As graduation approaches, many friends are confused. When looking for a job, should you focus on making money, or should you prioritize broadening your horizons?
We all know that the first job for fresh graduates is very important, but the problem now is that judging from the background and ability of an ordinary college student after graduation, there seems to be no way to get a good job of his choice.
After all, you only have one chance to become a fresh graduate, but every year companies see thousands of graduates who are better than you and who are less selective than you. So, what is your advantage? ? How should you determine your employment direction?
Today, Xiaoni will talk about his first job after graduation~
1. Establish a clear career plan
In fact, read this article now The young people in the article are in two situations:
The first kind of people have plans and ideas; the second kind of people have no clear plans and just think about how to make up for what they have missed after encountering difficulties. opportunity, or improve yourself in a short period of time.
For the second situation, it is difficult to achieve, but most people have the idea of ????taking shortcuts.
What is taking shortcuts? It means that the path of input and output is short, in other words, it is opportunistic. Even if you go well for a while and seize the dividends of the times. But in the long run, your ability, vision, and knowledge cannot keep up with your gains, and pigs born to fly will fall down.
What's more, the idea of ??taking shortcuts can corrode a person's patience and make him unwilling to make long-term investments. This kind of thinking is often counterproductive and will destroy a person.
Back to the career issue itself, Xiaoni’s internship experience, the colleagues I met, the books I read, and my long-term focus on workplace issues led me to this conclusion:
The most important thing in your first job is not the salary or the company's reputation (which is also very useful of course), but whether the job is in line with your career development plan.
Many young people are confused about the future, have no passion, no direction, follow what others say, and are at the mercy of others.
The following is an inappropriate example, but it is worth comparing:
Most people are very casual when they start their life and prepare to build the building of life. Without drawings, they just build it hastily. The construction team started building.
From the first floor to the second floor, I suddenly realized at a certain moment in my life that the building I wanted to build was not this building, so I simply knocked down the building and built it again.
You must know that the essential difference between a planned life and an unplanned life is time.
Those outstanding people will plan the blueprint in advance, verify it with multiple parties, and make sure that there are no problems with the blueprint before building the building. Maybe they do it slower than others at the beginning, but their growth rate is very fast.
——Zhang Meng's "Energy Management Manual"
Taking Xiao Ni's personal negative case as an example, for the first three years of college, he spent his first three years interning in the K12 education field, which was about to close down and be banned many years later. Practice, these experiences accumulated over time, are cheap, have no growth, and cannot be replicated.
During college, I worked as a publisher editor, curriculum consultant, course designer for a Chinese language institution, twice as a tutor, and as a part-time teacher at many camps. Finally, I did an operations internship, and then switched to a competitive career. I was sure that I wanted to be an operator...
It wasn't because I didn't have a clear career development plan, but because I had to start over halfway through. This is called pretend planning. I think I have a goal, but it's not clear. Wherever I put it into practice, I will be there.
Hey, if I talk too much, I will shed tears. Others write about the workplace to share successful experiences, but I am sharing the lessons of blood and tears.
2. Selection of industries and companies
Next, let’s take a look at the choices of industries and companies.
First of all, industry selection is very important. Xiao Ni mentioned in a previous article that "Industries that develop rapidly in the future will always have relatively higher rates of return." However, the specific industry to choose still depends on everyone's opportunities, judgment and interests, and it varies from person to person.
According to the "2022 College Students Employability Survey Report", the Internet industry is still the most desired employment direction for fresh graduates, even though the Internet industry has entered the second half of the year and is no longer sexy.
Affected by the economic downturn, major manufacturers such as Alibaba and Tencent no longer enjoy preferential tax rates. The company no longer expanded its business, but cut costs, cut off unprofitable projects, and laid off a large number of employees.
Secondly, the choice of company is more critical. Some students may be very willful and think that they know nothing and will go wherever the company wants me. Anyway, you can get training opportunities wherever you go, and you can learn wherever you go.
I don’t think that’s the case. You can get training in any company. However, the new employee training mechanism, promotion system, and company system are different for each company in terms of how they help individuals grow.
For example, two companies gave me offers for new media operations, and the salary was okay for me (base salary 6,000 + performance bonus 1,200).
But I need to be responsible for a wide range of work, including Xiaohongshu, Douyin, official accounts, Zhihu... I have to do it on every platform you can think of, but I haven't done it on every platform?
It is said that some fresh graduates have done these jobs before, but they quit halfway through.
If I accept this offer, I will be the sole person in charge of operations and need to directly interface with the boss or the marketing department. Do you dare to imagine?
I don’t dare. Many times operations require the help of company resources. A small and micro enterprise has no successful experience and no spare resources. The key is that I have insufficient experience. No one asks for advice, so I have to learn everything by myself.
If I had been working in this company for a few years but had not started working, and had left my status as a fresh graduate and entered social recruitment, the company would probably not ask for a blank piece of paper. The cost of this trial and error was too high, so I gave up on these two offers.
Xiao Ni’s personal point of view is: try to choose a large company, which has a higher fault tolerance rate, a good foundation for growth, and better endorsement for future job changes.
But many friends complained: Do you need to say this? Even if I want to go to a big company, I have no chance.
Um, yes. If you are not lucky enough to get into a big company, you should pay more attention to identification when going to a small company.
It is difficult for many small companies to recruit people, so they will over-exaggerate the company during interviews, such as: some blue ocean industry, the company is expanding rapidly, it will be listed next year, industry leader, unicorn company...
This is the same as our flashy resume. The last company I interned at, which was advertised as “top 3 in our industry segment”, has collapsed.
This reminds me of a famous saying by management guru Jack Welch:
When the number one in the industry sneezes, the number five in the industry may already be hospitalized with pneumonia.
When there is already a giant in your niche, consumers’ perception of the brand will be solidified. No matter how much money you have, it won't change anything. People only remember number one, and the first-mover advantage is difficult to break.
Of course, as ordinary job seekers, we don’t need to think so much. As long as the first company can give us endorsement, or take a step back and give us accumulation, it is a better one. choice.