Hey there!
Welcome to Work in Progress, a how-to series that's meant to help you with everything from
prepping for a job interview, to boosting your confidence, or negotiating a raise.
Here's today's question:
We're all human, so we all make mistakes in
our lives.
So it also makes sense that we would make mistakes in our careers, as well.
That's why today, we're talking about mistakes.
At Career Contessa, a couple of our pillars are authenticity and real talk.
Kit and I will actually be sharing mistakes that we made in our own careers, and lessons
that we learned.
Mistake #1 is allowing others to define your value.
The perfect example of this is that my first job after college, because I graduated in
2009, when the economy was awful, was a job at a coffee shop.
And while most people would think that that's a write-off job, in reality, it was one of
the best opportunities that I've had to network and meet a bunch of people in all sorts of
careers—people who I still reach out to today when I need help with different things.
I would completely agree with that.
I had multiple write-off jobs as well, but I also think that people who think that they
have to have their whole career figured out by the time they graduate—you don't.
You're successful, and you worked at a coffee shop.
So don't let anyone make you feel bad if you are at a write-off job, don't let anyone define
the value for you.
Right.
It's all about what you're getting out of it.
And you can get a lot out of any job, as long as you really give it your all and you keep
on top of yourself in terms of goals.
Even at Career Contessa, we love hiring people who have had the quote on quote write-off
jobs...coffee shops, retail, restaurants—those are tough jobs, and I think it shows a lot
of resiliency, too.
So it can also be a great part of your story, overall.
Mistake #2 is staying in a job you don't love, or even taking a job right away that you don't
love.
Now, this isn't to say that you're never going to have a job that you maybe don't love or
love all the parts of.
My first job out of college, I was an admin assistant, and I've told Kit this many times,
it was not my favorite job, by any means.
One of the things that I really wish I did is that when I had gone into the interview,
I knew it wasn't going to be a fit—I wish I had just kept job searching instead of taking
that job and saying, "Oh, I'll find a new job when I have that."
Only because, when you take that job that you know is going to be wrong, you're gonna
end up job searching anyways.
So if you have that luxury to take another month or two to job search, that would be
great.
Yeah, for sure.
I had a job that I absolutely hated.
I was miserable.
I think I stayed way longer than I should have, because I was afraid of what I could
or couldn't do once I left.
When I ultimately decided that I was going to take a leap and quit, and just take a temp
job while I figured it out, I literally got a full-time job offer a week later.
That's always how it happens!
Yeah, I also think when you stay in a job that you know isn't a fit, for way too long,
all you're doing is playing over the narrative in your head that, "I can't get another job,
this is the best one I can get."
It seems like the minute you make the leap, like you were saying, things start to come
in.
I don't know why it always happens like that in life.
You have to free up space, I guess.
Exactly.
Alright.
Mistake #3 is not asking enough questions, or not asking for help when you need it.
Obviously, there's a fine balance here.
Sometimes, you need to make your own decisions, and you need to take a few risks when you're
working at a new job or even in the job you currently have.
That being said, there are a lot of problems if you don't ask questions at the right time.
I have personally, especially in some of my earlier jobs, I would try to do things without
asking for help.
Ultimately, what you end up doing is doing more work than you needed to, because—you
probably all have experienced this—you do a project in the way that you think they want
you to do it, and they end up telling you to go back and do it all over again.
Also, I think something that's important to remember is that people appreciate when you
ask questions.
Especially smart questions.
In all likelihood, if you're thinking hard about your work, the questions you have are
smart questions.
So go with your gut, and if you feel like you're going to do something and it's not
going to be helpful at all, or that you're going to make a mistake, you probably are.
Use that intuiton, I would say.
Definitely intuition.
I was going to say also, showing off your curiosity, your manager is going to love that.
One of the things at Career Contessa's that's really hard for us is to have people where
we have to tell them step-by-step what to do.
If you're a curious person and they can tell you step one, and you can figure out steps
two, three, four, five, that's going to make you a much better employee.
Also, I think it's way more interesting at work to be curious about what you're working
on, too.
Absolutely.
We also appreciate when we don't have to deal with going back and cleaning up after you.
That's like, the final thing, right?
The problem is that you also create more work for other people if you don't ask questions
when you need to.
Mistake #4 is delaying networking until you need a job.
This might seem like obvious advice, and we talk about it a lot at Career Contessa, but
you want to network before you need something.
You want to build relationships and maintain them so that when you need to ask a favor,
you totally can.
I'll give you a quick story—when I was a recruiter at Hulu, I had an informational
interview with somebody months before I had even decided that I wanted to leave Hulu.
Not only did she have an informational interview with me, she stayed in touch with me and was
really great about maintaining it, and when I left, she was my go-to person for my replacement,
and she's been at Hulu ever since.
I think the lesson here is build those relationships before you need anything, and maybe they'll
think of you, or it will be so much easier to ask them for a favor when the job opens
up.
Absolutely.
I actually know someone personally who is so uniquely good at building relationships
and making friends, in a way that becomes good networking, but to the degree that in
her 40's, she's never, in her life, applied for a job.
People just, when they need to hire, come to her and say, "How are you feeling currently
with work?
Is there any chance you'd be interested in moving on?"
Just like that, these opportunities have landed in her lap, literally.
There's some research out there that 70 plus percent of jobs actually come from networking
and referrals.
A lot of companies actually have referral programs, so they want employees to hire their
friends, or hire people that they network with.
If you're not networking, you're making the job search way harder, even if you aren't
as lucky as [Kit's] friend, and just get offered jobs whenever you feel like it.
Right, you have to think about, like, so much of it, too, is about people.
You want to actually hire someone who you enjoy as a human being, to be in the office
with you 40 hours a week.
You're going to be more interested in talking with the person who you had a great conversation
with over coffee or at a networking event.
You're a culture fit.
They don't have to worry about that.
So the last mistake, mistake number five, is letting imposter syndrome get the best
of you.
The perfect example from my life is that I started working in web design for a few years
before I decided to go full time into writing.
I hadn't had any formal training, so I had learned everything on the job, and when applied
for my last job before Career Contessa, I felt so self-conscious about the fact that
I didn't have "official" training, or as much experience, that I asked for a salary that,
it turns out, was $25,000 less a year than the guy before me was making.
I also waited six or seven months to ask for a raise, and they gave it to me almost immediately.
Because ultimately, what happened was they would have paid me $25,000 more, but I just
didn't ask.
And they saved money for 8 months, you know?
It was somethig that I made a huge mistake on, and the main thing that I took away from
that is that salary research, and really understanding what your skills are worth, is so essential
to getting this right.
It's probably the most important part of salary negotiation, is the research.
That's one of the reasons why we started The Salary Project, which is our anonymous salary
database.
It's completely free because it's really hard to get access to that information without
directly asking people, and we know people don't exactly want to share their salaries
that often.
The Salary Project is great because it's free, you can go on there, you can get access to
over 5,000 pieces of data around salaries, and at least it gives you a starting place.
I do think, had you talked to real people in that job, it might have helped.
Maybe you would have been more confident about talking about that, had you had a tool like
The Salary Project.
Absolutely.
Even just alone, the difference between different companies, I went from a startup to a corporate
environment, I had no idea, how could I.
You don't know what you don't know.
The only way to figure it out is by asking.
Going back to one of the first mistakes we were talking about—advocate for yourself.
Ask.
Be aware, and ask questions, be curious.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That wraps up the mistakes from Kit and I, but we would love to hear from you guys.
What are your mistakes?
Leave them in the comments below—we would love to read them and know, did you make some
of the same mistakes as us?
What were your mistakes?
It's always interesting to learn from each other.
We also have a free worksheet on setting a career vision—Kit and I have both filled
out this worksheet, it's really fun.
It helps you visualize what you want in your future career.
It's okay if you've made mistakes, you can still use a worksheet like this to help you
either take those learnings and apply them, or say, "Okay, I want to be more thoughtful
about this going forward."
Go ahead and download that as well!