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Job Search Skills: Transitioning Into the Workplace
Getting the job is an important accomplishment. The following guidelines include suggestions for learning your job, getting started, and developing professionally.
Dealing with Change
- Validate that a change in environment, colleagues, responsibilities has occurred.
- Change can be stressful, having to deal with that stress can greatly affect our self-esteem and positive attitude.
- Identify stresses in the workplace and work to either reduce or eliminate them. Overload is a primary source of stress, continue to set and evaluate priorities and projects.
- Understand there is only 24 hours in a day, decide how you choose to divide that time regarding work, family, exercise, and don’t forget time for yourself.
- If stress continues to be a factor that is taking away from your ability to be positive and cheerful, seek ways to effectively deal with it. Develop a network of positive colleagues with varied interests from different areas. Have a strong network of friends outside the workplace, make time for yourself.
- Establish a routine / lifestyle that is realistic, especially share tasks / chores in the household. It is the little things that make a huge difference.
Learning the Job and Getting Started
- Most new employees obtain information both from formal training programs and other employees. However, new employees are responsible for a large part of their own learning.
- Take time to understand your supervisor’s expectations and work style. Some of these will be explicit, while others will emerge as new situations arise. Follow workplace etiquette/evaluate workplace norms (who goes to whom for what, what people do at lunchtime, etc.). Do not hesitate to ask questions.
- Timeliness, effectiveness, establishing a good fit with colleagues, is important to most employers and ways you are initially evaluated.
- New employees are often surprised by the lack of structure in their work environment and by the interruptions that occur. You are ultimately responsible for making the most of your time.
- College graduates may experience shock in finding that they are asked to do some mundane tasks and having less status than they had hoped for. Viewing this situation as paying dues and earning opportunities can be useful. Volunteering for tasks can provide additional experiences.
- Salaries and benefits can provide other surprises. For example, the reality that money does not go as far as it did in school, and that two weeks of vacation per year is the employment standard.
Working as a Professional
There are a number of things that you can do that will encourage your supervisor and coworkers to perceive you as a professional:
- Dress the part of a professional in your workplace. It is advisable that you dress like the people at the next level if you aspire to those jobs.
- Demonstrate the right attitude, be enthusiastic and learn to make use of constructive criticism. Viewing corrective feedback as an opportunity to learn as opposed to a personal attack will allow you to benefit from mistakes.
- Act with as much self-confidence as possible and continue to evaluate how to reduce stress.
- Set goals based on your job’s responsibilities and discuss them with your supervisor. Set priorities for your work based upon your supervisor’s expectations and your goals. Clarify your supervisor’s expectations and discuss your learning needs. Establish time lines, and do your best to meet deadlines.
- Getting along with your supervisor and colleagues is important to allow you to do your job well and to be comfortable in your workplace. Being positive, flexible, and willing to learn can serve you well.
- Before presenting new ideas, find out what has and has not worked before. Get facts and figures. These practices will not only prevent your reinventing the wheel, but you will also gain more respect for your ideas.
- Being willing to take on new responsibilities can lead to valuable experiences and to being perceived as a valuable employee.
Advancing in Your Career
Take responsibility for your own professional development throughout your career.
- As you learn and grow in your job, you will be developing mastery. Gaining and contributing as much as possible will better prepare you for advancement.
- Research the formal and informal opportunities for professional training and education within and outside of your workplace. Within your organization, training programs may be available to you or enroll in classes, seminars, and training programs to gain advanced training.
- Consider joining a professional association to meet other people in your field, to stay informed, and to open yourself of opportunities.
- Find a mentor to assist you with your professional growth. A mentor is essentially a career coach who can provide guidance and direction in your work, give you inside information about the organization or your field, and help you learn, and assist you in moving up or along your career. This person may be someone within your workplace, a person in your field whom you meet, for example, at a professional organization. He or she should be someone with whom you are compatible, from whom you learn as well as someone who wants to be a mentor.
- Networking is another valuable way to develop professionally. This process involves meeting formally or informally with individuals or groups to share information about your field or organization. While you ask for information and receive support, you will also need to share with others.
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