College Graduate: What will you get from your first job?

A few months ago I published a book about how to make the transition from a liberal arts degree into a career in tech. This was the transition that I made out of a lot of luck, lots of great mentors, and plenty of my own hustle. The book, The Liberal Arts Techie, is the book that I wish I could have read when I graduated with a liberal arts degree that didn’t have much utility in the job market at the height of the 2008–2009 recession.

There are a ton of things about my college education that I’m very grateful for. I lived in Latin America twice. I had some incredibly brilliant professors who taught me how to think about writing and media and communicating. I got to live in community with Catholic monks for 2 years and experience the routine and rhythm of community life, from daily prayers to family dinners and on.

But my education was a safe cocoon from what it would take to get a job and make money and create a life for myself outside of the safe confines of my university. I got amazing life experience, international exposure, a second language, but I wasn’t prepared for the rapidly changing economy and job market when I graduated.

The job market hit me like a ton of bricks, and I wasn’t the only one. My whole class graduated and we found that it wasn’t enough to simply have a piece of paper that said we had gone to school, we also needed to be able to deliver value to businesses when we joined. We needed to be able to step up and help something grow.

I spent a few years figuring out how to make the job market work for me, and how to build skills that were worth paying a good salary for. Worth moving to San Francisco. I took the foundation of my liberal arts degree, and adapted it to the exploding world of high tech because I knew that there was a green field of opportunity for me to create a job for myself and build as big of a career as my hard work and talent justified.

Along the way, I picked up a lot of things from people much smarter than me who had the patience to offer me advice and guidance, and without whose support, I wouldn’t have made it half this far. Along the way, I also figured out some of the things that people learn in Ivy League schools and from working at elite companies about how to perform at high levels and how to maximize their career opportunities. Plenty of these lessons are available to anyone, not just by the folks with $200k to spare (or borrow), and a killer GPA that earns them 4 years inside of an elite university.

The things I managed to pick up, I put in the book. My hope was that both folks who were just starting their careers out, and those who wanted to transform their careers midway through, would find strategies and tools they could apply to move their careers from point A to point B. That might mean more responsibility, more freedom, more learning, or more money. Boosting your career can mean a lot of different things, but it takes the know-how to identify what you want, and then know how to go after it to make that boost a reality.

I was fortunate that the first job I got out of school was at a startup incubator that taught me that entrepreneurship is an incredibly power act of creation. I also learned how to build community. I learned that I loved working for tech companies.

That first job set me on an incredibly strong career in tech that has had plenty of ups and downs, and I’ve made my share of mistakes, but I am grateful that my first job set me on this path because the momentum from those first two years of work out of school have determined where I have ended up.

That first job didn’t come easily to me. I had to hustle around for over 3 months until I finally wrote a job description at a tech incubator in Austin explaining the work I would do and how much they’d pay me before I found a job that would help shape my career. It sucked for a long time, but I had this inkling that if I took a “temporary job” working retail, that job would probably create inertia towards a career in retail, and that wasn’t where I wanted to be.

And since that first job at the tech incubator created massive inertia in tech that continues to build momentum, I think my intuition was right to wait out the job market, not take the retail job, and create the right opportunity for myself in tech.

Without that stroke of luck in my very first job, I am certain my life would not be nearly as rich as it currently is.

So at my current company, we hired a really talented intern who quickly earned her way into being a full member of our startup. She’s going to do really well on her own steam, but it made me think back about my own first job and I made a list of questions that I would ask myself, ask her, and ask anyone who is graduating school and figuring out what their first job will be.

The list is meant to get you thinking about how this first job will impact your life and your career, and how to be intentional about matching this first job, and it’s outsized impact on your life, with your goals and where you want to end up.

1. Since this first job will define your career, have you thought about how you want your career to look? You can’t know anything that you want in 5–10 years right now, but does this job help you learn, help you grow, pay you well, and help you build relationships that will grow as you grow? If yes, it’s a great spot. If no, then reconsider.
2. What are your goals in your first job? Do you care about making money first? Do you care about the projects you’re working on? Are you trying to learn and build certain skills? Have you defined what you want to get out of this job?
3. What are you bringing to the table at this job? I brought some early skills as a writer that I leveraged into content and social media marketing, and grew from there. What are the core skills you have that you can sell to your first employer? Where else can those skills take you? What else will you need to learn to get to the next stage?
4. Where do you want this job to lead you? How does this job get you there? If you don’t think through where you want to go, you could end up anywhere.

These are some of the most important questions you can ask as you start your first job. I still ask myself these questions every time I start a new job. They help me focus on what I can do to add the most value to the company so that my time there can have the maximum impact on my career.

I talk about this along with things like how to prepare for and crush a tech interview, and how to properly write a killer resume, and how to get job offers without filling in a single application in my book, The Liberal Arts Techie. If you’re looking to maximize your career, I’d recommend you give it a read.

Hope this helps.

Austin W. Gunter