The Challenges Facing Graduates in Modern Workplace

Landing the first job is usually a celebrated life milestone, but for many graduate students, leaving the academic world and joining the active workforce is not a smooth transition. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review interviewed 54 colleges graduates about their first experience at work. Feeling of constant struggle, anxiety, exhaustion, confusion and disappointment dominated the report. They questioned their career choice and felt they have made a mistake. They don’t know or understand what their employer expects from them. It impacts their wellbeing, morale, and motivation to do their job. Indirectly, it affects companies as well, who won’t get the best of these new recruits before this adjustment period is over.

Graduates woes mainly articulate around three commonly encountered problems: unrealistic expectation about their first job, learning to navigate the workplace and dealing with the absence of feedback.

Discussion

1.   Having realistic expectations for a first job

There is an old, well-known paradox of job searching: every company only want to hire people with experience, so then where are you supposed to get experience in the first place? Discovering that employers value even the tiniest work experience (even as a summer job as a cashier) on the top of a hard-won college degree can be a blow to morale. Professional recruiters often side-step the issue, advising to take unpaid internships or accept an underpaid position as a way to build up the first experience, but that can sometimes set a dangerous precedent: stunting the graduate’s salary history and making future negotiations difficult. And when positions specifically aimed at graduates exist, they may feel of little value; menial and limited in scope.

Studying hard for several years can easily lead to the false belief one is entitled to a job meeting his or her aspirations at the end, and settling for less feels unfair, disappointing, or even induce a sense of failure along the line. The harsh reality of the job market is that you take what’s available to you rather than what you want. There is no one hundred percent match. It can take a while to realize the “Dream Job” is exactly what it is: a dream.

2.   Navigating the workplace and understanding work culture

Even after finally getting through the door of a company, a graduate may discover a universe “different from advertised”. First, there are aspects of work-life that are unglamorous but necessary: from filling forms and expense report to sitting in meetings or dealing with a distant bureaucracy. Priorities change and you are re-affected to a different project, doing a different type of work than what you’ve been hired for. Ending up spending a significant amount of time on tasks unrelated to your core skillset may quickly douse enthusiasm.

Second, social interactions also change significantly. A student may freely choose who associate with, group themselves by personal affinities and avoid the rest. The workplace doesn’t give you much latitude: you don’t get whom you are going to work with. An unlikable professor is only suffered maybe three hours a week during the one-way interaction that constitutes a class. Co-workers, however, must be dealt with 8 hours a day, every day, and you need to build and maintain a relationship with them in order to succeed in your job and career. The notion of being professional, as in leaving your personal moral judgement of someone at home and maintaining a neutral temper, is vital.

Which leads to third: becoming accountable. The stakes are greater and so are the consequences of failure. An exam can be retaken, but at the workplace failing a key task may permanently damage your standing within the organization. It is often said that “every mistake is an opportunity to learn” but it also costs money to your employer, who may not tolerate it more than once. This is a new type of pressure on the shoulders of a graduate.

3.   Dealing with feedbacks

Students typically spent years learning by applying their knowledge in controlled environments. Assignments always are ideal use cases, whose solution can be found almost verbatim in the course material.

A student’s life is rhythmed with all form of feedback: periodic exams and assignments returning precisely numbered evaluation of the student’s skill level and performance, and where he sits relative to fellow students. The rules are always clear, usually fair, there is no ambiguity: you know in advance what’s the minimum grade to pass, the professor grades your homework and gives the thumb up or down, for he or she knows all the answers.

In the professional world, however, most of those indicators either disappear or are turned upside down. Employers might use metrics, “key performance indicators”, but they each have their own definition and their interpretation inside the same company may vary from manager to manager. Feedback can be infrequent, and sometimes must be actively sought. It can be subjective, terse, or inconsistent. When coming from an environment with highly standardized evaluations and obvious roadmaps, suddenly having to decipher comments and read between the lines can be disconcerting and confusing. Most workplaces have a form of yearly performance review, but again, the rules may be unwritten. Graduates often end up swimming blind toward ill-defined “career goals” they were asked to set up themselves despite having at this stage little knowledge of their own potential and being told only after the fact if they veered off-course.

Conclusion

When it comes to preparing students for their future work life, colleges often focus on very specific elements; they offer plenty of help on how to write a CV, a cover letter, or prepare a job interview. But this covers only the first step: the cultural distance between the academic environment and the professional environment is longer. The professional world is full of unwritten rules and codes one must figure out fast or be left behind. As we just saw, it boils down to deciphering what an employer means versus what an employer says, be it about job descriptions, job responsibilities, and job feedback.

Recommendation

As employee happiness has become an increasingly important subject, employers must give attention to the problems encountered by new hires. While coming to term with the reality of the workplace is a process that varies from person to person, the best way to ease the transition is to offer proper mentoring. Creating a “buddy system” between graduates and older employees does more than transferring technical knowledge, it also gives the graduates a model to follow in term of professionalism and behaviour. Letting experienced employee teach by example, rather than relying on materials like employee handbooks, could save time and money in getting graduates up to speed. Having a clear and consistent feedback system is a complement to integrating graduates. Yearly review too often becomes box-ticking exercises devoid of real information, setting up objectives but not the means to reach them. A graduate’s career is still in the process of being shaped, investing time in offering a close follow-up during their first year is the best way to find and then help them reach their full potential as employees.

References

Pisman, S., Molinsky, A. (2019). The Biggest Hurdles Recent Graduates Face Entering the Workforce. Harvard Business Review

Schawbei, D. (2019). 10 Workplace Trends You’ll See in 2019. Forbes.com

Petersen, J. (2016). 6 Career Challenges You’ll Face as a Recent College Graduates. Recruiter.com

Greene, A. (2016) If you’re a new grad, here are some things for you. AskAManager.org

Grey, R. (2014). 5 Key Challenges Today’s Graduates Encounter. CollegeRecruiter.com