding work meant my social life was tied to my job and the company I worked for facilitated this with all manner of social events.  And finally, I was able to lay foundations for a long-term career in Financial Services which as well as continuing to meet all my initial needs has facilitated my meeting those that have surfaced in the years since.

It would be foolish to dwell too long on a detailed inventory of what you want from your career before it’s started.  You will gain both experience and additional maturity as you pass through the early years of your career meaning your initial choices may change.  However, to avoid job-hopping through your journey to your optimal job, it’s worth spending a little time in identifying a few early goals that can act as a guide to your first job searches.  There is nothing to say a career change cannot occur later down the track but by finding something that meets your early career needs, you will be able to start building the track record of achievement that will be necessary for future success with your current employer and to give you a realistic option for successful transition to another company or industry should you so choose to do so in the future.

A mentor of mine once explained things as follows,

“RJ, you always say you’ll do one hundred things…and you always get fifty of them done. Bob over there only ever says he’ll do ten things but he always does them all. Although you’re actually achieving five times as much as he in terms of output, you are only ever seen as the guy who delivers half of what he promises. Bob’s reputation is for 100% delivery. Who do you think people trust most with their next project?”

As a new grad, it is likely that you’ll be tempted to get involved in as many projects, initiatives and other opportunities as your employer has on offer. And being involved might be the right thing to do. However, consider carefully what involvement actually means? If your involvement is going to be meaningful, it’s likely that it will require you to contribute something to the initiative. If you’re therefore a contributing partner to the initiative, then there is a high likelihood that you’ll be required to deliver some type of result. And therefore, if you’re involved in a multiple number of initiatives all of which you’re required to deliver a result for, there will be a smaller percentage of time available to you to spend on each one relative to the others. This in turn will most likely mean that you either fail to deliver at all for some of the projects or else, you deliver substandard contributions for the full set. It is impossible and importantly, it is not necessary for you to be involved and responsible for everything. Be smart about what you choose to do and then limit other objectives to ensure that what you finally deliver is of exceptional quality. This is the key to success.

New grads are often blighted by their un-controllable enthusiasm to be involved in everything and it results in them often appearing to deliver on only a portion of what they volunteer or are charged to do. This is not a strategy for success. Those who advance furthest and most quickly are those who are concentrated on a minimum number of objectives but who complete them all. They are the people returning differentiated results to their organizations through focused use of their intellect and skills. In the workplace, quality always, always, always beats quantity. Be wary of pretenders talking up the volume of work they have completed. They are often the individuals with the 50% delivery record.

As squirrels have proven and gained fame for demonstrating, a focused approach on a single task is most likely to return success. Clearly for new grads early in their careers, the temptation of breadth over depth is difficult to resist. The idea of being involved so early in so many different things gives a feeling of belonging, of progress and almost of somehow being critical to the company’s continuance.  However, the company will most likely survive without you being involved in every aspect of its business from day one! All you need to concern yourself with in the early stages of your career is to deliver what you promise 100% of the time. And make sure what you deliver is of exceptional quality. For if you do, you will quickly find that a steady progression of more interesting initiatives and, whether you need them or not, titles make their way to you.

Promotion is the first of the P’s to explore.  In the event that you’re being promoted and being asked to ‘step up’ into a bigger role, typically it’s in your best interests to accept the move!  Promotions normally result in greater experience, improved conditions and of course, they demonstrate progression on your resume.  But that said, if being promoted actually puts you in harms way, for example, if you’re asked to resolve an impossible situation where there is a high likelihood of career damaging failure and it’s clear you’re being asked as nobody else wanted the job, then it’s important that you ask questions of whether it’s right for you?  Accepting a promotion simply because you’re offered a title is a fools errand.  Important also is to consider the impact of the promotion on the other P’s.  Under normal circumstances, a promotion will mean more pay and better positioning but if the impact on your personal life (through increased responsibility, travel, hours, etc) is prohibitive, then potentially the opportunity is not one you should so happily pursue?

Secondly, it’s important to consider where a new opportunity will position you in your career.  Positioning is important, especially when considering sideways or even seemingly more junior roles that you might be asked to assume early in your career.  Remember a career is a marathon not simply a sprint and so there are times when such moves are appropriate, especially when you’re trying to gain some breadth in your knowledge.  Let’s consider the junior sales person who is asked to move away from sales into the administration centre.  Potentially, this is a bad move; moving away from the customer, assuming responsibility in a non-revenue generating area, etc.  However, if the move allows the individual to understand the full product life cycle, understand post sale client issues and develop a network within the company that will eventually allow her to return to Sales more capable than before of serving the client and generating revenue for the company, then the move presents long term advantage as it positions the individual perfectly for later progression to more senior levels within the organization.

In the current economic climate, talk of pay is almost considered crass!  However, what you make for your labor is a critical benchmark against which you can judge your performance and your progress.  Very often, large corporations only review compensation details on an annual basis regardless of whether you are asked to move roles or not.  This arrangement whereby you accept change imposed upon you by your employer in lieu of some potential compensation in the future is clearly weighted to the advantage of only one side in the agreement.  And whilst I would not advocate making pay demands every time you are asked to take on new responsibilities, at the point where you are asked to make a job change, it is appropriate to ask a question about your likely future compensation.  Something as simple as, “can you indicate to me what the likely implications this move will have on my current and future compensation?” is a wholly appropriate question to ask.  If you are satisfied with the response, which of course, does not necessarily have to state that you’ll get a raise, then you can rest assured that you’re moving in the right direction.  If however, you receive a wavering or even negative response, you have to ask whether the move is in your best interests after all?

Finally, it is absolutely critical that you consider your personal circumstances when approached about a job change.  The stresses associated with change are well documented and while sometimes welcomed, for example if a new challenge is needed, if they place an undue strain on your personal commitments, the likelihood is that you’ll fail in your new responsibilities while also failing in your personal ones.  Regardless of how ambitious you are, to forget to consider the impact of a new role on your personal life is reckless.  And it’s important to be honest.  If you intend to retain your commitment to the athletics club you jog with twice a week and yet the role you are being asked to take requires hours that will clash with that commitment, you need to make a choice about which one you’re going to honor and which will be dumped.  Even if you anticipate a compromise, some clash at some point is inevitable and so it’s important to decide what your priority is before you take your new role.  For making a snap decision when faced with the dilemma can leave you exposed to making a wrong choice and damaging both your work and personal relationships.

Successful careers are splattered with change and any successful individual will be offered and will take opportunities that change their roles or functions on many occasions.  The current economic climate is such though that companies are often being forced by circumstance to ask their employees to assume different responsibilities perhaps not always after robust enough consideration.  In most cases, companies do act to achieve a compromise between what’s best for them and what’s best for the individual to achieve a win-win situation but under intense business pressures like those we see today, this cannot be taken for granted.  In order to effectively judge the opportunity offered to you it is important to step back and cast objective judgment over what is presented as your next role.  The 4 P’s; Promotion, Positioning, Pay and Personal allow you to consider what is asked of you with necessary objectivity thereby allowing you to make an appropriate decision on whether the change is best for your career or not.  Only when you have made this decision should you move ahead.

For new grads in the early years of their career, the chances are that you’re working under the supervision of a relatively junior manager. There are two types of junior manager that you’re likely to experience; the technical expert and the high flier. Each presents challenges for the new grad to overcome if they are to succeed themselves but both can prove useful allies if you can see past their limitations and exploit what they offer. The technical expert for example, is unlikely to empower you but rather, will see problems as an opportunity to demonstrate their ‘fire-fighting’ skills. You will struggle to compete with their years of experience or equally, gain the recognition of more senior management for problem resolution while you’re under their supervision. However, they will likely lack the analytical skills to identify root causes of problems and their own fire-fighting abilities will often result in their failure to design technology solutions that prevent the problems in the first place. In this scenario, your opportunity is to fill this gap. Begin data collection and analysis to show how your boss’s fire-fighting skills could be employed less if procedure and or technology changes were sponsored. Ask if you might work with technology staff to design and implement a workflow change or even whether your own database or macro skills might be utilized to prove the concept? Build a story to support your case based upon empirical evidence and socialize your findings with your boss and other technically aware employees to ensure your idea has merit and then get to work implementing it.  And remember, share the praise and credit with all who assist if you succeed. Although be sure to post more senior managers and mentors directly. You will need them to recognize your contribution and lift you from your current role as your technical specialist manager is unlikely to do so. If they don’t know what you’ve done, they won’t know the talent that you have.

Alternatively, if you find yourself working for the high flier you will find that she already has the more senior relationships sewn up and so your route up is guaranteed…so long as you can get on her coat-tails! The trick to this is to CTA (cover their ass!). Whilst the high flier is out pitching new ideas and socializing the success of their teams, Rome could very well be burning! Your ticket is to fire-fight. You might not have the technical knowledge to know how but you should be capable of recognizing a potential problem. The biggest fear of a high flier is that something goes wrong. You acting as an alarm and coordinating responses to problems ensuring the high flier always has timely and accurate data to hand will ensure you become a trusted and depended upon resource who will be taken for the ride all the way up the corporate ladder until you either surpass your high flying boss or decide for yourself to change direction.

Managers, particularly the junior ones who you will work with during your early career years are not perfect and should not be expected to be so. You might wish to complain but to be blunt, it’s futile to do so…and remember, you’ll hopefully be in their position some day and you’ll want your chance to make mistakes and grow. The trick then is to compliment their strengths to maximize team productivity and highlight your own capabilities. The strategy for achieving this depends upon your manager’s competencies but if correctly identified will allow you to make up for their short-comings and position yourself well for progression as soon as appropriate.

You see, the problem with structured schemes such as those designed for graduate entry is that for the period of time they last, they can act as much as a bind constraining talent as they do a springboard from which to launch it. Job rotations for example, present many challenges. Just as participants begin to understand a function or product they’re whisked off to start the process again somewhere else having actually achieved very little. How annoying for both them and those that are asked to consistently train them (you can imagine how much effort gets put into the training after the second or third participant has been and gone from a particular team who’ve gained nothing from the experience!). And of course, once somebody is selected for a graduate entry scheme, there’s no way they’re going to get off it until it’s completed. Which means that should you find your absolute niche role, you’re not going to be allowed to maximize your potential in it until you’ve completed all the other component parts of the training program. Graduate schemes have many positives but not being on one actually opens opportunities for early success that participants who win the esteemed places have to forgo.

So what can non grad scheme new grads do to ensure they maximize their potential advantages early in their careers. First and foremost, learn your business. While grad scheme participants are busy developing a jack of all trades reputation, you need to quickly become master of one. In large organizations, nobody will understand every function or every product. You have to start by learning at least one. By specializing and learning the detail of your particular area, you can quickly demonstrate technical expertise which once achieved will get you the ear of decision makers while your grad scheme compatriots are still enjoying their senior management introduction lunches. And once you’ve learnt the detail of your particular area, focus then on learning the details of the areas that are directly impacted by yours and those that impact you. Just as in science where the greatest discoveries are now on the boundaries of disciplines so will you often find the greatest room for material improvement at the points where products transition from one area of responsibility to another. Again, once you have done this you can get the ear of decision makers while your new grad scheme compatriots are forming teams to practice teamwork.

Important as all of this work is, if you can’t market yourself and communicate what you’re doing effectively, you’re out of the race. One thing that you know participants on graduate entry schemes are skilled at is communication and presentation. The likelihood is that if you were equally qualified as Brenda from Sales who managed to get on the scheme while your application was rejected after second interview, then Brenda is probably far more competent in presentation and communication than you. And although you’ve now got into the company, it doesn’t mean that you can neglect to develop these essential skills for your future. Therefore, practice. Don’t wait for an invitation to a senior management meeting before you start communicating upwards. If you’ve gained technical competency and have an innovative idea, find a senior manager and ask them if you can have 5 minutes of their time to explain it to them. After you’ve done this, assuming they like your idea, explain to them that you’re in need of some advice on effective communication styles at the company and you wonder if they’d be willing to help you out? If they don’t offer their own time (most likely they will), they will definitely advise you of somebody else to speak with. And so your own personally generated network will begin to form. No other type of network is as powerful.

Graduate training schemes have a place in the recruitment strategies of most major companies. However, few new grads actually enter companies via these schemes and you should recognize the advantages you gain when you join through an alternative direct entry route. Long term success will primarily come from what you contribute commercially to your organization and so if you can educate yourself on a function or product and then become intimately familiar with its directly related areas, the likelihood is that you’ll be capable of making a meaningful commercial difference to your organization before the grad scheme participants have finished their program. What you must remain aware of though is how communication skills and networks are enhanced and developed through structured schemes. These are powerful tools absolutely necessary at senior levels of management and so you must couple your hard technical labor with specific efforts to identify useful mentors to assist you hone your presentation and marketing skills. If you are capable of doing this, then there is a high likelihood that you will out-perform those who spend the first years of their careers meeting the demands of a structured entry program. And who knows, by the time they complete their obligations to the scheme, you could well be an established high performer in the real world of your company, something that they will still have to prove.

It is not that I have an issue with new grads exploring opportunities in retail.  In fact, I think there is an enormous amount to be learned in retail, much of which is applicable across industries.  Customer service skills, marketing skills and analytical skills to name but a few can all be mastered by the retail employee.  What I have an issue with however, is the suggestion that new grads should opt for retail to make friends, work flexible hours (should I assume this means few?) while experimenting with multiple other career options until they find out what they want to be.  Worth particular consideration are the following:

1.)    Every hour you spend at work not using your brain power is an hour wasted.  If you want a flexible job and choose retail in the early months post graduation then gain something useful to your long term career from the experience.  Learn about point of sale marketing and implement change to increase demand for a particular product.  Or alternatively, do some study of purchasing habits of a segment of your customers and learn to target particular products to increase revenue from that demographic.  Standing around chatting to your colleagues is a waste of your time.  Do that when you’re off duty.

2.)    It is highly unlikely that you’re going to find out exactly what you want to be during your 20’s.  In fact, even if you think you have discovered it, the likelihood is that you’ll change your mind in your 30’s and perhaps again in your 40’s and 50’s.  If, as is suggested, you’ll change your career 4 or 5 times in the course of your working life, then does it really matter if you find your perfect niche in the first couple of years.  No!  What does matter though is that you establish a pattern of behavior that results in achievement.  As you attempt to move careers in the future, nobody will be interested in you if your early career years demonstrate nothing of material value.  Be sure your prestigious retail opportunity is capable of helping your show this before you see it as your best option.

3.)    The debt accumulated by attending Grad School is only a burden if you fail to apply what you’ve learnt in the real world for commercial benefit.  If you’re going to Grad School simply to put off getting a job then more fool you but if you’re serious about a post graduate qualification to give you the best possible foundation for your chosen career, then the cost becomes irrelevant against the returns gained through the years you apply what you have learnt.

It is rare that I take such offence to the words of others in the Blogosphere.  However, as an advocate of new grads, their capability and opportunity, I am incapable of refraining from comment where other commentators give the green light to the waste of their potential.  The current generation of new grads about to embark upon or in the early years of their career are perhaps the most capable group in history.  They have the potential to make radical change through their technological savvy, communication networks and global mobility.  And so by encouraging members of this group to set a low bar for achievement at any stage in their careers is to lessen the positive impact their enormous utility can have. My fundamental belief is that the long term success of Gen Y and the new grads within it will secure the long term prospects for us all.  To think of them wasting their time folding shirts in a store then is something abhorrent to me and I would hope to us all.