How to Get on The Fast Track in Your First Real Job
Many of us come out of college and join the workforce ready to take on the world and become the CEO. If you are anything like I was, you might spend the first couple of years of your career restless and frustrated that things aren’t moving as fast as you would like. In hindsight, what I find ironic now is that many business leaders like myself are looking for reasons to promote people but they struggle with finding talent that are ready. We want — scratch that, need — you prepared to take on more responsibility. After a few decades into our careers, many of my peers and I are now CEOs or senior leaders in business. Here’s how we got there.
To start off with, identify your first employment opportunity with a company or people that value apprenticeship. Look to work for someone who enjoys investing in those coming up in the ranks. Even if your initial boss isn’t that person, find the person in the company who has a reputation for grooming talent and plot a path to work for them. You learn business in three ways: by doing it, by getting trained in it and by experiencing it. The ‘experiencing it’ is the X factor — it helps build the wisdom that you can’t get in the classroom at business school or that you wouldn’t learn from your day-to-day tasks. It comes when a manager pulls you into meetings above your pay grade so that you can listen in and learn through osmosis. After business school, I went to work for a venture capital fund. The managing partner there — Yuval Almog at Coral Ventures—had me tag along to board meetings and listen in to important calls with investors. I gained years of extra experience through those opportunities beyond what I got from the daily grind.
Be there. Along the same lines as finding an employer that values apprenticeship, you need to be there to take advantage of those chance opportunities to join that customer meeting or conversation with an investor for which you wouldn’t normally be invited. It’s fashionable in the millennial generation to value flexibility in your work schedule. The downfall of working from home is that you miss those incredible extra exposure opportunities.
Go to where the growth is. Companies that are growing require additional help to handle the onslaught of new demands that customers are placing on their business. That means more responsibility and the existing team members are usually the first candidates to have dibs to step into those newly emerging roles. Find out if the business you are joining is growing. If it’s a private company you may have to ask some questions, such as what was the growth rate of the business last year? What do you expect it to be this year? If it’s a public company look up the financials on Google Finance or Edgar. You may also want to inquire about the financial performance of the division you are joining if it is a larger company. Don’t be afraid to ask questions about financial performance. You’re hitching your wagon to this baby.
Roll up your sleeves. Contrary to popular opinion, the really awesome big ideas don’t usually come simply because one has tons of experience or has a strategic mind. Those things help but my experience has been that throwing yourself into the details of everyday work is where you find the interesting patterns that turn a flailing product into a successful one, identify a new product opportunity or come up with an idea that leads to an entirely new company. On occasion, I see our younger team members getting frustrated with tasks that seem too manual, feeling that they are being given the ‘shit’ work. I’ve been surprised how valuable those detailed jobs can be if you embrace it. There’s always something to be learned, no matter how mundane the work. Mastering the complexity of the task at hand in one area builds confidence that you can do it in other areas. Side note: many bosses throw money at folks that add a ton of value so that they don’t spend any time at all looking for another job — getting super knowledgable about how to do your job well is the fastest path to more money and a promotion. (For an excellent read on the topic, check out Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way)
Ask not what is in it for you but what is in it for the company. I learned this from my friend and mentor Rob Majteles, and it has held true throughout my career. We all go through phases where we are “all in,” thinking only about how we can help others or help the business achieve its goals. We also all go through times when we are frustrated and are left wondering what we are getting out of a job. That might show up in frustration that we aren’t being paid enough or angst that co-workers are being recognized more than we are. Monitor your own mindset — when you are asking yourself what’s in it for you then you are in the wrong job or have the wrong attitude. Make a change of some kind. I’ve been most productive — and oddly benefited the most — when I am solely thinking about how I can add value to the company or help my boss or assist my peers or make life better for the customer.
Exhibit gap-filling behavior. There are always things that need to be done that aren’t covered by anyone’s job description. You wouldn’t believe how valuable one becomes when the boss knows that person can be counted on to get anything done. Be the one to raise your hand first to take on the task that no one else wants or owns.
Be patient. The research on the most successful people is increasingly clear: persistence and grit take you far. I see a lot of resumes and interview a lot of candidates that bounce between jobs in their first few years. Those restless souls grow bored or frustrated and quickly move on to the next opportunity. The problem is that they jump ship right before something might pop up that gives them that jump in responsibility, oftentimes leaving behind a big investment that they made in building a reputation in their current company. Be aggressive in asking your current employer what it takes to get that jump in responsibility before throwing away the investment you have made with your current employer. (Note: Your employer’s ability to give you more responsibility is going to most likely be directly linked with how fast their company is growing — work for the ones with an increasing revenue line!)
Run “to” not “away” your next job. When you are considering a job change, make sure you are running to the next thing, not away from what you dislike about your current job. The new employers that you will be interviewing can smell it a mile away, and you will get a lot more out of your next job if you are clear on what the next challenge is that will propel you along your path. Developing the self awareness to know what you are looking for next will also make sure the next move isn’t a misfire.
Spend “time in the field.” Regardless of your role in the company, finding ways to get exposure to customers makes you immensely valuable. Volunteer to help train customers. Throw in to help the support team when they get overloaded. The more experience you get with customers, the better. Even if you have a job buried inside the organization, there are always ways to get to the front lines — just ask.
Learn to manage expectations. For your boss, knowing when you are going to complete something is more important than the speed to which you get it done. Read that again. Knowing when you are going to complete something is more important than the speed to which you get it done. Your boss likely has to answer to others (customers, their boss, their peers, etc.) and their ability to be able to tell others when it will be done is more valuable to them than when it actually gets done.
Be a leader. Being a leader isn’t a job or a title, it’s a way of acting. Leaders, quite simply, get a group of others to act by getting them to share a common purpose. You can be a leader by taking initiative to start a new program at work, be it a business book reading club, diversity initiative, volunteer project or any number of things that should happen. Be the person who finds a problem and decides to mobilize others to fix it, not just complain about it.
Don’t be a critic. No one likes being criticized. The best way to change something is to model the behavior you wish to change in others. Being critical oftentimes stirs emotion and subsequently doesn’t achieve the change you are seeking.
Seek to understand before being understood. It’s surprising how often your first reaction to something might be altered as you learn more information. It’s good to build in an automatic 3 minute pause before responding to that annoying email. The worst decisions that I have made in my career have been when I responded to something in the first 3 seconds (it’s a lifelong struggle for some of us!).
Ask Questions. No one likes the new person that has all the answers but hasn’t done the homework. The best way to make a point is to use the socratic method and ask questions to get the core of an issue. This will allow you to better understand the situation and not come across as a smart $%# that has all of the answers. Double win.
Don’t focus too much on money. There will be a time and place in your career where the money will become important — and more meaningful — but in the early days don’t put too much stock in it. Right out of college, a $5K or $10K difference in pay between two opportunities may seem like a lot but later on in the grand scheme of things it won’t make much of a difference. Take the job with the most learning potential — the money will come.
Christopher Smith is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Kipsu, which helps hoteliers, retailers and other high touch service providers build amazing relationships with their customers using text messaging and other digital conversation channels. Chris is also a Co-Founder and the Co-Chair of Minnesota Comeback, an education reform network tackling the opportunity gap in Minneapolis. You can reach him at chris@kipsu.com.
