Mind the Gap- minimising the transition between uni and work

Photo by honeyjew via flickr

Photo by bezajel via Flickr

Apologies for the latest post being up a day late however I started work this week- as will be evident from this thursday's post- and as a result am tired. All. The. Time. Despite this I have still found time to gift you all with my thoughts and feelings on the first week in a new job. Enjoy!

Tomorrow will mark the end of my first week in the working world, a world that is very different from the university life that proceeded it. In honour of this momentous achievement, this Thursday’s post will focus on dealing with the differences between life at university and life at work. Some you may be aware of, some you may need to prepare yourselves for, either way I hope this will be an educational guide to understanding and minimising the gap between student and worker drone.

Getting Up Early: as a student you may have occasionally had to get up early (or what you thought was early) for lectures and supervisions but generally you set your own hours, especially if you studied for an arts degree. If early did occur it meant getting up for something scheduled at nine meaning that you seldom needed to get up before seven. When you go to work you have to get up ‘early’ everyday, only it doesn’t count as early anymore it just becomes ‘the time you get up’. The average commuter gets up around 6-6:30 and those with long distances to travel will get up even earlier in order to make it to work on time.

This means for the first week (at least) of the uni-job transition you will be very, very tired. There are two main ways to combat this: 1. Go to bed early at least for the first few weeks – this will give your body the rest it needs to adjust to the new schedule. 2. If you can, the week before you start work, reduce the time you get up at by an hour/half hour (depending on the disparity between the two schedules) every morning leading up to your first day so that when you start, your body has already had time to start adjusting.

Not Having Any Friends: this is not something I had considered being a problem but after four years of building friendships at university suddenly you find yourself starting from the beginning only this time the people you’re trying to make friends with aren’t the same age as you and they’re not in the same boat: unless you join a company through a big graduate recruitment scheme, you will be one new person in a group of people that have had at least a year to work out who they eat lunch with and what they have in common. From my own experience, the majority of people I work closely with are middle aged women with school or college aged children; they are absolutely lovely but their conversations are generally about the things they have in common which unfortunately are generally not something I can relate to. So no matter how friendly or helpful or welcoming your new colleagues are, it is likely that at least a few times during your first week you will end up feeling lonely. 

This will probably pass but in the mean time there are a couple of things you can do to make yourself feel better: firstly, up your contact time with your friends. With Facebook, Twitter etc there is little chance of truly falling out of contact with people you no longer see every day but make sure you get enough real time contact: try and meet up with friends on the weekends, grab some face time on Skype, give them a ring or even send them a good old-fashioned letter (this will be discussed in more detail next week). Even better, if you have a friend that works nearby make plans to have lunch, giving you the chance to break up the working day with a chance of scene. Alternatively you can put your efforts into making friends: take an interest in people, engage them in conversation and you might discover you do have things in common, age notwithstanding. Search out people closer to your own age and experience in the organisation as well if you are trying to discover common ground – you may feel more at ease trying to befriend someone you feel comfortable reminiscing about those drunken halcyon days at uni with.

Feeling Out Of Your Depth: Logically you know you’re capable of doing the job: the interview process and competitive job market leave little room for erroneous appointments. However, few graduates these days go into a career that makes direct use of their degree- the phrase ‘transferable skills’ looms its ugly head. Yes you are capable of the work being required- you just don’t always know how to produce it. Admittedly the start of university evoked a similar sense of inadequacy and confusion but after your first essay wasn’t sent back to you via the medium of a cross cut shredder your working style adapted fast and panic was more about completing the work on time than any worries about how to do it or what to use. It has taken me four days at work to sort out all my passwords and get to grips with the ICT system, on top of the work I am supposed to be doing.

To tackle this make sure you ask lots of questions and take extensive notes: few people will object to a barrage of questions in the first week and most will be happy to explain or demonstrate how things work (like the photocopier for example) and this will not affect their opinion of you or your abilities; after all they were all new once too. However, if you don’t make a note of procedures and end up asking a second or third time you will find people’s good will- and their good opnion of you- considerably diminished. Another strategy for dealing with this is to try and find a mentor within the company- this relates back to point two about making friends- who will be happy to act as your guide to the workings of the organisation over a more extended timescale. This minimises the people who are inconvenienced by your questions and inexperience and gives you a more secure relationship which should make you feel happier to ask questions however simple.

These are just a few thoughts on my first week at work. If you are in a similar situation and have found my advice helpful or have thoughts of your own to proffer, please let us know in the comments section below!