From University to Workplace

As a Career Starter, you will need a change of pace when you go from University to a professional environment in a company. Practice these steps every day and you will be off to a great start in your career.
Plan in time-horizons of 1 week
At the Uni, you plan today and maybe tomorrow. The workplace requires you to plan in weeks, months, quarters, the whole year and at later stages, multiple years. Start with planning whole weeks. It will get you started to think in future scenarios, which you will have to deal with soon enough.
The ultimate result will be to take better control of your time.

Switch from IM to Email
In college circles, you have been using the Instant Messenger of your choice for conveying important messages. You have to cut back on that at the workplace.
For one, the workplace requires you to share more complete and comprehensive information about projects, tasks, decisions, problems, etc. You can do this by email much better. Take the time, find the words.
For another, email has more memory than IM. Mail threads are a great collection of communication pertaining to a specific topic. (That’s why you should dedicate one mail per topic.). You can always come back to this thread, reference to it, or continue the conversation.
You can hold 3–5 threads in your brain. But if you are doing any job of responsibility, you’ll be dealing with 2 to 10 times those number of issues at any given time. Use technology to master them.
Be Endpoint Oriented
It’s not important how many projects you start. Only how many you close.
Most career starters get a kick out of sampling multiple projects. That’s OK, but in business, unfinished work has no value. So finish what you begin.
Multitask
In college, you have split your attention to multiple subjects. So you already know to manage multiple projects parallelly. This is an asset for your work environment.
Organise your mind to execute forward several projects at once.
Make Knowledge your Opium
Knowledge is power. Drink it, eat it, breath it — maximum. Absorbing new knowledge should be your daily mission.
While you do this, look for more depth (specialist) than breath (generalist). Your goal should be to be in the top 1% of professionals in your area of specialization, worldwide.

Go to Sleep with Work on Your Mind
It helps you to become a passionate professional. Sometimes you will see source-code in your dream; that’s a good thing.
Cut Out the Alcohol
Alcohol is a bitch.
While it’s cool to binge as a student, alcohol will drag you down in your career. You‘ll say stuff to people that you’ll regret the next day. You’ll likely come to work with this stupid poison in your brain.
If you need to indulge yourselves in social gatherings, there are better things to do — tell people jokes, or stories or, if you can, play music for them. If you are single, flirt with women or men (no, this doesn’t need ethanol). If you can’t think of anything else, just pour drinks for other people, but don’t drink till it gets into your own head!
And gentlemen, it’s surely more macho to stay sober than trash yourselves.

What You Do After Work Determines Your Future
Those are Jack Ma’s words. They are self-explanatory.
Unlearning is as Important as Learning
We learn a lot of things along the way in our little lives. But who is to guarantee that all that we learnt was right? No one.
The alert mind catches its own flaws, some if not all, along the way. Then it is important to unlearn the flaws and keep rewiring our brain.
(fine, this last one is not specific to career-starters).
Sooner or later, you will realize all the above yourselves. But hopefully, these shortcuts help you reach higher career goals faster.
For career opportunities at Simplify-ERP.com, please visit https://www.simplify-erp.com/careers/.
Originally published at www.simplify-erp.com on August 31, 2018.
