First Job, First Month Survival Guide Mini Series – Intro

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The First Job – First Month survival guide was created by Mark Blayney from www.theworkpress.com as a way to share some of his best information and tips on how to not only cope with your first month at your first job, but how to thrive in it.

We have broken down his guide in to bite size posts to make it easier to read, so you can find the rest of the guide in other posts.


Congratulations on starting your first job.

You’ll probably experience a honeymoon period for your first few days where everybody will be nice and friendly as they show you around, introduce you to people and welcome you on board.

Even so it’s going to feel a bit odd. After all you’ve just left a place, whether it’s school, college or university where not only did you know your way around since you’d been there for a number of years, but where (leaving aside the teaching staff) you’d been in a relatively senior position, and surrounded by people that you’ve grown to know over a prolonged period. Whereas now you’re starting somewhere completely new, with its own rules and networks that you’re going to need to get used to, as probably the most junior member of staff, knowing precisely no one.

And by the end of week two, with piles of work landing on you apparently at random, from people who seem demanding

 and to expect you to just know what to do with it all, and the phone going all the time, you might feel yourself drowning

as you wonder how you are ever going to handle all this.

Well the first thing to say is that you’re not alone in going through this.

Schools or colleges are often great at getting you the qualifications you need to land a job and guiding you in how to apply and land it. But given the many different career paths for students, it can be difficult for them to fully prepare you for the range of practical issues you will run into at work and how to make a success of it once you’ve started.

And that’s a pity, because it’s an important formative experience. Your first ‘proper’ job is potentially the foundation for what you are going to be doing for the next 40 or 50 years, and how far you are going to get, so if you want to have a great career it’s important to make a great start, and it’s never too early to begin either.

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression (actually if you think about it that’s complete rubbish, you just have to make it on someone else, somewhere else), so this short guide is focused on making those

crucial first impressions in those critical first few weeks at work.

Think of it as a crash course on a few essentials intended to ensure you get off on the right foot in your first month or so.

It’s therefore a bit of a catch-all of some basic information and survival tips, a mix of Dos and Don’ts to get you started.


Read Part 2 Here

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