The Southern California Job Market : Making It Work : How to Survive the First Rung and Then Move Up the Ladder
A decade after her First Real Job was but a dim memory, Julie Adair King realized what she did wrong and why that job had remained a dead end for so long.
It wasn’t that she was a bad worker. The young educational-video production coordinator applied herself to her job, was conscientious and capable of much more than she was allowed to do. Still she foundered.
Why? She brought her personal life into the office. It was her first job away from home and her boss was the fatherly type. So it just seemed OK to go to him with her everyday problems: the broken-down car, the difficult boyfriend, the worried mother.
“A lot of people, especially young women, bring their personal lives into the workplace, and it marks you as unprofessional,” says King, who now writes career books for women. “I was terribly frustrated that no one was advancing me along. And I didn’t realize it wasn’t a smart thing until 10 years later.”
But no college teaches Office Politics 101 or even Acceptable Work Place Behavior 1A. And much of the job advice that is available is tailored to older workers in search of a second career, not twentysomethings grappling with a first job. Even career how-to books for the young worker are more likely to offer counsel on getting the first non-fast-food job, not surviving it.
As a result, many young workers think they have it made simply by getting Real Job No. 1. They’re wrong; they still have to prosper and jump to Real Job No. 2.
Contrary to popular belief, surviving the first step up the career ladder does not require the skills of a rocket scientist, a fancy MBA from an even fancier graduate school or even a degree from the school of hard knocks.
“For people in their first job, the assumption is that they’re so naive they need to be beaten around a little before the teachable moment occurs,” says management consultant Janet Hauter. “But if the first-time employee could be prepared a little better, they would be less shellshocked and might stay around a company a little longer.”
Surviving the first job requires a good dose of common sense and the willingness to follow a few simple guidelines. Hauter steals the first one straight from the real estate industry:
* Location, location, location: When you buy a house, you pick the most affordable property in the priciest block. When you get your first job, you should aim at landing in the best company you can find in your career field.
“If you can go to a superior place . . . that will help you focus far faster than reading the books about your field or going to a second-class organization,” Hauter says.
* Silence is golden: Shutting up and taking notes is one of King’s favorite pieces of advice to the new employee. “This is not the time of your career to come in insisting you know the right way to do things.”
* Timing is everything: Prepare for a minimum of a 50-hour workweek, particularly if your first job is in a growing entrepreneurial company. Still, you have to know how to draw the line at unwanted overtime. One graceful out: “I have really worked so hard today that if I stayed to work overtime, I wouldn’t be giving the company my best,” Hauter suggests.
* Timing is everything II: Don’t quit too soon; and for heaven’s sake, don’t stick around too long. Two to three years is a nice amount. In that time, you must do three things: Learn the job, learn the political disposition of the company and learn the industry.
* Know when to fold ‘em: A “restlessness in the gut” is Hauter’s first signal that it’s time to quit. Other good indicators are an inability to get to work on time or make deadline on important projects.
For Alex DeLeon, 26, it’s way too soon to be getting any intestinal signals that it’s time to go. An animator who graduated from UCLA in 1990 with a degree in fine arts, he is five months into his first real job.
During a short tenure as a security guard--about two years into his search for that career opener--DeLeon realized he’d already had 14 mostly unreal jobs since graduation.
“One night I was sitting there in the lobby--they didn’t even have a desk for me--(and) I knew it was my last day there. I had to find a real job,” he said.
Contacts in an animation workshop helped land him his current position at Sidley Wright Motionworks in Hollywood, where the first project he was assigned to was Steven Spielberg’s animated dinosaur movie “We’re Back.”
Flexibility and a willingness to work long hours helped get him recalled after brief layoffs between projects, while others have not returned.
Now DeLeon has his own hard-learned advice for others on the first rung of the career ladder: “I show up, listen and do the job.”
