Do you remember your first day at school? Most children find it intimidating, and why wouldn’t they? It’s a whole new experience, and since the place is filled with strangers, a sense of insecurity always kicks in. The beginning phase of a professional career is not very different.
You are certainly more mature than a toddler, and the unknown faces don’t intimidate you any more. However, the stakes are much higher in the professional field, and quite evidently, you cannot afford to make a mistake here.
They say “morning shows the day”, and whether you believe in this saying or not, your first impression has a lot to do with how your superiors perceive you as an individual. The same formula applies to your professional career as well. Your performance at the beginning of your career often decides how successful you are going to be in the future.
However, your skills and knowledge won’t be enough to guarantee success. You also need to steer clear of some critical mistakes from the very beginning of your career that can ruin your chances of succeeding. If you aren’t aware of these mistakes, don’t worry. This blog will help you acknowledge the serious ones.
Choosing the career for wrong reasons:
There may be a lot of options in today’s date, but choosing a career path is not as simple as it looks. One of the very first mistakes that people commit in their career is by choosing an option that is easy or high-paying, not the one which they are passionate about. If you choose your career path for the wrong reasons, it is possible that you may start to feel depressed in less than one year in to a job.
Not having a particular goal:
You may already acknowledge the fact that starting a career without a proper goal in mind is definitely a mistake. Getting a job without any preparation is not rare today, but to be successful in the longer run, you do need to set a particular career goal.
Like everyone else, you may also come to a point, where giving up seems easier than carrying on. If you never had a goal in the first place, you may not find the motivation to improve your situation from that point.
Building unrealistic expectations:
It’s one of the most common mistakes among the beginners to develop unrealistic expectations after getting their first jobs. They often believe that if they complete a project before the deadline, they will receive a promotion or an increment soon. In reality, that happens rarely. If you develop such expectations, in the beginning, you are likely to feel depressed once you discover the truth.
And if you are not making connections from the very beginning of your career, you are simply wasting your time as well as the opportunity to build your own network. In the professional field, a network of influential people often directs you to the path of success. Perhaps, you need to maintain a healthy relationship with all your connections. It may seem difficult at times, but the results are worth all the efforts.
Not expanding your skillsets:
Not improving your existing skills to the current requirements is one of the common mistakes among the beginners. If you want to pursue a successful career from the very beginning, it is recommended that you keep your skillsets relevant either by improving the existing skills or by acquiring a new set of skills which is pertinent to your field of profession.
Burning yourself out:
A lot of people take their work so seriously that they often forget when to stop. It’s a good thing if you love your job, but putting a lot of strain on yourself just to please your superiors can have adverse effects on your mind and body. Pushing your limits may help improve your individual skills, but if you burn yourself out at the beginning of your career, you may experience other complications later in your career.
Lack of self-belief:
Success comes to those who dare to defy all the odds, and that is not possible if you don’t feel confident about your own capabilities. Lack of self-belief is one of the major challenges that can keep you from achieving success in your career. Also, when people find out that you are not confident about your own abilities, they start to recognize you as an incompetent person.
Trying to be jack of all trades:
It is necessary to expand your skillsets in order to achieve success in your career, but developing expertise in too many areas can do more harm than good. You can work on your leadership skills, communication skills and even management skills to perform better in the professional field, but when it comes to technical skills, it is important to keep your focus on a particular area. Jack of all trades and master of none is not really a preferable profile in most of the professional sectors.
Every organization expects their employees to maintain the strict conduct of professionalism and fulfill all their job responsibilities as instructed. However, there are people who still show lack of professionalism from the very beginning of their career. If you’re one of those people who like to procrastinate or don’t have a proper sense of responsibility, this is the right time to start working on those areas.
Blaming others for your mistakes:
Success won’t come easily to you if you don’t take responsibility for your actions. If you’ve the tendency to blame others for your mistakes or make excuses to cover your errors, it may become difficult for you to win the trust of your team members as well as the superiors. In order to ensure your success from the very beginning of your career, you need to act more responsibly and learn to accept the consequences of your mistakes.
You may have heard “success is a journey, not a destination”, and if the beginning of the journey is not right, chances are it may end before it can even reach the halfway mark. So it will be wiser for you if you can acknowledge the common mistakes made by people in the early stages of their career, and avoid them effectively.
It is possible that you may not realize the implication of these mistakes right now, but don’t wait until it’s too late. You may have the option to change your career path when you are still at the beginning phase of your career. Five years down the line, you will no longer have the option. So act cautiously.
Author bio: Joanne Criss is an academic writer and an academic consultant from Aberdeen city, United Kingdom. She graduated from the University of Aberdeen and started a career of a web and Blog content writer and an educator since a decade, now she works as a writer at My Assignment Help.
