Help & Grow: Starting your career
I recently started an experiment on helping out 5 people on #LinkedIn every week. Some of the discussions have been amazing, so I decided to share some here, anonymously.
These questions are from someone who is just about to start their #career:
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Question:
So at this point, I basically know what kind of roles I want to get in (#strategy, #productmanagement, #digitalmarketing or #operations). In fact, more than specific roles I want to work with great mentors and in an environment with steep #growth curves. Question 1) is this too vague? How do I identify environments with great #mentors and steep growth curves and then break into them?
While I know I’m an incredibly quick learner, a hard worker and I have done lots of relevant online courses (#designthinking, #problemsolving and #analytics), I do lack practical experiences at this point in my #career.
Question 2) how do I break into roles where I have the opportunity to do impactful #work? Most #internships that I was getting this summer were content writing or just very basic #sales. The teams didn’t seem too keen on my growth and it didn’t seem like there was potential to move horizontally within those firms. I tried to network with people on LinkedIn also. I’m sure I’m missing out on something here but I can’t tell what.
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Before I go into the questions, just sharing some things that I know are applicable to everyone in this world. 99% people don't know what to do while graduating from #college, so they #experiment, fail, try out different things, fail again, and over time get somewhere close to the ideal #job/role they want. The more you experiment and fail and learn the faster you will "grow".
Q1) Yes this is vague and it should be this way! Like I said, rarely do people know what they exactly want to do. So it is normal and necessary to be vague, even random at times. But that doesn't help does it?
In hindsight, a good way to go about it is to go broad for the first 3-5 years of your career. Learn random #skills, learn tough skills (making a PPT is the toughest for me!), learn things which excite you. And once you narrow down to either skill set, or #industry then you start going deep into the field.
Second part to this question, How do I identify environments with great mentors and steep growth curves and then break into them?
Talk to people with more experience than you. Connect on LinkedIn, ask for help (like you did right now), have a set of questions ready, 15 minutes with anyone can give you an idea of where they found great mentors, and how their current/ past organizations are in terms of #culture, #growth and #learning. If you write to 100 folks 20 will reply and you will connect with 10, do this for 5 months, i.e. 50 conversations you will have a list of top 10 places to work at!
Question 2) how do I break into roles where I have the opportunity to do impactful work?I’m sure I’m missing out on something here but I can’t tell what.
You are not missing out on anything, just expecting things to fall into place from day 1. We all make this mistake of taking it as a #sprint, whereas in reality it is a long journey, which you are just starting. So be easy on yourself! You need at least 1-2 years to properly asses if a company/org is the right place for you to learn and grow.
Internships are like movie trailers, it can be good or bad, but will never tell you how the whole film is going to be.
Like I said previously, initial years of your career should be experiments in finding out what you want. I did 3 internships before my first job, 1st at a mobile phone repair center of @samsung - I was literally repairing mobile phones with a soldering iron daily! But I loved it!
Second was in a manufacturing plant where I had to just look at numbers on screen, and tell my manager if any cell turned red! Got bored in week!
Third was a door to door sales internship, which i quit midway because I couldn't face the daily rejections.
But I'm glad I did all these as it helped me learn and grow into a better person.
Your definition of "impactful work" will also evolve over time, so I suggest to not worry about impact in the initial few years and focus on learning. Here is how I see priorities shifting over the years for someone starting their career:
- 0-2 years: Learning | Experimentation
- 2-4 years: Learning | Experimentation | Building Core skills
- 4-7 years: Learning | Strengthening Core skills | Building #Empathy | Understanding Impact of your work | Experimentation
- 7+ years: Learning | Making Empathy a Core skill | Adding more Core skills | Expanding Impact of your work | Experimentation
Can't go beyond that yet, as I'm at this stage! And this is all in hindsight, even I didn't know how things should be done when I was starting my career
