INTRODUCTION
After I graduated from college, I was hell-bent on moving to New York City. I believed in the saying, “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.” I was the type of kid who studied hard and got As in school, and I didn’t think I’d have any trouble skipping up the corporate ladder in one of the most intimidating cities in the world. When I landed a job at a top public relations firm despite having zero relevant experience, I thought the toughest part was over. I dumped my extra resumes in a recycling bin and eagerly awaited a paycheck that would scarcely cover my rent. I looked forward to worldly business trips, stimulating office brainstorms, and hanging out with my coworkers every Friday at happy hour.
Three years later, I found myself cringing at the words corporate travel, and I never made it to a happy hour gathering because I was passed out on the couch every Friday night. One of my managers disliked me so much that I was convinced I had killed her in a past life. I held an entry-level position for sixteen months while people with half my intelligence and work ethic lapped me. I saw a career counselor, bookmarked job boards on my browser, and dreamed of a distant future in which I was happily ensconced in a job that merited getting up in the morning. My resume listed four positions in three years because I was always on the lookout for a better opportunity that would bring the ever-elusive job satisfaction I dreamed of.
Desperate for help, I looked on Amazon for a book geared toward twenty-somethings’ struggling to survive in the professional world. I found a handful of titles on finding an affordable living situation, decoding tax forms, and allocating the right combination of funds to one’s brand-spanking-new 401(k) plan. And I assure you, after painting these books with a yellow highlighter, I had the best damn 401(k) in the world. My 401(k) was so sound that I could have been a billionaire by the time I retired from my chief general manager/divisional senior vice president position at age sixty-five!
Too bad I wouldn’t last that long. The way I was going, I would be the corporate equivalent of the dinosaur in Darwin’s natural selection process. In those days, I spent a lot of time in bars doing tequila shots and smoking cigarettes. I complained to anyone who would listen about the death of common sense in the workplace, and how my expensive undergraduate education was being wasted on clearing paper jams from the printers. When I probed my mother for answers, she told me that life wasn’t supposed to be fair or fulfilling, and that I should learn to tolerate my job. My father shrugged and said he hoped I would become the first in a long line of suffering, worker-bee Levits to triumph in the business world . . . but he doubted it. My friends told me to go to law school.
The idea of going back to school was tempting indeed, and why not? We’re comfortable with the concept of school. We know how the story goes: if you work hard, you get good grades and everyone is happy. The business world, however, is another animal entirely. Politically motivated and fraught with nonsensical change, the professional world is not a natural fit for graduates who leave school expecting results from a logical combination of education and effort. Suddenly, the tenets of success we were taught since kindergarten don’t apply, because getting ahead in the business world has nothing to do with intelligence or exceeding a set of defined expectations. In our first corporate jobs, we come up against rules no one ever told us about. We feel lost. It’s like we were whisked away on a spaceship and have landed on an alien planet where we have to eat oxygen and breathe vegetables.
So how did I survive it? Well, things started to turn around when I finally realized that the professional world is the same everywhere. I was bringing my misguided attitudes and beliefs about the business world to each new position, and I knew I wouldn’t be successful until I changed them. So I stopped job jumping and started taking courses and reading books on practical self-improvement. I put myself under a microscope and took a close look at the persona I presented to the companies I had worked for. After polishing the package and learning how to promote it, I mastered human relations skills such as diplomacy, cooperation, initiative-taking, and networking. I also refined personal development skills such as organization, time management, and attitude adjustment. Eventually, I overcame the negativity that was making me miserable and holding me back in my career. By my late twenties, I saw results in the form of three promotions, and I could finally claim that I was—at long last—happy working in the professional world.
Throughout the years, as I’ve talked with young professionals, I realized that my experiences are disturbingly common. Today’s twenty-somethings technically have more occupational choices than their parents did and face escalating uncertainty about their careers. More than ever, twenty-somethings worldwide are seeking counseling and are job jumping due to stress, and dissatisfaction has become the norm. For example, a 2018 study by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average young professional stays in a job under two years.
At the end of the day, the choice is yours. You can help NYU Law and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management increase their applications by another 200 percent while you shell out more than $100,000 for several more years of school. Or, because you don’t want to be in debt and eating with plastic utensils the rest of your life, you can learn to win the game of the professional world. Difficult as it may be, you must change your attitude about the education you left behind. A college degree is a piece of paper that gets you in the door for an interview and it may even land you a job. But if you want to get any further in the professional world, you have to treat your first job out of college like it’s first grade. This new world is full of possibilities, but you must be willing to readjust your thinking cap and prepare for some tough lessons.
The business climate is tougher than it has ever been. I came, I saw, and I didn’t go back to school. That’s why I decided to write this book. By sharing the strategies that helped me succeed in my career, I hope to provide a helping hand to those just beginning the journey, and also to reassure those who have been in the trenches for some time already that it is possible to make sense of this upside-down world.
The contents of They Don’t Teach Corporate in College are as follows: Chapter 1 serves as the insider’s guide to job hunting, including proven techniques for surveying the field, meeting contacts, preparing promotional materials, and interviewing. Chapter 2 will help you transition to a new position, and suggests actions that will help you achieve the best possible first impression. Chapter 3 lays out strategies for getting to know a new boss, navigating the company’s social scene, practicing cringe-free networking, and finding a mentor and sponsors. Chapter 4 describes critical skills such as goal-setting, self-promotion, innovation, problem-solving, and risk-taking, which will take you wherever you decide to go. Chapter 5 covers how to stretch the eight-plus hours a day you spend at work—everything from effective time and project management and organization to making every piece of communication count.
Chapter 6 is devoted to combating negativity, maintaining a positive attitude, and staying motivated in the face of difficult circumstances. Chapter 7 focuses on approaches for enlisting the cooperation of others, creating positive relationships, and coping with difficult personalities. Chapter 8 is a how-to on advancement, including mastering the performance review process and troubleshooting antipromotion situations. Chapter 9 will guide you through your first experience as a boss, expanding upon specific techniques for starting off on the right foot with employees of varying generations and styles, delegating tasks, facilitating open communication, and resolving performance issues. Chapter 10 advises when it’s time to move on, and offers suggestions for finding a new position and making a graceful exit.
To keep things interesting, you’ll also hear from current twenty-somethings who share their on-the-job adventures, as well as current thirty-somethings who wish they could go back in time and give their twenty-something selves some better career advice!
What’s the best way to use this book? I suggest that you jot down the concepts that resonate with you so that you can remember them later. Post notes in your phone or cubicle —anywhere you’ll see them regularly. Some of the ideas mentioned might seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how rarely people act on them in real life. If at any point you feel as though this is not worth the effort, just consider how much time you are likely to spend in the professional world. Assuming you work from age twenty-two to age sixty-five (and that’s generous), for 235 days a year, you’ll be on someone else’s clock for about 80,000 hours—a tenth of your life. Isn’t it only fair that you do everything you can to create a rewarding job experience?
There’s one more thing I want to emphasize before we begin: the strategies I’m about to discuss are “best practices”; that is, they represent the ideal way to handle particular situations. Although you should generally stick to these principles if you want to be successful, no one expects you to follow them to the letter every time. As human beings, it’s impossible for us to be perfect employees. We can sing self-improvement mantras all day, but the truth is we will still have our areas of strength and areas in which we can always do better. So don’t be too hard on yourself. The best you can do is read through these ten chapters and pick out the concepts from which you feel you can benefit the most. If you finish this book and take away one piece of advice that makes you more effective at work, then I will have achieved my purpose in writing it.