Success on the Job

Congratulations – you are now employed! Believe it or not, now comes the hard part. Throughout your college years you have learned to connect with the culture at Notre Dame, how to accomplish your goals, how to get along with others, how to deal tactfully with challenges and opportunities. You will need all of those skills in the working world. Listed below are things to remember and some additional online resources.

The following is adapted from the book The New Professional by Ed Holton.

  • Learn your job. To get into Notre Dame you had to prove yourself, to succeed at Notre Dame you had to prove yourself, and now you have to prove yourself once again. That means no matter how trivial a portion of your job may seem, you need to do it, and all other aspects of your job, well to earn the opportunity for promotion.
  • Build professional respect and credibility. The key during your first year is to gain the respect of your peers, colleagues, and management and to establish yourself as a professional with credibility and integrity. Learn the culture and the formal and informal norms. Refrain from gossip and complaining. With respect and credibility will come acceptance into work groups, and acceptance is a valuable part of the organization and department team.
  • Confirm the hiring decision. Your employers took a chance in hiring you. Based on a limited amount of information (school success, interviews, etc.) they believed you could be a good performer and contributor to the organization. Make sure you prove them right!
  • Show you have potential. You weren’t hired to do the entry-level job, but for your potential to advance beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you will be receiving that promotion immediately, or even 6 to 12 months down the road, but you need to show you have the raw material to advance when the opportunity arises.
  • Make good impressions. Everything you do makes an impression – focus on making the right ones.
  • Become a professional. For the past sixteen years or so you have been a student. You knew how to fit in to the culture of school life. Now you are a professional and you need to fit into that culture. It is critical that you leave the student life behind and enter the professional one. Find role models you can learn from covering all areas of work ethic, approachability, dress, etc.
  • Get to know your organization. Each organization has its own personal culture. You may think you know what it is but you really don’t until you experience it. A department’s culture may even differ in some ways from the organization’s culture. Your mission in your first year is to get to know your organization/department, how it works and what it expects. You can’t choose personal career strategies and develop a success plan until you do.

Things to avoid during your first year:

  • Behaving like a college student
  • Trying to start too fast
  • Making premature judgments about people in the organization
  • Trying to play a bigger role than you are capable of
  • Taking it easy – there’s still a lot of ground to cover
  • Too much partying
  • Thinking you understand it all – there are typically levels of politics and culture that you haven’t experienced yet

Things to avoid after your first year:

  • Letting your unrealistic expectation in the beginning lead you to a hasty and unwise decision about leaving the organization
  • Continuing to act or perform like a rookie
  • Expecting to be promoted immediately – you are just beginning to earn your keep

Some additional information can be found at the following websites:
http://careerplanning.about.com/cs/firstjob/a/post_grad.htm
http://www.quintcareers.com/life_after_college_books.html