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Five steps for tackling the transition from Business School to career

Business Impact: Five steps for tackling the transition from Business School to career

Five steps for tackling the transition from Business School to career

Business Impact: Five steps for tackling the transition from Business School to career
Business Impact: Five steps for tackling the transition from Business School to career

In the face of an unknown future, it can help to have a mindset rooted in curiosity about what is possible in new terrain. Marketing professor, Joan Ball, outlines five ways to prompt enquiry, exploration and learning

In a world filled with promises of quick or easy answers to life’s most challenging questions, I wish there were five easy steps I could offer to set you off on a well-marked path to success, post-graduation.

Unfortunately, after nearly 15 years of working with students transitioning from university to career in my research and practice, one thing is clear – there is no single path, best practice or model for professional and personal success in the 2020s. You are graduating into an environment where commitments and priorities are constantly shifting and changing. One where opportunities (and challenges) abound and no single map, compass or true north is available to guide your way.

In this uncharted territory, careers are increasingly nomadic, and the future of work is being co-created in practice, as organisations and the people who keep them afloat are called on to adapt to new tools, tactics and approaches to living in a paradoxically predictable and unpredictable postdigital world.

Some people find this realisation exciting. They are inspired by the freedom and creative potential of uncharted territory and the adventure of blazing new trails in their professional and personal lives. These are the people who embrace uncertainty and ambiguity as a prompt to explore. For others, the lack of stability and predictability is unsettling – even threatening. They long for clear markers on well-worn paths that lead to a clearly defined notion of a successful career and life. In either case, the space between university and career is a liminal space between the highly structured life of the university and the multitude of possible ways to move forwards beyond graduation.

In this new environment, embarking on the career journey is less about following prescribed steps and more about developing and adapting practices and principles that are customised to amplify our unique strengths, address our particular challenges and guide us on a path towards our context-specific aspirations in ways that are relevant to the lives we hope to live.

For many of us who were trained in systems that favored finding a true north and relying on models, frameworks and best practices as our compass, this can feel daunting. Many students I work with describe themselves as feeling lost, overwhelmed or stuck at this point of inflection – even though they are excited and eager to embark on their career journey.

Fortunately, uncharted territory is just as navigable as a clearer path if we gather resources and develop the principles, practices and approaches we need to engage uncertainty with curiosity, confidence and humility. This involves shifting from a traditional navigator mindset (‘GPS, tell me where to go!’) to a wayfinding mindset.

Wayfinders mindset

The wayfinders mindset is rooted in rigorous self-awareness and a curiosity about what is possible in new terrain. I offer the following prompts as a place to begin. Not so much a set of steps, but more a stepping off point that I hope will prompt enquiry, exploration and learning in the face of an unknown future.

1. Stop: you are entering liminal space

You’ve spent the past 22+ years studying, preparing and having your life reset every quarter, semester or trimester for as long as you remember. This rhythm of life and the prescribed routines surrounding them (registering for classes, studying, preparing for exams) are now over. You are no longer a student, which is a huge identity shift. You no longer have the prescribed timelines and approaches that were created by your university.
Making the shift to a new identity and a new direction is not something that always happens intuitively at points of transition. This sort of disjunction can be unsettling and lead to incendiary emotions. Pausing to acknowledge the change and give it consideration prompts us to shift from a mindset that views the future as a problem to solve to a mindset of discovery. Doing so can help temper the threat we sometimes feel when we’re not sure what to do next and help us to embrace uncertain transitions as invitations to learning. This makes it easier to approach change with dispassionate curiosity rather than fear-based reactions.

2. Ask: what is the new terrain I am entering?

Once we’ve paused and set an intention to engage transition with dispassionate curiosity, we can reflect on who we’ve become and the particulars of the current state of the world we’re entering. You are not the same person you were when you entered university. Who have you become? Are the aspirations you had when you started the same as they were then? What are you clear about? Where is your sense of who you are and what you want murky?
No judgement here, just enquiry and taking a clear-minded inventory of who we are, where we are and what is possible. Once we have a sense of ourselves, we can do the same for the state of the world we’re entering. It is not the same as it was when you entered university. Making time to get the lay of the land can help spark ideas about what comes next.

3. Ask: what resources do I need to navigate this new terrain?

Open an enquiry into what resources you have or don’t have. What strengths do you see in yourself as you enter this transition? Where do you have gaps and holes? How might you connect to the emotional, physical, material and social resources you need to amplify your strengths and reinforce areas where you feel less prepared?
Gathering the right resources to enter the uncharted territory of your life, post-graduation, is as important as gathering resources for a backwoods hike.

4. Ask: what do you hope for as I enter this new terrain?

What are your aspirations? Have they changed since you entered university? Are you still not sure? Acknowledge that having a clear sense of what’s next is sometimes available and that, at other times, we are exploring. Neither is better or worse than the other, but each invites a different wayfinding approach.

5. Explore: how do I find my way in this new terrain?

Wayfinding is an art – and a science. Entering into the transition from Business School to career with the open-minded creativity of an artist and a scientist’s structured willingness to experiment, learn and build on learning can provide a framework for engaging in uncertainty as an adventure in learning, doing and exploring rather than finding the ‘right’ answer to living a good life. This is a critical orientation for entering this next stage of your life – and every uncertain transition you face in the future.

Joan P Ball is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Peter J Tobin College of Business, St. John’s University in the US. She is a transition expert, holds a PhD in international business management and is the author of Stop, Ask, Explore: Learn to Navigate Change in Times of Uncertainty (Kogan Page, 2022).

 

Headline image: Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

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Will your social media profile replace your CV?

Business Impact: Will your social media profile replace your CV?

Will your social media profile replace your CV?

Business Impact: Will your social media profile replace your CV?
Business Impact: Will your social media profile replace your CV?

From Amazon and Netflix to LinkedIn and TikTok – your digital footprints offer glimpses into your personality. Algorithms can use these footprints to reveal your soft skills and suitability for a particular role, say the authors of The Future of Recruitment

What do you think reveals the most about you, your carefully curated resumé, or your online browsing habits? I think we all would agree that the latter would give any stranger an accurate picture of your unique values, characteristics and personality.

If I know that you spend a lot of time browsing and contributing to Wikipedia, as opposed to if I know you spend your time bouncing from one influencer to the next on TikTok, I can make a safe bet that you’re intellectually curious — a personality trait that is a strong predictor of job performance.

When evaluating job applicants, recruiters are evaluating a candidate on their technical skills and expertise, alongside their soft skills – or in other words, their personality. The field of industrial-organisational psychology (I-O psychology) is dedicated to identifying and measuring the personality characteristics that explain who performs at work, and who doesn’t.

Thousands of scientific studies have demonstrated that psychological qualities – such as being disciplined, curious and considerate, to name just a few – consistently predict important work outcomes, such as leadership effectiveness, innovation, and collaboration, as well as which industries or vocations would be most engaging. These findings are then used by recruiters to improve their hiring decisions and organisational performance.

Digital footprints offer new ways to evaluate applicants’ suitability

While it is somewhat easy to measure one’s technical ability, understanding whether a candidate has the ability to work alongside others, stay motivated and practice curiosity is much harder. Recruiters are often left to their intuitions (which are inadvertently biased) or rely on psychometric tests that are usually cumbersome, expensive, and often unscientific. Fortunately, new technologies powered by machine-learning and our digital footprints may offer new ways to identify top talent and evaluate the suitability of job applicants. They can also open up new job opportunities to underserved communities, save time and minimise the bias that holds many people back.

As you live and work online, you leave a large trail of digital footprints that reveals an insight into what makes you, you. The films you watch on Netflix, the things you purchase on Amazon, the TikTok influencers you follow — each provide a tiny glimpse into your personality. These footprints can be aggregated and mined by machine-learning algorithms to reveal your soft skills.

Nearly 10 years ago, researchers from Cambridge University demonstrated that your Facebook Likes could accurately predict your personality, with greater accuracy than your closest friends and family. In other words, you are what you Like. Other researchers have since expanded these findings to include Spotify playlists, Tweets, smartphone usage, and many other sources of online behaviour. So how does this impact the way organisations recruit talent?

Benefits of incorporating digital footprints into the job application process

The fundamental objective of all talent assessments is to sufficiently understand a person’s tendency to behave in a given way and infer that they will continue to do so in the future. After all, if talent is the product of the right personality in the right place, recruiters need more accurate and comprehensive tools of one’s dispositions, decision-making styles and motivations. Incorporating digital footprints into the job application process offer multiple advantages over traditional talent assessment methods:

  1. User experience. Digital footprints can be analysed in seconds, as opposed to the 30 minutes or more that it takes applicants to complete a traditional talent assessment.
  2. Fairness. If trained and deployed correctly, algorithm-powered talent assessments standardise the job application process. This means that all candidates are assessed against the same criteria, minimising human bias and subjectivity.
  3. Diverse talent pools. Digital footprints allow for ‘one click’ job applications, and when coupled with the switch to virtual working, they can attract applications from underrepresented groups and communities. New assessment methods can reduce barriers to entry and build more inclusive organisations.
  4. Accuracy. Digital footprints provide an accurate and objective measure of an individual’s disposition. By using objective behavioural data, from a variety of sources across multiple points in time, recruiters can gain an accurate insight into one’s dispositions and potential. 
  5. Transparency. It is hard to understand and ‘debug’ human decision-making, it is comparatively easy to study how algorithms work. The use of algorithms in hiring contexts will lead to talent decisions that can be easily explained — another way to combat bias.

Ethical use of algorithms  

We hope that you are hearing alarm bells as you read this article. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the use of such data and technologies in the hiring process. As US mathematician, Cathy O’Neil, writes, algorithms that are used to evaluate people and guide human decision-making can become ‘weapons of math destruction’. In fact, we have already seen how these technologies have been used to foster social tension and inadvertently lead to biased recruiting decisions. That said, we believe it is better to be proactive about the future and guide the development of these technologies for the benefit of individuals and society. 

To ensure that the promise of alternative measures of talent can be fully realised and used ethically, it is important that the developers and users of these next-generation technologies think critically and intentionally about the following questions:

  1. A lack of transparency. To what extent do applicants and recruiters know how their data is being processed, weighted and analysed by the algorithm?
  2. Power asymmetry. What can be done to equalise the imbalance of power between those wielding the algorithm and those being subjected to its decisions?
  3. Bias and discrimination. Can the developers and users of talent algorithms demonstrate that there is no adverse impact on the selection of minority and protected groups?
  4. Privacy. Are the requested digital records relevant, made clear to the applicant, and what safeguards are being made to ensure their privacy is being protected?

Talent algorithms should not replace human agency and decisions. Instead, they are a tool to balance our intuition and subjectivity that so often leads to bad hires and wasted resources. As the way people live and work changes, so must organisations change the way they understand and recruit talent. Digital footprints show promise to be a valuable addition to the job application process, providing we can ensure that it is done with fairness, transparency and ethics.

Franziska Leutner is a Lecturer in Occupational Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Reece Akhtar is a Co-Founder and CEO of personality assessment firm, Deeper Signals.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University.

Franziska Leutner, Reece Akhtar and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic are the authors of The Future of Recruitment: Using the New Science of Talent Analytics to Get Your Hiring Right (Emerald, 2022).

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

Business Impact: Building a career with impact in CSR
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Building a career with impact in CSR

Creative and ambitious people that can help businesses shape and deliver their CSR agendas are in demand, says Lakshmi Woodings. Discover what careers in CSR involve and the skills you’ll need to succeed

Read More »
Discover more articles on careers
Business Impact Volume 19

Download the latest edition of the Business Impact magazine

Download here

Want your business school to feature in
Business Impact?

For questions about editorial opportunities, please contact:

Tim Banerjee Dhoul

Content Editor
Business Impact

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Tim

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Finding your fit: the relationship between stress, career and creativity

Business Impact: Finding your fit – the relationship between stress, career and creativity

Finding your fit: the relationship between stress, career and creativity

Business Impact: Finding your fit – the relationship between stress, career and creativity
Business Impact: Finding your fit – the relationship between stress, career and creativity

While an optimal amount of stress can help you focus and perform better, ‘bad’ stress and anxiety can impair your ability, says the author of Beat Stress at Work, Mark Simmonds. That’s why your characteristics and your work must be a good fit

Fit is everything.

If you want to give yourself the best chance possible of enjoying a rewarding career – one where you are able to fulfil the loftiest of ambitions – it’s important that you’re able to choose a path where you are able to manage ‘bad’ stress as much as possible. One way of doing this is to treat your job in the same way you would treat a personal relationship. In other words, look for a job where there is a close alignment between your own values and those of the company. If there is misalignment between the two for too long, the pressure will mount and it will more than likely end in tears.

This is what happened to me when I kicked off my career. It was really painful.

The prolonged panic attack

In my early twenties, I started working for Unilever, the global consumer goods company – one of the largest in the world. Its household brands, like Dove, Axe, Knorr, Magnum and Domestos are available in around 190 countries.

Unilever also has one of the most respected management trainee programmes for young people who want to forge a career in marketing. I succeeded in joining it when I was 25, working for Birds Eye Wall’s, one of its operating companies at the time and I was pretty proud of my achievement. The career roadmap was now neatly laid out in front of me and the future seemed bright.

A year later, I found myself pacing up and down the basement of the Birds Eye Wall’s building liked a caged animal. I was alone, surrounded only by freezers full of frozen peas, beef burgers and fish fingers and my own confused thoughts. I was trying to work out why I was suddenly feeling so anxious, why I seemed incapable of completing the most basic of tasks at my desk upstairs. I needed a bit of head space, away from people, to think clearly and work out what was going on in my frazzled mind. At the time, I was only a trainee, the lowest of the low. Admittedly, I had now been handed a little more responsibility and people in the team were relying on me to get things done, but I was still a relatively insignificant cog in the wheel.

Yerkes, Dodson and the electrocuted rat

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing a prolonged panic attack. During those ‘basement wandering days’, I felt frightened and agitated all the time. Back in 1908, two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, discovered that mild electric shocks could be used to motivate rats to complete a maze, but when the shocks became too strong, they would start panicking and scurry around the maze haphazardly in an attempt to escape. This became the basis of the Yerkes-Dodson Law which suggested there is a clear link between performance and arousal.

For example, an optimal amount of stress will help you focus on an exam and remember all the key facts. You might feel energised, stimulated, even exhilarated. That is ‘good stress’ and this might help you perform even better. But too much anxiety can impair your ability to remember anything worth writing down on the exam paper. You might freeze and become incapable of thinking straight. That’s ‘bad stress’ when you might not even perform at all. For what it’s worth, I felt like that electrocuted rat.

A round peg in a square hole 

When I was writing the book, Beat Stress at Work, I reflected back on that period and tried to work out what had gone wrong. What was it that had caused me to suffer from the prolonged panic attack and the years of discomfort that followed working at Birds Eye Wall’s? The problem was fit. I was a round peg in a square hole.

By nature, I was more of a creative type and enjoyed ruminating and cogitating, playing around with ideas and concepts, preferably on my own. I liked to have time and space to think things through. However, Birds Eye Wall’s was a fast-paced environment where making decisions quickly was very much the order of the day. Long ‘to do’ lists and pressing deadlines were very much the order of the day and all the beautiful inefficiency associated with the creative process was frowned on.

Matching careers and characteristics  

I developed the Matchmaker to help people make good career choices. It identifies a number of characteristics that define the DNA of both the company and the individual. The goal is to try and ensure that there are as many matches as possible, because the more matches there are, the more aligned the needs of both parties will be, and the less likely that ‘bad’ stress will rear its ugly head.

You can see in the Matchmaker table that in the case of Birds Eye Wall’s and me, that it was only ‘team orientation’ where alignment existed. For crucial pairings such as ‘focus on people development’ vs. ‘focus on task completion’ and ‘bias towards introverts’ vs. ‘bias towards extroverts’, the company and I were misaligned. Over a period of time, this misalignment began to cause me more and more ‘bad stress’.                            

So, how do you use the Matchmaker?

1* If your current job is causing you significant ‘bad’ stress, use this framework to highlight the differences that exist between you and the company, dimension by dimension. Put your name and your company’s name in the relevant boxes and insert a star where your names appear side by side.

2* Use the completed framework as the basis for a constructive conversation with your employers to see if you can achieve greater alignment. Be prepared to discuss the source(s) of your stress. Try and agree what they can do, what you can do.

3* Alternatively, if you are on the lookout for a new job, then use the dimensions of the Matchmaker to help you identify companies/positions where there is likely to be greater alignment between you and them.

Remember that fit is everything. Don’t be a square peg in a round hole if you can avoid it.

Mark Simmonds runs a creativity agency called GENIUS YOU and is the author of Beat Stress at Work. 

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Business Impact Volume 19

Download the latest edition of the Business Impact magazine

Download here

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Business Impact?

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Tim Banerjee Dhoul

Content Editor
Business Impact

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Pursuing purpose in your career and life

pursuing purpose in your career and life

Pursuing purpose in your career and life

pursuing purpose in your career and life
pursuing purpose in your career and life

Society in the western world has lived in a dearth of purpose since the 1970s, but now is a great time to pursue it once more, says McKinsey Consultant and author of Outgrowing Capitalism, Marco Dondi

What role should your job play in your life? The range of possible answers today is quite different to those of 100 years ago.

If you’ve never thought about this question, now might be a good time because the answer is often a window into the quest for our life purpose. Those who rarely ponder the question are likely to end up regretting it on their death bed.

A good sign that you are pursuing your purpose is that you are proud of who you are and are not afraid of people getting to know you. But what should you do today to be proud of yourself? What should you do to make your future self proud? You spend most of your waking time working – is this time spent in a meaningful way?

The historical decline of purpose

A century ago, most people gained pride from their role in the family, namely with men as breadwinners and women as caregivers. Work led to a material increase in living standards for both one’s own family and society at large, and in times of war, it contributed to survival, freedom and national pride. Over the last 50 years, these historical sources of pride and purpose have declined in the western world.

The fight for survival and freedom has, thankfully, almost disappeared from our day-to-day lives. Raising a family has become insufficient or secondary to finding purpose, as more women have joined the workforce and both men and women have delayed marriage and having children. Increases in living standards as a source of pride, meanwhile, started to plateau once the masses reached middle class. And work, that should have strengthened its contribution to purpose, has instead been sullied by a ‘wicked’ turn of capitalism.

At the worst possible time, the prevailing narrative among economists and politicians made shareholder profit the sole purpose of a business, and a person’s salary became the main measure of their worth. From the late 1970s, society has lived in a dearth of purpose. Some clung tightly to their family values, but divorces and wage stagnation among the middle classes made the road to purpose more arduous. Others espoused the pursuit of higher salaries and personal achievements, only to find out later in life that this road too often leads to perdition and narcissism.

But here come the 2020s. From the ashes of rising inequalities, social divisions, and the failures derived from letting greed loose in the financial markets, a new society is starting to take form. Businesses are repudiating shareholder capitalism and are placing all stakeholders – as well as purpose – back on the agenda. Some governments are prioritising people over money and ideology. Covid-19 lockdowns forced people to break away from habits and gave them the uncommon luxury of time to reflect. In addition, climate change provides a common enemy to fight against. By the end of 2021 the world was facing the start of The Great Resignation. Could this be the dawn of a new purposeful society?

The road to purpose in the 2020s

While a good dose of optimism is justified, younger generations should not be naïve in thinking they have tailwinds. Gender equality has long been a priority for most actors in society but after decades of struggle we are nowhere near a satisfactory situation. Much of the power to enact change has historically lain with senior white males at the top of the ladder, siloed by several layers of mostly male executives and managers. In this context, conscious and unconscious bias has made the road to gender equality a terribly frustrating one for hundreds of millions of women to this very day.

The road to purpose is likely to face similar barriers. There are decades-long habits and mindsets ingrained in your peers, your more senior colleagues and – depending on your age – they might even be ingrained in you too. There is a window now where people are more open to consider alternatives and look more favourably to a diversity of approaches for individuals to pursue purpose in their own way. But creating new habits will not happen overnight. People showing up less in the office might still be labelled as ‘they care less’. People de-prioritising a fast career trajectory might still be labelled as ‘less ambitious’ or ‘less capable’. All the while, businesses still need to turn profits, with markets pressuring for higher profits and faster growth than the competition. Many executives and managers will still look at numbers before people and have expectations of you.

Navigating your path to purpose

How can you navigate your path to purpose in these choppy waters? Is quitting the only solution? Should you set up your own business? Or should you hang on and chart your path in your current organisation?

The answers are, of course, many and diverse but here are four suggestions:

  1. Take time to reflect and gain clarity on the version of yourself that you would be proud to show the world and for the world to know – the version that you’d be proud of when looking back at your life. What would this version of you do, and why would you do what you do? This should give you a glimpse of land beyond the choppy waters and can be your guiding North Star.
  2. Get to know your strengths and weaknesses and set a path to purpose that plays to your strengths. Be humble when choosing or you’ll be, quite literally, fooling yourself. Ask others for an honest opinion, after all, it’s not too difficult to listen to others’ talking about where you excel.
  3. Stay open to changing what you do to live up to your purpose. There are multiple paths to reach your North Star, so you might want to stay relatively detached from any one path in particular. Stay nimble and acknowledge that some waves are too big to surf.
  4. Be consistent with who you want to be even when you’re faced with more complex situations. We have a cunning tendency to create justifications when we take decisions that are at odds with our principles. This helps superficially but a deeper reflection will uncover the inconsistency. It is better to keep a tight grip on the steering wheel than to follow the waters wherever they take you and fool yourself into believing that it was your intended course.

Now is a great time in history to pursue purpose. However, the pursuit is yours to captain.

Main image credit: Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Marco Dondi is a Strategy Consultant at McKinsey & Company and former global manager for economic development working on labour markets. He is also the author of Outgrowing Capitalism (Fast Company Press, 2021). Marco holds an MBA from INSEAD and a master’s in management, economics and industrial engineering from Politecnico di Milano.  

 

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

Business Impact: Building a career with impact in CSR
careers

Building a career with impact in CSR

Creative and ambitious people that can help businesses shape and deliver their CSR agendas are in demand, says Lakshmi Woodings. Discover what careers in CSR involve and the skills you’ll need to succeed

Read More »
Discover more articles on careers
Business Impact Volume 19

Download the latest edition of the Business Impact magazine

Download here

Want your business school to feature in
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Tim Banerjee Dhoul

Content Editor
Business Impact

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How to answer tricky interview questions

Business Impact: How to answer tricky interview questions

How to answer tricky interview questions

Business Impact: How to answer tricky interview questions
Business Impact: How to answer tricky interview questions

Congratulations, you’ve been selected for interview – now comes the nerve-wracking part. Get some advice on preparing for, and answering, questions designed to explore your decision-making and reveal your potential

Job interviews are the single most important part of the work selection process – for you and for your future employer. Once your CV has shown that you meet the basic skills and background requirements, the interview then establishes how well you might fit into an organisation’s culture and future plans.

Most interview questions are generally straightforward, unambiguous enquiries, but some interviewers like to surprise you by asking questions specifically intended to explore your thinking and expectations. Or they might try to throw you off guard to see how you react in high-stress or confusing circumstances. Or they may not be intentionally tricky at all. The interviewer may not be very experienced and so ask you questions which seem unrelated to you and the position.

Answering tricky questions successfully could help you gain the position you are applying for, but remember that the nature of the questions, and how your answers are received, can tell you volumes about whether this is a company you would really want to work for.

Prepare for the interview

1. Think about the potential questions

Spend time in advance thinking about questions you might be asked during the interview. Also, study lists of questions that are available online and formulate possible answers. Although you may not be asked those questions specifically, being well prepared will help you feel relaxed, confident and capable.

2. Think about the purpose

The best job interviews are positive encounters that allow a two-way exchange of information. It may feel as though the employer has all the power as it is they who will decide whether or not to offer you the job. But, in fact, it is you who holds the power – it is you who will decide whether or not to accept the job. So, interviews are just as important for you as they are for the interviewer. Keeping this power balance in mind will help you stay calm, dignified, and clear-headed.

3. Think about the interviewer

It is safe to assume that the interviewer is slightly uncomfortable with the process too. Not many people enjoy grilling a stranger. Remember that you may be the 25th candidate this week and the interviewer may be quite sick of asking the same questions and hearing the same rehearsed answers. Remember, too, that the interviewer was once sitting in your seat, applying for his or her job within the company and worrying about the same surprise questions. Establishing some empathy with the interviewer can help to make the encounter more relaxed.

Communicate effectively during the interview

Never lie. Many interviewers do this work for a living, so they have heard all the ‘correct’ answers many times before. Don’t trot out what you think the interviewer wants to hear. Instead, be candid and clear, and use lengthy answers only when you think that demonstrating your thought processes in detail will add valuable information.

Be sure you understand the question. If the question is unclear, ask for clarification. ‘I’m not sure what you mean. Could you explain?’ or ‘could you rephrase that question?’ are perfectly acceptable queries in any civilised conversation. Job interviews are no different. Similarly, if you didn’t hear the question properly, don’t be afraid to ask for it to be repeated.

Be prepared to answer questions about salary. You can politely decline to give details about past salary and future expectations if you wish, but be warned that this is difficult to do without creating a bad atmosphere in the interview. The most important thing is to keep the focus on your worth, not your cost.

Many companies offer salaries only at a certain percentage above a candidate’s previous salary. However, if your previous salary was below the market average or your worth, this doesn’t mean you should be forced to accept a lower salary in the future. Decide before you go into the interview on a salary range that is acceptable to you. Make sure the top of the range is well above the figure you would be thrilled to accept, and the bottom of the range slightly above your predetermined ‘walk-away’ figure.

Deal with tricky questions

There are roughly eight areas of questioning that could pose a challenge in the interview:

  1. Your experience and management skills
  2. Your opinion about industry or professional trends
  3. The reasons why you are leaving your current job
  4. The financial or other value of your past work and achievements
  5. Your work habits
  6. Your salary expectations
  7. Your expectations for the future
  8. Your personality and relationship skills or problems

Identify the topic areas that might be the trickiest for you, then think carefully about how you might answer them. You don’t want to have to try to blag your way through difficult parts of the interview, and you certainly shouldn’t lie. However, you should also be wary of rehearsing answers to anticipated questions word for word, as this is likely to come across as false and insincere, too.

Your solutions to ‘scenario’ type problems will tell the interviewer a lot about you – whether you can make tough decisions, for example, or if you have leadership qualities.

Questions about your weaknesses are usually designed to discover the extent of your self-knowledge. Keep your answers short and dignified. Identify only one area of weakness that you’re aware of and describe what you are doing to strengthen that area to demonstrate your enthusiasm for self-development. Try to avoid using the response of being a ‘perfectionist’ as it is a cliché. Remember, no one is perfect.

This is an edited excerpt from Get That Job: Interviews (Bloomsbury Business, 2022) from the Business Essentials series. Available in paperback, ebook and audio, £8.99 GBP. www.bloomsbury.com

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Building a career with impact in CSR

Creative and ambitious people that can help businesses shape and deliver their CSR agendas are in demand, says Lakshmi Woodings. Discover what careers in CSR involve and the skills you’ll need to succeed

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How to build meaningful work for your people

Business Impact: How to build meaningful work for your people

How to build meaningful work for your people

Business Impact: How to build meaningful work for your people
Business Impact: How to build meaningful work for your people

What do we mean by ‘meaningful’ work and how can organisations provide it? Degreed’s Annee Bayeux looks at factors of autonomy, complexity and recognition

Let’s face it, we’re all looking for that dream job. The one which brings meaning, purpose and growth to our lives. Yet, in many cases, our work is falling short. In fact, only 20% of employees globally are engaged at work. And that’s bad news for employees and their employers. Disengaged employees are known to be less productive, less satisfied, and less likely to remain with their employer for a long time.

Defining meaningful work

More than anything else, people everywhere are looking to have meaningful work in this moment of time, but what exactly is ‘meaningful’ work? According to author and journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, meaningful work consists of three distinct qualities:

  1. Autonomy: having control of our choices.
  2. Complexity: being able to constantly improve and be challenged.
  3. Recognition: a direct connection between effort and reward. That payoff can be financial, spiritual, social, and so forth.

Using this as a guide, HR leaders and people managers can bring meaningful work into their people’s day-to-day lives. As a Chief Learning Strategist, I see this list as a challenge to shift the learning and growth culture of an organisation.

Autonomy

It makes sense that anyone stuck doing rote tasks under the constant gaze of a controlling manager is not going to have much job satisfaction. There’s no fun in having little-to-no control of what you’re working on, where you work, when you work, or your career trajectory. Instead, offering greater autonomy in the workplace will boost engagement, trust, loyalty, and work quality.

So how can you build greater autonomy in your workforce? A few ways to do this include:

  • Providing greater flexibility for people to choose their working hours and environment. Some people work better in quiet spaces while others prefer the hustle and bustle of a workplace or cafe. Likewise, giving greater control over work hours can help people fit their work around other commitments, like family or personal development.
  • Offering stretch assignments that align with goals and interests. This empowers employees to seek out experiences that will build their careers and skills, while also inspiring them in work that they are interested in.
  • Offer volunteer opportunities. Similar to the above, having the opportunity to volunteer for a cause close to an employee’s heart actually has a boost effect on productivity. Studies have shown that allowing employees to help others, either externally or internally, on ‘company time’ increases productivity over time. Degreed’s traditional ‘Good Deeds Day’ gives four days a year to your favourite cause, where many employees choose to help upskill, mentor or coach others during their time off.
  • Provide opportunities to teach, mentor or coach others. People who are passionate about their work and who have built a wealth of experience, will naturally want to share this knowledge with others. Like volunteering, the intrinsic pleasure of helping others helps to keep us happy and motivated. Don’t forget about reverse mentoring, where new arrivals can help bring fresh ideas and expertise as mentors and coaches, just like your seniors. Finally, keep it democratic – using technology to level the playing field, opportunities to coach, mentor or be coached should be transparent and available for everyone, not just a ‘happy few’.  

Complexity

Complexity is… well, hard. Having complex work ensures that your mind grows constantly. Helping your people to feel challenged (but in control) will enable them to discover their passions and shape their career journeys. The first step is to understand what makes your people tick. What are their interests and career goals? By understanding what motivates them, you can offer learning and career opportunities that help them achieve their goals. At the same time, this challenges them every day, especially if those learning and career activities are done in the flow of work.

Two other things to consider when developing complexity in the workday: it needs to be challenging, but not so much so that it causes constant stress. This is how ‘stretch assignments’ earned their name – for seeking to find the sweet spot between your comfort zone and learning a new skill. Find the right balance between tricky things and activities that your people are confident and experienced in.

The second thing is to provide the psychological safety to fail. My first boss once told me: ‘Annee, you can make as many mistakes as you want, as long as you only make each one once’. This tongue-in-cheek expression really teaches you the value of learning from mistakes. Building a culture focused on growth, instead of blame, will be a key factor in managing complexity. You don’t get success without some failures along the way, and failing can provide people with valuable lessons for the future. Communicate that it’s ok to fail as long as there are learnings from it.

Recognition

It’s hard for me to mention recognition without mentioning rewards, but here my intention is distinct. So much of the joy of success comes from seeing how far you’ve come and equally importantly, to feel that others around you appreciate your efforts and passion. Recognition comes in many forms, from a manager recognising the great work of a team member, to colleagues who thank team members, to winning an award for a complex project. Everyone feels great to be recognised.

There are many options to help build recognition into your people’s workday.

  • Track your team’s efforts, recognising those who have gone above and beyond, and report back on progress against set goals. Allow your stars to mentor or coach others.
  • Incorporate regular feedback into your culture. This could be as informal as a quick coffee or walk, or more formally during regularly scheduled team and individual feedback meetings.
  • Remember that rewards offer proof of recognition! Consider gamification, badges, and other reward-systems that provide incentives for someone to reach specific goals and results. Peer-recognition systems can also help to recognise someone’s contribution and teamwork across a wider organisation.

Remember to recognise all forms of effort at work, whether that’s completing a difficult task, helping another department, or learning a new skill.

A thriving and motivated workforce

Building meaning into everyone’s workday will pay off with greater retention, engagement, and productivity. Your people will feel motivated to achieve their best work because it feeds their sense of purpose and passion. This creates an environment where everyone thrives, can bring their best selves to work, and who are in it for the long term.

Annee Bayeux is Chief Learning Strategist at upskilling platform, Degreed. She has 20+ years in L&D, M&A, Talent, and HR Technologies with Global 2000 companies, such as Bosch Automotive, Alstom, General Electric, and Danone.

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Business Impact Volume 19

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Building your career strategy

Business Impact: Building your career strategy

Building your career strategy

Business Impact: Building your career strategy
Business Impact: Building your career strategy

What do the terms ‘insider information’ and ‘high potential’ really mean? Kimberly Cummings, author of Next Move, Best Move, outlines what you need to know and why it’s important to put together your own career strategy

When we think about career strategies, we often expect the strategy to be handed to us by senior leadership, human resources, a direct manager, or a mentor building it out on our behalf. I want to empower you to understand the importance of putting together your strategy.

This strategy will focus on your goals and align with your career opportunities, not only for your career at your current company but for your overall career. Additionally, relationships are a key part of your career strategy to help you navigate new situations and easily move into your next opportunities. If you do not believe in the power of relationship-building in your career, I hope digging into the concept of ‘insider information’ will help you understand that this career concept is non-negotiable for you.

Insider information

I affectionately call my email newsletter ‘insider notes’ because it’s my way of sharing career-related stories, insight, experiences, and tips with my subscribers. In your everyday life, insider information is the same thing. Essentially, insider information is the 15-minute coffee chat when you learn more about a stakeholder and his or her preferences for receiving information for a new business proposal, or those quick after-hour drinks when you get some helpful feedback to learn a better way to approach your role.

As you build relationships with peers, coaches, mentors, and sponsors, the insider information you receive will make or break your ability to take advantage of various opportunities. For example, whenever I learned about a new career opportunity, the first thing I would do was go through my network to determine if I knew anyone working with or for the company to conduct an informational interview.

As a professional in the workforce, you know there’s a big difference between the beautiful job descriptions and testimonials on the company website versus the actual experience working at a company, especially as a woman or person of colour. Once I locate a contact or request an introduction from someone we have in common, I prepare key questions to inform my next steps. Typically, I ask questions like these:

  • Would you share your current experience in the company?
  • Do you feel your experience has been consistent since day one?
  • What are the policies for upwards movement at your company?
  • Would you share more about your experiences with senior leadership?
  • Do you feel like you have opportunities to grow at this company?
  • Do you feel like there’s a glass ceiling for women and people of colour? If yes, why?

If the person works in the same team or department that I’m seeking to work in, I also ask the following:

  • Would you tell me more about the leadership style of the manager?
  • What are the biggest challenges your team faces?
  • Who are the key stakeholders and external teams your team works with?
  • Does your manager have any red flags he or she looks for in candidates? If so, would you identify them?
  • What do you believe the first 90 days in this role will look like?

When you rely on your company to build your career strategy, you allow it to have a singular focus for your career. Your company spends thousands upon thousands of dollars recruiting and onboarding its talent. So, of course, it likes to ensure it keeps it, which means its priority will be to keep you in your role, or a more senior role within that same department or company at-large.

High potentials

Moreover, companies frequently focus exclusively on developing their high-potential talent. ‘High potential’ can have several meanings, depending on the company, but what I’ve seen, especially for women and people of colour, is that although they do phenomenal work, they may not have the talent designation of high potential.

High potential is short for:

  • Ready for an opportunity for promotion
  • Ready for a new, lateral opportunity
  • Ready to begin managing people
  • Ready for a stretch assignment
  • Needs more development but is very promising, and efforts need to be made to retain the talent, so the employee does not pursue external opportunities

After more than 11 years of career development experience in higher education, talent acquisition, and coaching hundreds of clients, I have seen that many companies do not have strict guidelines on the definition of high potential. Without high-potential definitions to remove bias and allow managers to make an objective assessment of their talent, that talent is being evaluated at the mercy of the managers.

I’ve had some great managers and some terrible managers in my career, and one of the best pieces of advice I received was from one of my mentors, a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. She advised that not all feedback is about me. When she shared this during a conversation, my mind was blown. I had an experience in my office that I wanted to review with her, and she changed the way I thought about performance appraisals and feedback in the workplace. Managers are responsible for providing feedback and insights about their teams that can make or break a team member’s career. However, a biased opinion can paint a picture of a team member that does not align with that member’s skill set, performance, and career objectives.

This is an edited extract from Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning Into A Career You’ll Love by Kimberly B Cummings (Wiley, 2021).

Kimberly Cummings is an author, career expert, and the Founder of leadership development company, Manifest Yourself. She has a background as a career development adviser for US universities, and as a diversity and inclusion professional at a Fortune 100 company.

BGA members are able to receive a 20% discount off the RRP for Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning into a Career You’ll Love, courtesy of the BGA Book Club. Click here for details.

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Building a career with impact in CSR

Creative and ambitious people that can help businesses shape and deliver their CSR agendas are in demand, says Lakshmi Woodings. Discover what careers in CSR involve and the skills you’ll need to succeed

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Business Impact Volume 19

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Building your career profile through experimentation

Business Impact: Building your career profile through experimentation

Building your career profile through experimentation

Business Impact: Building your career profile through experimentation
Business Impact: Building your career profile through experimentation

‘Get on the dance floor as soon as the party starts and show off your moves.’ Michel Masquelier, author of This is Not a Dress Rehearsal, says it’s never too early to embrace experimentation and start building your unique profile

Your grades and your CV are no guarantee of success. And even if they help open the door for you, the leap from theory to practice is one you will have to make by yourself, without a safety net and without the helping hand of parents or teachers. You will gain wisdom and build your confidence through a succession of experiments, through trial and error, on your journey.

Experiment as early as possible

Before undertaking her degree at the University of Edinburgh, my eldest daughter, Charlotte, had held six different summer jobs requiring three different languages – French, Spanish and English. The tasks she was given ranged from making the morning coffee to translating interviews, or simply being a runner from one desk to another. She started at the bottom and began to demystify the unknown world of work.

While taking her degree, and after graduation, she secured several internships. These ranged from an Erasmus scholarship working for EuroLeague basketball in Barcelona to working in online education in London, working in data management in Melbourne, being a marketing assistant in Hong Kong and acting as a media rights assistant at UEFA in Nyon, Switzerland.

It has become increasingly common for young people to take a gap year, either before or after graduation. That can be great fun, and a great opportunity to learn and grow. Charlotte decided to sacrifice the fun, however, and dive straight into the corporate world – to learn the trade from the inside. After a couple of years, she decided to deepen her understanding of the business by enrolling for a master’s degree at Esade Business School in Barcelona.

The choices that now lie ahead of her include going back into the corporate world or flying with her own wings and starting a business. Whatever path she chooses, she has embraced experimentation to build up a unique profile for herself, with experience based on tasting the real thing at an early stage and building communities of real friends.

The path to knowledge is practice

I am an advocate of internships. At IMG, I used such opportunities to test the practical ability, motivation and ambition of people who would later be given proper challenges and responsibilities. Many of the talents that came through the IMG internship programme went to the very top, driven by hard work and determination, as well as their innate abilities. This was how my own journey started too. I wanted to get my foot in the door and an internship was a way of doing this.

I was determined to break any barrier to have the privilege of jumping on the corporate ladder, building relationships, and learning the trade. However you are able to get your start, I recommend that you get on the dance floor as soon as the party starts and show off your moves, regardless of how outrageous or clumsy they might be. Practice, goodwill, hard work and experimentation are prerequisites for the journey to success.

You may be a talented artist, a gifted athlete or possess a scientific intellect, but without experimentation and practice, you are not yet a star. You may like cooking and feel passionate about it, but to become a recognised chef you will need to go beyond reading recipes. It is about hard work, experimenting, innovating, taking inspiration from others, creating and progressing.

No one starts as an expert. You may be gifted, talented and well educated, but the path to knowledge is practice and the earlier you take a deep dive the better: to experiment, to learn languages, to see the world, to taste real things. It is never too early to start. Do not waste time; the journey is shorter than you think.

This is an edited excerpt from This is Not a Dress Rehearsal (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2021) by Michel Masquelier.
Michel Masquelier is the former chairman of IMG Media, part of the global sports management agency. After graduating with a degree in law, he worked his way up the ladder at IMG from intern to chairman.

BGA members can receive 20% off the price of a copy of This is Not a Dress Rehearsal courtesy of the BGA Book Club. Click here for details.

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Business Impact Volume 19

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Understanding the media industry’s brave new worlds

A dark Sci-fi landscape of mountains on an unknown world with two moons on a night horizon symbolises brave new worlds.

Understanding the media industry’s brave new worlds

A dark Sci-fi landscape of mountains on an unknown world with two moons on a night horizon symbolises brave new worlds.
A dark Sci-fi landscape of mountains on an unknown world with two moons on a night horizon symbolises brave new worlds.

‘Like one of the outer moons of our solar system; exotic, constantly evolving, febrile, white hot, relentlessly volcanic…’ The National Film and Television School’s Alex Connock outlines the importance of understanding today’s media landscape and developing confidence in all of its commercial forms

Question: What do Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Fortnite and Netflix all have in common? Answer: none of them even existed in the year 2000. 

Go back a couple more years and you can add Amazon (founded in 1994, at the very start of the internet) and Google (1998) to that list. What this means is that many of the companies that determine the rhythm and the content of our daily lives are extraordinarily new. That’s indicative of a media landscape, a content footprint across all our lives, that has been in a state of constant agitation. In fact, the media business is like one of the outer moons of our solar system; exotic, constantly evolving, febrile, white hot, relentlessly volcanic… and a place you definitely want to go.

‘No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world,’ said comedian, Robin Williams, which is why media is the industry of which everyone knows the products (shows and songs) and everyone has an opinion. That makes it a joy to be in. Content spending in 2020 (a Covid year, by the way) was $149 billion USD in the US, growing at a staggering 16% year on year. Meanwhile, in Asia it was growing even faster in the same year, at 19%, and in Africa, at 46%. This means that, over time, the content creation industry is getting bigger, less west-centric, and more imaginatively global. 

From screen and audio to social media: how media has changed

Segment the media business down into its constituent categories – and you can see how radical the changes have been, and how challenging it is to fully own the space. 

Screen has seen the invention of streaming platforms to supplant the pre-eminence of the broadcast powerhouses like CBS or ITV which had defined the latter part of the 20th century, and radically upend their business models. Now, AI (specifically, machine learning) layered onto home screen platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon or Disney +, provide personalisation to user tastes at a globalised, but individual, level. The shows you are served, and the order in which you are served them, is completely unique. YouTubehas come out of nowhere to become the principle media channel for many young peoples’ lives. Meanwhile, the production technologies of video games, like Fortnite, are lending the ability to create whole new worlds in virtual studios to shows like The Mandalorian. Finally, the cinema itself has been in decline in the west (although not in China).

Audio has changed just as much. Chris Martin from Coldplay said: ‘No one really knows where songs come from’, but those involved in making them do need to know where the money comes from. Artists used to make their money from record and CD sales. Then came downloads, illegal at first, which decimated record company incomes and put the whole business model of music in jeopardy. Streamers, specifically Spotify, provided a new hope of firm revenues, but artists and record companies remain locked in alternative interpretations of who is due what.  Meanwhile, radio has been edged out by the breakthrough model of podcasting. 

In the 20th century, humanity made it to the moon – but it didn’t invent social media.  That took until the early 21st century, but now (in the west, that is) Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms are the pre-eminent media businesses in every respect except that they don’t consider themselves media businesses, because they don’t want to accept editorial responsibility for the content that is uploaded. Their production model is radically new in that it is outsourced to users. Their revenue model is driven by the personalisation and AI algorithms that make digital marketing the most powerful business tool of the era. And this is only the beginning of an era in which computer vision (another form of AI) will radically shift how we choose and interface with our entertainment.

Then there are video games – arguably the biggest and fastest-growing media sector on earth right now. One company, Riot Games, which makes League of Legends, has more than 400 job vacancies at the time of writing, such is the speed of its growth and demand for talent. There are e-sports teams and leagues too, each hungry for skilled workers. There are also business tools, like Substack, driving monetisation into blogging, hitherto a business for the penniless. And then there are traditional segments like book publishing (a sector whose demise was called way too early and which is now showing strong growth) theatre, events, festivals, music touring (Ed Sheeran, earned $700m USD on his last tour) commercials, documentaries… Oh, and sports. The soccer (football) teams, Barcelona and Manchester United, are media businesses, and best understood as such. 

Specialist skills required to thrive

Put simply, the media is of a greater breadth and scale than at any time in history.  This creative sector requires specialist skills and knowledge that can help you thrive in the industries within. As it’s primarily a gig economy with short-term, contract-driven employment, even cellists and dancers need to know enough about business to thrive. Meanwhile, those who want to design or run businesses, from animation to gaming, need to understand the multiple, complex models which drive them. Many of the text books that would tell you how to do that are so far out of date they still talk about TV advertising oligopolies and CDs. A better perspective would be that of writer, Charlie Fink, on the coming impact of augmented reality: ‘The world is about to be painted with data’.

The skills you need now, in the 2020s, are quite precise. You need to understand digital marketing – because that’s what drives sales from Broadway producers to an organic Instagrammer. You need to understand the drivers of idea creation, and how to copyright and sell those ideas – whether they are TV formats like the smash-hit US show Survivor (now in its 21st year) or the Korean megahit The Masked Singer. You need to understand accounting and finance, from the cash flow behind a streaming hit, like Chernobyl or Money Heist, to the monetisation technologies that will work in metaverse gaming concepts. You need to know how to deal with an agent, how to present a business plan, how to organise production of merchandising around your children’s animation, or how to sell advertising for a podcast. These days, even restaurants are media businesses: they make shows for Netflix and Apple TV.

Everyone in the media needs to know their worth and make sure they get paid.  ‘Chaplin’s no negotiator,’ said studio boss Sam Goldwyn of the notoriously business like silent movie star. ‘He just knows he can’t take anything less.’

There is an opportunity in business education to make sure graduates go out into the market knowing not to take anything less. Our specialist MA in Creative Business at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) maps the landscape by introducing students to a range and depth of media guests that would be impossible for a generalist education. It allows aspirant businesspeople to work with animators on product development, to deep-dive into a media sector – from the contemporary horror films of Jordan Peele and specialist Instagram commercials production for e-commerce to developing a business plan and pitching it to venture capitalists specialised in the industry. 

At the end of that, graduates emerge with an understanding of the media and a confidence in all of its commercial forms, such that they can specialise in one field, but have an informed perspective on all the others. Screenwriter, William Goldman famously wrote: ‘In Hollywood, no one knows anything.’ Only someone with proper inside knowledge could say something that smart.

Alex Connock is Head of Department of the Creative Business MA at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, UK.

Read more Business Impact articles related to careers:

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Building a career with impact in CSR

Creative and ambitious people that can help businesses shape and deliver their CSR agendas are in demand, says Lakshmi Woodings. Discover what careers in CSR involve and the skills you’ll need to succeed

Read More »
Discover more articles on careers
Business Impact Volume 19

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Feeling ‘forgotten’? Seven steps to reclaim control of your future

An owl peaking out of a bricked wall. Business Impact article image for feeling 'forgotten'? Seven steps to reclaim control of your future.

Feeling ‘forgotten’? Seven steps to reclaim control of your future

An owl peaking out of a bricked wall. Business Impact article image for feeling 'forgotten'? Seven steps to reclaim control of your future.
An owl peaking out of a bricked wall. Business Impact article image for feeling 'forgotten'? Seven steps to reclaim control of your future.

From turning rejection into opportunity to identifying strengths and matching these up with a suitable role or industry, there are lots of things students and graduates can do to lessen any sense of feeling ‘forgotten’ by their university during Covid-19, says Results Strategist, Cel Amade

This past year has been tough, and the graduating classes of 2020 and 2021 may not have had the same opportunities as preceding classes to gain additional skills before graduation day. In the blink of an eye everything changed. Internships, job offers, and graduation plans went out the window. These cancellations and postponements left many graduates around the world feeling overwhelmed and, in many ways, forgotten by their university.

University is a great platform to explore and strengthen our natural talents and strengths safely. The reality is – exploring one’s strengths in order to do what we love post-graduation is not an obvious choice, but it’s a crucial one if you are after personal and career fulfilment and not just ‘any job’.

When students and graduates find themselves feeling abandoned, forgotten, or let down, they often find it harder to believe that they have what it takes to achieve their graduate goals. On that note, here are seven steps that I would recommend to any students and graduates looking to combat the idea of feeling forgotten by their university and to shift their focus to ideas they can actually execute. Ideas that are within any student or graduate’s control and that can help them design their own world after graduation.

1. Forgive yourself for past mistakes, shame, blame, guilt, regret or anger

We all have our fair share of shame, blame, guilt, regret or anger. Whether it is the shame of thinking you’re not employable after graduation. The blame for getting your internship or job offer cancelled. The guilt of what you could have done while you were too immersed in your studies, busy procrastinating or the pain of regret that comes with all of the above… Even though we cannot change our past, the most valuable thing students and graduates can do for themselves is to forgive their past and understand where they are now in relation to where they want to be.

2. See rejection as an opportunity

Too often, recent graduates use someone else’s definition of success before coming to the realisation that they have been rejected for roles that had nothing to do with their strengths. And from that perspective, rejection might not feel so painful after all.

Rejection can provide graduates with the opportunity to choose a role that is more in line with their natural talents and strengths. Rejection can provide more clarity. More clarity often equates to greater confidence in knowing what value a graduate is bringing to the table. And this increased confidence lessens the idea of feeling forgotten. Rejection might even make graduates realise that they have paid little attention to what they really ‘want’. Perhaps, for example, they have been applying to big companies all along just so that they could tell themselves and others that they work for ‘a big company’.

3. Identify your strengths

When we use our natural talents and strengths, we tend to feel more engaged and productive. We feel happier and energised. We get that buzz that comes with doing what we enjoy and we feel like we are being our ‘true self’. We are not pretending to be someone we are not. A great way to identify our strengths is to think back to some of our biggest achievements and try to identify which strengths were used to achieve those great outcomes.

4. Ask for feedback

If you are having trouble identifying your strengths, ask for feedback. It would be premature to conclude you have no strengths or natural talents. Everyone is good at something… Reach out to friends, peers, university staff and colleagues that know you well and ask them to help you answer these three questions.

  • When you need to ask for my help, what do you generally come to me, versus anybody else, for help with?
  • What do you see as my biggest strength?
  • What do you think makes me unique?

Any common themes in their responses – and that also feel right – would be a good indication of what your strengths are. Their responses will also be a reminder that your university connections have not forgotten you.

5. Exercise your strengths

The largest room in the world, is the room for improvement. Being aware of our strengths is life changing, but it’s only truly transformational when we choose to use our strengths. Once you have figured your strengths out, look for opportunities to apply those strengths. What resources does the university have? Are there any volunteering projects or partnership opportunities with student societies that would enable you to exercise your strengths?

Actively participating in leadership activities or creating new opportunities to reconnect with the university as you exercise your strengths can help combat this idea of feeling forgotten or abandoned by the university. There is boldness, genius, magic and power in recognising your strengths, using your strengths and taking strategic action towards your desired result!

6. Follow the rule of five

Match your strengths to a job type, field, or industry you would enjoy working in and get laser-focused to achieve your goal, by following the rule of five. Commit to do five (big or small) tasks every single day that bring you closer to your definition of a successful graduate life or your desired result. These five tasks could be as simple as sending five LinkedIn messages to professionals who are currently working in your dream role and which might allow you to gain insights of what their role entails on daily basis.

7. Define success in your own terms

What does a ‘successful’ graduate life look like for you? What industry or field do you wish to work in? What impact do you wish to have in the world of business and management? How do you wish to be remembered? Do you belief you can achieve it? Being able to define your own meaning of success clearly will add a sense of purpose to your life and get you one step closer to achieving it.

Cel Amade is a Results Strategist who delivers workshops and keynotes to facilitate, guide and inspire university students and graduates. Her educational YouTube content has amassed more than 433,000 views in the past year. She is committed to helping students make a smoother transition from university to graduate life and feel empowered to design their own world.

 

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