The Corporate Freshman: A New Chapter Begins

The holidays are over, and so is your six month, self-imposed hiatus from the real world. It seems like just yesterday that you devoured the leftovers from those graduation barbeques and sanitized your senior year apartment for the next lucky inhabitant. But now, it's time to get down to business. Hopefully, by now, you have a job offer in hand and a business-appropriate wardrobe hanging patiently in your closet. You can't wait to decorate your cube a la Extreme Home Makeover and scale the corporate ladder faster than you can say "Vice President."

When you start that first job, enthusiasm is essential, but you want to be prepared too. It wasn't long ago that I graduated from Northwestern University and touched down on the alien planet known as Corporate America. I was so eager to strut my stuff as a PR account exec that I didn't realize the rules had changed. Unlike school, success in the business world wasn't about how much information I crammed into my brain, or how well I exceeded a set of defined expectations. I didn't understand the importance of marketing myself or knowing the right people, and after months of working my butt off with no results, I was ready to escape to law school.

I stuck it out, though, and after some tough lessons, finally figured out how to stay sane and move up. In an effort to help new employees avoid the agida I experienced, I published They Don't Teach Corporate in College: A Twenty-Something's Guide to the Business World and now I'm looking forward to writing this blog for the Huffington Post, which will cover everything from overcoming a lack of experience to coping with reverse age discrimination.

As for surviving that first job, here are some tips I picked up along the way:

* Play the role of the mature professional: Think of yourself as a publicist with the task of promoting you. Capitalize on the skills you bring to the table, be confident, and subtly assert your achievements without bragging.

* Establish profitable relationships: Networking with colleagues in and outside your department is a valuable way to gain information, increase your visibility, and make connections that will help you move forward.

* Be a humble, can-do employee: Show that you can learn from any assignment, no matter how unglamorous. Don't have a sense of entitlement. As the newbie, it's your responsibility to fit in and figure out how you can best contribute.

* Master skills that will take you anywhere: You might not know exactly what you want to do with your life, but transferable skills like goal setting, effective communication and time management will serve you well no matter what future path you pursue.

* Be proactive about your career growth: Don't just wait for your review to happen. Approach it strategically by soliciting feedback on your progress and hammering out a long-term promotion plan.

I'm going to do these posts once a month, and I'd love to hear from you! Send me your thoughts, your feedback, your sticky situations, and your unique ways of troubleshooting workplace issues that other employees in the trenches will find useful. Life as a corporate freshman isn't easy, but if you approach your journey in the right way, you'll be speaking their language in no time.

Follow Alexandra Levit on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alevit

Comments

[onezero]

Read The Prince by Nicolò Machiavelli. It contains all you need to know about business culture in the US. How people behave in structured groups simply does not change.

[QueenMaedb]

I've been long winded!

But wanted to let you know I am not in management any more. I discovered I don't have the stomach for it after I had to preside over a couple of rounds of layoffs. It tore my guts out, having to decide who stayed and who went - especially when that company was hiring VP's and giving them signing bonuses like they were going out of style.

Finally, the pink slip came for me. I went back to being a techie - which was my first love, anyway - with a new company. I love my job and hope to avoid age discrimination and layoffs until I retire.

[QueenMaedb]

Hi, Alexandra!

I wish you - and Huffpo! - had been around when I was a "Corporate Freshman!"

Here are two of the dilemmas I faced during my 25+ year career for your consideration. I'd be interested to see how you - and your readers - might deal with them.

Just two or so years into my first job out of college, a good friend and co-worker took me aside and told me - after I PROMISED to keep it confidential - that one of her paychecks had been double-deposited to her account a year earlier. It was never caught, and she felt she was owed the money for all the hard work she did (she WAS an extremely talented and good worker).

This made me NUTS! I'd NEVER have done this, myself, yet I'd promised not to tell. For this and other reasons, I left that company in the next year.

If I had to do it over, I would have "told" on her with a plea for understanding. I don't know what the fallout would have been, had I done this...

In 1999, I was managing a team of IT professionals. Y2K was THE project, and our upper management met with us to discuss vacation black-outs (among other things) in February 1999. Their first thought was a black-out between May 1, 1999 and March 31, 2000.

I gave input that this time was when most folks made deposits on beach houses for the summer and it wouldn't be fair to let them proceed.

In my next staff meeting, I polled my team on who had made vacation plans - including deposits they'd put down - under the guise of starting on a vacation calendar for the year. When I discovered that half had already put down money, I TOLD them about management's thinking. It spread like wildfire!

Next time we all met with upper management, I fessed up that I was the leak showed everyone the vacation calender I'd done up for my team, including color codes for those who'd already put down money.

[curiousasheck]

The truth is that no serious person has ever achieved anything in absence of grueling work stretching over many years.

[hopeless277]

Do whatever it takes to advance the corporate agenda. Lie, cheat, steal, bribe, murder, rape, pillage, anything and everything is now permissible for corporations. And if, in the very strange event that you get into trouble with the law, just pass a few hundred Franklin's to your local congressman and 'poof' your problems dissappear. Ain't America GREAT????