Hitting the Ground Running after University

So you've arrived at your first post-University job, which in the modern world probably isn't directly related to what you studied at University, and may not even have been a position which you need a degree to apply for. First off, that's okay! You've got to start somewhere. For me, it started with landing a Clinical Administrator post at ORLA Healthcare, getting that all important 'foot in the door'. Within 5 months of starting in this role I was offered the chance to become the company's first ever Management Trainee, with my first job being to recruit a replacement Administrator. I believe the 5 practical strategies outlined below played a significant role in the speed of my promotion.

We've all heard about the importance of first impressions, with most of the research focusing upon conclusions drawn within a minute of meeting someone. However, making a good first impression in a new workplace takes a lot longer than a minute. Depending upon the size of the organisation you're in, you could be meeting new people continuously for months, but for the purposes of this article I'm going to outline how to hit the ground running during your induction period and lay the foundations for good first, second and third impressions using the following strategies:

1) Learn your job

A lot of what I'm going to talk about below is ways to go above and beyond and find ways to show off skills and a willingness to learn. However, all of that will be utterly pointless if you completely ignore learning and being good at the position you are actually paid for.

2) Proactively get to know your colleagues

We spend a LOT of time at work. It is likely you will have some flexibility during your induction period to invest time in getting to know your colleagues and what they do. If your employer doesn't already promote this, ask to shadow different members of the team during the first few weeks to get an overview of how everyone's jobs fit together. It's amazing how often simple problems can be overcome by a little interdisciplinary communication.

As well as getting to know their jobs, find out about their personal interests too! I confess that one of my greatest downfalls is that I'm very bad at remembering names. Over time I'm identifying strategies to remedy this, often writing down a list of people I've met at an event and anything unique I remember about them. This gives me something to refer back to, helping shift their name into long term memory.

3) Apply your University skills - use it or lose it

You've just spent 3-4 years in Higher Education acquiring skills (as well as ￡20k+ of student debt) that you may forget within a year if you don't actively identify ways to apply them to your new job. It is tempting the think "my degree is completely unrelated to my new job", but I guarantee you there will be transferable skills if you look hard enough.

In my case for instance, what on earth could Psychology have to do with Clinical Administration? Well, among countless other things, we were taught how to do scientific research, including statistical analysis. Within weeks of starting my new job, by getting to know my colleagues and their day-to-day jobs (see strategy 2) I had found at least five ways to make colleagues work easier by improving existing excel documents. I had also begun collaborating with a Consultant by performing basic statistical analysis on some research they were working on. None of these things were on my job description, but it was helpful to colleagues and it kept my skills honed. Without this I guarantee I'd have forgotten what a t-test was within a year.

4) Show Initiative

This is in part related to the strategy 3, but deserves a step of it's own. According to Dr Robert Kelley, the most apparent characteristic that separates high performers from average performers is initiative. Now, initiative is not about finding ways to do aspects of your actual job better or faster. Initiative is about adding value to your colleagues/organisation in ways that clearly go beyond your remit.

For example, having identified that my understanding of Excel was appreciated within the ORLA team, I began actively looking for processes or documents that I might be able to help improve. Within months I had worked with members of the team to design a brand new medical equipment tracking system and a staff training matrix that not only made day-to-day work easier, but also enabled managers to have greater oversight and quick access to statistics and compliance without it requiring any effort. In the process, I created myself a niche for overseeing the maintenance and development of these systems moving forwards.

5) Get to know your industry

You may find that in a large company most processes are already established. They certainly won't be tracking staff training using excel spreadsheets like we were at ORLA! The quickest way to learn the pain points for your organisation and innovate solutions is to learn about your sector. For me, this was reading up on healthcare and keeping my eyes peeled for new innovative solutions coming onto the market. I set up Google alerts for ORLA and particular buzzwords so that any news immediately came my way. As a result on more than one occasion I was able to bring relevant new articles to the attention of our Directors and add value by keeping our fingers on the pulse.

Hopefully others will find the insights above useful. I actually wrote most of this article quite a while ago but hadn't gotten around to a final edit. It's even more relevant to me personally now that ORLA is no more and redundancy beckons. So I'm looking forward to practicing what I preach wherever my next exciting opportunity lies!