Finishing university can be a time of equal amounts excitement and trepidation. You are moving from a place in which you’re top of the totem pole and know your surroundings, to another environment in which you’re starting from the beginning again.
Obviously, this creates challenges. Here are some of the most common issues faced by graduates entering the workforce, and some of the solutions to overcome these hurdles.
1. Poor development or line management
Anne Musiol, a career counsellor based in Dublin, said one of the biggest issues is people struggling to cope working with a manager who maybe isn’t offering them clear instructions or guidance. “If someone has poor management in that first job, it can really have an impact on their confidence or on their prospects,” she said.
“It can leave them floundering without anybody developing their career and development.”
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The best way to overcome this hurdle, she said, is to request a one-on-one meeting with your manager to seek a clear understanding of your role, or to see if your place of work has a mentorship programme so you can partner with a more experienced colleague who could guide you.
2. Lack of training
A lot of focus when beginning a new job is on the soft skills that are learned. However, every place of work is different, and many of them require role-specific training or upskilling. Line managers and colleagues often think all employees have the knowledge and skills for the role, however, new entrants may not be fully equipped.
“To be a graduate, it’s really important for your confidence to keep building on your learning through training; to gain new skills as you go along, especially as you’re starting,” Ms Musiol said.
3. Part of a team
As any individual who attended full-time education can attest, group work is the worst. There’s always one member who doesn’t pull their weight, one member who thinks they’re the boss of everyone, and everyone else just tries to get through the experience without committing homicide. According to Ms Musiol, teamwork and collaboration are key features of the working environment, but it is often more palatable than it was in university.
“There’s always going to be someone whose job it is to guide you. There are parameters there, and there is always a job description to fall back on,” she said.
4. Matching your perceptions with reality
Often, how we envisage a job to be is vastly different from how it is in practice, particularly for those graduates who studied largely theoretical degrees such as business or humanities.
Trying to mesh those perceptions to how graduates’ roles are in reality is often a difficulty encountered by those beginning work.
“If you’re not happy, and if what you have is not what you thought it would be, I think you can still be very valuable to build on that towards what you want. Maybe what you’re doing isn’t that satisfying, but there are movements left and right,” Ms Musiol added.
5. Setting boundaries
One of the biggest difficulties is trying to complete your workload in a healthy and relatively stress-free way. Even though you might want to prove yourself, you should not be working hours and hours of overtime to complete tasks of impress your bosses.
Setting healthy worklife boundaries is “really difficult”, Ms Musiol said.
“If you’re trying to make a name for yourself, it’s really easy to let those boundaries slip. It’s a very new situation to you, so you don’t even know what these boundaries are yet.
“You’ve got to work out what works for you, and where you need the breaks and respite as you go along. If you can define what stresses you then you can start to look for techniques to master it.”
6. Are your expectations of yourself realistic?
As you move from the cream of the crop to suddenly being the fledgling once again, it is important not to expect too much of yourself. While you’re an important part of the workforce, you’re not going to solve a company’s problems in your first week of the job. But this lack of responsibility allows a graduate to work on themselves, and to decide what sort of employee they want to be.
“It can be really good to identify people to look up to, maybe there’s somebody who really reminds you of yourself or really impressed by,” Ms Musiol said.
“You should look into what attracts that person to you, and how you can apply that to yourself.”
7. Anxiety
On the flip side of that, anxiety and stress are emotions often felt by new employees as you’re pushed to take on new tasks or to try things that are outside of your comfortzone. Ms Musiol said it can be “very easy to feel overwhelmed” in these early days of transition.
“It’s important for people to recognise that preparation can help with anxiety in work. If you’re starting to get anxious about things you’re being asked to do, put some time in to prepare and do practical things you can do for yourself. Be patient with yourself as you learn,” she added.
8. Mistakes are bound to happen
It’s also important to remember that you’re a human who is on a new learning journey. With that, mistakes are going to happen, just like they did to your colleagues when they first began working. “Making mistakes can be really painful, but allow yourself that moment of suffering but then say ‘okay, I’m learning from this and I’ll try again’. It’s okay to admit you don’t know everything,” Ms Musiol said.
9. Confidence
When you’re new and younger than your colleagues, the workplace can be daunting. But the best way to success is to contribute: pitch ideas, speak at meetings and volunteer for projects. Ms Musiol said impostor syndrome too often holds new graduates back.
“You might need something extra, maybe more tools and more guidance, but yeah you can do it. It’s important not to go to that automatic thought of ‘oh I’m an impostor and I don’t belong here’,” she said.
10. Interpersonal skills
For a cohort of individuals who largely completed university online during the Covid-19 pandemic, a specific issue of people skills arises. However, Ms Musiol said these graduates have shown resilience and adaptability, and going into the workplace with an open mind will assist in overcoming this issue.
“Depending on where you go, some places have a large influx of graduates and you’ll find your tribe through that. Other places, you may come in as the only person or one of two, and that’s going to be quite different,” she added.
