One of the most underrated skills for any employee is the ability to start fresh but with a running advantage. Even if you get the job, and even if your first couple of days go really well, the stresses of the next few weeks can get seriously draining as you learn not just the rules on paper, but also the rules as they are practiced by the company. This is a common, almost universal experience that can make anyone hate their life, so let’s talk about some tips for avoiding this pitfall of a new job.
Table of Contents
Be Honest With Yourself
The human brain can be a strange thing, almost uniquely positioned to lie to itself concerning things like new job social situations, but even more deviously just how tired you are. If you can identify a problem with how you are faring in a particular situation, it becomes a thousand times easier to fix. This is the basis for the phrase “knowing is half the battle,” and it’s remarkably true for real situations all around us.
When you start your job, you will likely have to undergo employee compliance training, which despite its ominous name is just going over rules and regulations concerning workplace behavior created by the government. These are often as simple as codes of conduct to prevent sexual harassment, but it’s still important to pay attention since hidden among these videos are actual rules that are enforced. A lot of the time, these modules are considered kind of a throwaway period of your time working, but this is a deceptive perception. Don’t let your eyes glaze over, working is a marathon, not a sprint!
Start With The Best Habits
If you have struggled with working in the past, or if you think you may during a first job, it’s worth evaluating your worktime to set up good habits. Habits are things that need to be actively maintained, which especially during the first weeks of a new job is a painful reality. But, it is the truth nonetheless that if you think you can get away with lacking motivation from day 1 your body will take notice. Anyone who has gone down a single career path much of their life can attest to this: start early or you may not start at all.
A lot of job-seeking sites can provide helpful advice for new employees, visit this website to see a list of these tips from Indeed, a fairly household name for job searching. I think a lot of people throw around the idea that others flake out of particular jobs or burn out due to a lack of motivation, and while this is partly true, in reality, the habits started on day 1 can take you very far on very little drive.
Practice Humility
Even if your new job is something you are very good at naturally, and even if you’ve done all this in a past job, you need to be willing to admit that you will make mistakes. A person’s first mistake on the job is sometimes considered a rite of passage that actually gives you some credibility in the field. Don’t make the mistake of refusing to admit you made a real, costly error. Being defensive is your worst enemy.
You should remember not just that you can make mistakes or produce problems, but that you are on the bottom of the entire totem pole. They call it a corporate ladder for a reason, and sometimes that reality is lost on people who come into a job expecting to be listened to. Frankly, this is not a terrible expectation, but being listened to and being told what to do are not mutually exclusive, sometimes in work going hand in hand. If you want more information on common first job mistakes, follow this link: https://money.usnews.com/careers/company-culture/slideshows/9-common-first-job-mistakes to see some of the most common.
Make Connections
This is a very roundabout, potentially circular, way of saying that networking is a useful tactic. Make friends at your new job and you may end up drawing on those friendships for future opportunities or just a night out for fun. The thing about new jobs is that they place you, sometimes perhaps unwillingly, into a culture that you can either join and reap the benefits of or stay away from and be isolated from team members. I would always avoid the second option, even if you are a strong introvert the possibilities brought from simply talking to people cannot be overlooked.
The biggest tips for new jobs? Work hard, be attentive and respectful, and be safe. It’s a wide, super scary world out there, and a scarier working world, but you should have some confidence in yourself that you can do it. Once you have that, the rest comes naturally.
