Some good advice for new grads in their first job – and a good reminder for the rest of us – in a recent post over on Yahoo Finance. Yahoo’s 6 career damaging mistakes:
1. Thinking that because you have your degree, you shouldn’t have to do grunt work.
2. Not being thorough.
3. Thinking that what you post on social networking sites doesn’t matter.
4. Procrastinating.
5. Not putting effort into forming relationships with older colleagues.
6. Not saying “thank you.”
Here are a couple of more —
- Not being a team player. In much of your college work, you were on your own, competing, even, against your classmates. In business, however, you’re almost always part of a team, collaborating to accomplish a task. The more you can learn to get things done with and through other people, the more likely your long term success.
- Not learning the Big Picture. Again, in college, you’re typically given a well defined problem with an outcome that falls within a well defined set of possibilities. Although your early job assignments will probably be small manageable pieces of a larger business problem, the important business problems are hardly ever clearly defined or understood, and rarely do they have an obvious path to a solution. Context, history, and relationships often matter as much as the technology and analytics. Those who can put it all together are rare and valuable to your employer.
And – especially for young women – be mindful of the image you project. Study after study show the advantage – for both men and women – of being attractive, but a reputation as the office ‘hottie’ is not an ingredient for long term career success. Study and model you behaviors and appearance after people at the level of your boss’s boss. They have already achieved some measure of success, and they provide you with a clear indication of what your employer values and rewards.
