Career Development Freshers TipsFresh out of college, you immediately land on great job that offers you a wide variety of tools for development. They are also open for suggestions so you fire up that imaginative thinking of yours so that you could help the company to be in better grounds. Some of these ideas may not be conventional but they would certainly work for the company.
But before you go ahead and present the upper management with a better way to do things, think of your coworkers, specifically the older ones first. Your business proposal may look good but you will certainly outdo your older coworkers and end up looking really bad in front of our coworkers. The last thing you would want to go whenever you work in a company is your coworkers’ respect as it will matter much in your survival.
Working with older coworkers is already a given in any workplace. Most company values loyalty and they want people to work with them for a very long time so that there would be someone who will keep the company values for a very long time. Your success in your career could be even dictated on how you deal with your older coworkers. Your boss and the upper management are usually older than you so if you know how to deal with them, you increase your chances of being promoted.
First thing you should remember when working with coworkers is that they usually like the present company setting. The process is already there and all they need to do is go with it. You might find this a little bit traditional but you have to live with it. As a sign of respect, you have to go with the process to ensure not only your job security but also to gain respect from the older coworkers.
If you really don’t like the process or policies with the company or you have new ideas that will be beneficial for them, don’t just go in and present your ideas. Stop first and talk to an older coworker about this. Before you convince your boss that your idea is good, you have to talk to your older coworkers first. Consulting them about this is actually a great idea because you’ll have the wisdom of an older coworker. They might have suggestions to make it look better.
Best of all, they know when this idea should be presented. Every great idea presented to the company requires timing and no other person in the company that could tell you when that idea is best presented than the older coworkers. With their experience, they know when the boss is in a good mood or when will the idea look great.
You could even have insider tips on how to beat some policies through simple loopholes. Not that you need it but you know that someone is willing to help you get things done faster.
Always value the wisdom of the older coworkers. They have survived in this company and with their help you will do too.
Wisdom is a too simple term for workplace experience or “institutional memory”. Long term workers, who aren't necessarily old, know much more than you about what has been tried in the past, what has worked and what ISN'T worth trying again.
Short term workers see a problem and go full bore toward a solution without understanding the background. All too often, when a correction is made without adequate understanding, it creates follow-on problems which can be worse than the original.
If you really want to follow the advice in this article, your first and most important question should always be, "Why are things like they are now?"
You’ll soon learn institutional policy is rarely, if ever, planned. Usually it grows organically which makes for a messy implementation of any process. This means there is always room for improvement, but understand the lay of the land before you charge ahead with your improvement.
Ignore this advice and you lose any chance of being anything other than an outsider.