Career transitions

There’s a massive difference between being a student at university and being an entry or graduate-level worker in a business, and it can often be difficult to navigate this transition from education into the workplace.

Some of the common difficulties to overcome within this transition include:

• Quest for perfection vs Quest for efficiency
• Failure avoidance vs Failure is inevitable
• Manage my time how I like vs Working week/hours
• Friends and peers vs Colleagues and hierarchy
• Clear tasks and deadlines vs Ambiguous tasks and changing deadlines.

Quest for perfection vs Quest for efficiency

At university, your goal is generally to get as high a mark as possible, so we often spend a long time on each piece of work to try and get it as perfect as we can! In the working world, this isn’t as easy. You’ve got strict(er) working hours, tighter deadlines, and lots of other work to deal with. For many employers, efficiency is more valuable than perfection, which is why this transition is so important. Making the transition from perfection to efficiency can be difficult, but is able to be managed through the management of your own expectations, and getting help from others. You’ll be able to judge how much work you can do in a certain amount of time and will start to understand the level of quality you need for each client. It gets easier over time, trust me!

Failure avoidance vs Failure is inevitable

If you’re a perfectionist (like me), you’re likely to do practically anything to avoid failing. Whether it’s spending hours on assignments, getting 100 people’s advice on things, or avoiding taking risks, this isn’t plausible when you’re in employment. You’ll have to accept that failure is inevitable – it’s a part of life that you should use as a means of learning from and improving for next time. The next time you fail, why not try journaling – write down what you learned from the experience? What positives can you take away? How can you use your experiences to bounce back the next time?

Manage my time how I like vs Working week/hours

You might be used to spending your time how you like (outside of your mandatory lectures) whilst you’re at university. Maybe you like to study into the night and get up late in the morning. Maybe you like to keep a few hours free in the day to go to the gym or get out for a walk. That’s all fine and well when you’re at university, but won’t translate well to a 9-5 job or other fixed working patterns. You might want to get a head start on this transition by starting off setting yourself a routine. Maybe something like waking up at 7:30, having lunch at 12:30, and tea at 6 pm, to reflect the 9-5 workday. Utilising your work calendar can also be useful in the beginning to schedule your time and make use of your best working periods. If you’re a morning person, maybe keep that time free for meetings when your head is fresh, or block it out to get your head down and do large amounts of work. Figure out what works for you based on your times of efficiency!

Friends and peers vs Colleagues and hierarchy

Being surrounded by friends and peers can be excellent – they accept you for who you are, you accept them for them, and it’s all sunshine and rainbows! In a business though, you’re likely to come across a lot of different personalities that you’ll have to work with constructively – people of different ages, backgrounds and political opinions. You’ll also have to get used to hierarchy within business, what your role within your team is, what you’re responsible for and how you are accountable to your manager and other members of the organisation. To navigate this and understand what it’s like to be within a business in terms of your relationships with colleagues and the hierarchy, you can ask other people you know how they manage their relationships with their manager, colleagues, and clients. The more experience you can get, the better! People might not have the same level of qualifications as you, but they may have many years of experience – they’re great to learn from! Interacting with people more senior than you can be daunting, so (if you’re still at university), you could try interacting more with your lecturers and other staff members to build your confidence in this.

Clear tasks and deadlines vs Ambiguous tasks and changing deadlines

At university, you normally have set assignments with a specific deadline, clear marking criteria and instructions for what to do and when to do it. This is very different to what you might experience in the working world, where requirements and deadlines might be constantly shifting, and you might have to wait for colleagues to complete their tasks before you can even get started on yours. The information to complete your tasks might be ambiguous, incomplete or unclear. To help ease you into these changes, you can shadow others in the business to see how they might break a task down into its integral parts, or how they generate ideas or manage their time to ensure that deadlines are met – perhaps they put in mini-deadlines and aim to get work done well in advance of deadlines, just in case they are moved closer.