Career tip: First days will be tough

Weekender

By THOMAS HUKAHU
LAST week, our career tip discussion was on your interview.
I stressed that you must prepare yourself well for the interview, or any other sessions with your possible future employer.
If you are successful in being recruited by a firm (or organisation/government body), make use of the success and build on it.
In this week’s topic, I want to discuss and help you realise how important it is to adjust to your new environment in the first 100 days.
However, before I do that, let me remind you of the privileges that are before you as a successful candidate, if you had won the job.

A job must be embraced  
Winning a job is a success story – for you and for your family.
Let me point out some things to you about your job.
Firstly, you must realise how fortunate you are.
Do you realise that there are many people who are unemployed today – and that includes university graduates?
Our education system is expanding but the job market is not expanding as fast to accommodate for the school leavers coming out of the system.
In the past, a Grade 12 school leaver, or a dropout from university, will easily find a job. Today that is not the case. There are school leavers and university graduates hunting for jobs, and have been for years.
So, the job you have won must be treasured.
Secondly, your job will earn you money to support you and your family.
If you are a single man or woman, your family will be your extended family. If you are married, that job should help you take care of your immediate family members – your spouse and your children.
So, it is imperative that you take your work seriously and bring home the money to buy food for your family and pay the bills.
See the other side of life where you have no job. You would be at the mercy of others (possibly your parents), depending on them for food and paying the bills and you may even ask them for money to buy phone credits for you to keep in touch with friends and other relatives.
That will not be so when you win a job.
Thirdly, a job is a stepping stone to get you from the position of being a dependent to becoming independent.
The natural growth process in life is for someone to eventually becoming independent. When a child is born and then later growing up, his or her parents will provide them the care and support. That was also part of our culture as Melanesians.
However, at some point in time, the child has got to go out and build his or her own house and raise a family.
In today’s modern world, having a job could be the first step of you becoming independent, having to support yourself and your small family, if you have one – and even planning to buy your own house in years to come.
The reason why I am stressing this point is because many young people do not appreciate their jobs enough and do not take that seriously. And as a result they remain dependents most of their lives, even after they get married and have children.
That is not right.
Fourthly, a job can help you prepare for other more challenging opportunities.
Generally, the job you won will not be the only one that you will hold down all your life. You may go on to win another job outside of where you are in a few years’ time.
Holding down the job for a few years will help you learn about the work environment and teach your vital skills that you will use in other positions within the firm or out of it.
 
Your first 100 days
It is often the case when someone, like a politician gets into office, he will write a 100-day plan to get the most important things moving for his electorate for other development initiatives to start rolling.
In your work life, try to give your best shot in everything you do in the first 100 days. You should be aware that if you are taken on a job for the first time with a firm or organisation, you will be given a three-month probationary period. The 100-day period is just over three months and must be taken seriously.
How you perform as a staff will determine whether they take you on permanently as an employee or ask you to leave.
So, take those first 100 days seriously. Here are some tips on how you can do well in those first few months.
Firstly, work quickly to adjust your routines and body clock.
If you were a school leaver and had countless hours of free time before being given the job, you should realise that you cannot continue to live the life of someone without much to do.
You will need to get home on time and refrain from staying up late so that you turn up for work on time and perform to your utmost best during the day.
It is likely that your body clock needs adjustment.
Previously, you stay up until 2am and then sleep until 10am. That will have to change and your body may feel a bit awkward in adjusting to the new time.
However, within a week or two, I am sure you would have adjusted if you try to sleep at 11pm at night and wake up at 5am each working day.
When I was in journalism, for years my worktime was from 3pm-10pm. When I changed jobs from that shift to an 8am-4pm job, my body had a hard time at first, however I soon had it adjusting to the new times.
That is one of the amazing things about our body. It adjusts itself when we take good care of it and work with it.
Secondly, turn up for work on time.
You may want to come to work 30 minutes early and clock in and start on your tasks before anyone else does.
It is a good habit to form in working life, not just as a way to impress your supervisors. Early starters move up the rank and file in a firm. They are usually ahead of their colleagues in most things they do.
Additionally, do not leave before working time is over. That is, do not look for excuses to leave the workplace before your clock-off time.
Thirdly, try to learn as fast as you can.
It is likely that in the first few days, a supervisor will take you around the workplace and introduce you to other staff and inform you on different equipment and tasks that you would be in charge of, or will be doing with someone supervising you.
Ask questions when you do not understand and keep your eyes and ears open. There are many things that you will learn about your working by just keeping your ears and eyes open.
Be brave to ask your new colleagues for help also. There will be some who will reach out to you and help you. Others may not be so helpful but that is normal, as in life there will be people who are helpful and would assist while others will not.
Fourthly, stay away from staff members who tend to break rules.
In any work environment, there will be workers who have bad habits. They may be your former schoolmates or relatives too – so beware!
Workers who have bad habits are those who come in and try leave well before 4pm. They may go for lunch and turn up 30 minutes late – and they always have an excuse as to why they are late.
At times, they will clock in but then disappear to the back to chat with other people.
They will also be very negative in their words concerning many things in the workplace. They may have been there for more than a decade and they will talk as if they will leave tomorrow, but they will never do that.
If you are going to get the best from your work, you should stay away from such negative people.

Start saving money
If you have kept to the basic guidelines pointed out in the last section, I am sure your employer will take you on as a permanent worker.
Now, I turn to something which I think is important.
As soon as you can, possibly just after you are taken on as a permanent staff, open a savings account and start saving money.
And that account is not your daily transactional account, it is an account where you save funds for future use.
Try saving K50 to K100 a fortnight, depending on how much you are paid.
I will say more about this in a later article.
I am mentioning this here because savings will help you and your family in many ways. It can take care of unplanned expenses, like your child getting hurt and needing immediate care or your spouse is admitted at the hospital for appendicitis and you need extra funds to help take care of him or her.
More will be said about saving later.

l Next week: Learning and growing. Thomas Hukahu is a freelance writer.