5 things to take with you when you leave your first job

There’s always something about your first.

Job — your first job. Not the checkout clerk or babysitting gigs or even paid internship. Your first professional role of your long term career.

If you’re lucky, you worked at a great company with a warm team, mentor-y boss, and plenty of growth opportunity. Even if it’s only some of those things, if you did it right, you probably feel really connected and excited about your career opportunities to come. Fifteen years ago, I started five strong and fulfilling years at my first job — it gave me more of an ‘education’ to realize my professional potential than university did.

And now that you’re moving on, I want to offer tips for relating to your ‘first’.

1. Collect key ‘items’ for your professional ‘scrapbook’.

On a totally practical level, make sure as you leave your first job you capture critical evidence of your successes so you can have them for future interviews and reference. That is NOT about taking sensitive confidential information from your employer, customer details, or proprietary code. What you want to have in your own records are pieces of content you wrote or produced, snapshots of apps or website elements you worked on, case studies or testimonials of customers you worked with.

Capture, download and screenshot these things — don’t leave them as digital footprints on someone else’s server. Blogs I have created, websites and apps I have worked on, visuals I have produced have disappeared. I created my own records by capturing screenshots or downloading content pieces so I could send them off when interviewing. Keep them in an accessible disk drive or your cloud storage account so you can grab whenever.

2. Bring your ideas and skills with you, but leave behind the ‘past’.

The thing about having only one experience in your professional life is… you don’t know what you don’t know. You know what seemed good and helpful and productive, and you know what seemed challenging and dysfunctional and destructive. But the world, and your career, and your professional life are never binary. And in some situations, what was good at your old place will be less helpful at your new; and what seemed dysfunctional there may be how things actually work somewhere else.

View your previous job as a historical text from which to glean lessons and tap into your experience, but not as a guide book. Your new team will consist of different people with different chemistry, and your new company will have a different culture with a different corporate DNA.

3. Building new relationships from scratch is hard — it will take time, and work.

Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get to work — creating positive and productive relationships at your new company. Dedicate a decent percentage of your time understanding what others do and care about at the new place, so you can start to piece together your place and potential in the context of the company work ethic and culture.

By the way, that is not just advice regarding connecting with others on your team — but especially other teams you will work alongside as well as your administrative colleagues. Get to know — and always be respectful of— the office managers, receptionists, executive assistants and finance team. These professionals at your office work their asses off, especially dealing with ungrateful colleagues, and are too often taken for granted and overlooked until their skills and help are required. Don’t be the person they roll their eyes as they watch you walk away.

4. Stay connected with your old colleagues to brainstorm and network

I remember when I was starting out, I used to watch professionals ten years older and wonder how they got so connected. But innately, having a decade of experience more means you’ve by default been exposed to more — people, roles, experiences.

It’s not that you have stay ‘friends’ with everyone. But in professional life, it’s totally normal to reach out with months or even years between and seek out an old colleague for a coffee and a talk. Build your network in the most authentic way by experiencing professional situations with others, learning and growing together, and staying in touch. Cherish the connections you made at your first job — they are the foundation as you go forward and start building new ones, as well as your reputation.

5. Leave the air clear; burning bridges is for the construction industry.

Whatever you do, don’t Jerry Maguire it. No matter how badly you fantasize about it.

Though I totally understand wanting to flip off co-workers or a manager you didn’t get along with, you’d do much better sitting with HR in an exit interview or even writing out — in a constructive way — what you found really works at the company, and insights about how you think it can improve. Make the distinction between clearing the air and moving on versus ranting — then, go for the former. Sit down with the co-worker that you had it rough with and talk it out, with the end goal being: we leave the table (at the very least) no worse off than we were before.

Remember #4; you never know where these former colleagues will come up again. Maybe they’ll be an influence at a future job you apply for. Maybe they will be a second degree contact of a future boss. Especially if you are a building your career in a specific industry, this situation is not crazy. So consider the long term when you’re cutting off ties — versus burning bridges — with your first company.

Good luck out there! Remember, that first job was just one step in a long career ahead — and it served as the basis for everything you currently think you know. Armed with that knowledge — and the knowledge that there’s a whole aspect of your professional self that you don’t know yet, keep an open mind and get to work.

Liz Cohen is the VP Marketing & Investor Community at OurCrowd, a global venture investing platform. She manages the best team from the company’s Jerusalem headquarters. Connect on LinkedIn.