Graduate Development Programs

You want it all? Well, you can’t have it all, but you can have most of it. Life is about choices and you must make them, often resulting in some things being excluded. It means establishing your priorities and fitting everything else around them. It also means taking responsibility for your well being. That you feel the way you do as a result of your lifestyle.

If you want to perform like a high performance machine, then you need to provide yourself with a high level of care. The more time you put into your well being, the higher your potential output.

So how do you decide on your priorities? Well it’s actually not so difficult to do. In fact I have done this for you already in …..

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It is only natural when you are entering a new period of your life that you will encounter a clash of priorities. Your graduate position will impose new demands on your time will leave you asking “how could I possibly fit it all into my life?

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We all like to be acknowledged for our efforts and even better still, that they have resulted in something quite exceptional. To be acknowledged for exceptional work a a graduate, you need to make time to work on “exceptions”. That is, work which is not operational. A project or a piece of analysis. Something that is exceptional by definition should be very different from the expected.

The results of operational work, that is work related to the core function of a department, are measured often and tallied at the end of a quarter, half-year or annually. Operational work is what you are expected to do.

Operational performance is usually measured relative to your peers and various benchmarks, so differentiation is challenging and highly competitive. If you beat your targets by 10% and everybody else has exceeded them by 10% too, then you are not going to standout. The spotlight will shine on the person who topped the group with 30%.

So why not be that person? It’s too much work and besides, you can work the hardest and smartest yet still be trumped by someone due to circumstance. Why risk it?

For example, if you are in sales and your colleague picks up a “windfall” client who proves to be exceptionally lucrative, you will be blown out of the water. Such clients are not available to target in every portfolio and can be down to luck more than effort.

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Bad days are often self-perpetuating. You convince yourself that you are having a bad day and then look for all the evidence that you are indeed having a bad day. This just reinforces a negative outlook that will undermine your confidence and likely to fulfil your expectation of a bad day. Congratulations! One bad day accomplished!

We like to over dramatise. It gives us something to talk about and a basis to relate to one another. How else do you explain the inane conversations about whether it feels like a Tuesday or a Wednesday today? It’s just silly conversation. So is the proclamation that I am having a bad day. Not because they don’t occur, because they can and do. But often, they’re really not as bad as people make out.

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Motivation has been a topic that has intrigued academics and employers alike. What motivates people? Everybody is different. However, a distinction needs to be made between motivation to work and motivation to go the extra distance.

First of all, I don’t believe anybody should have to motivate you to do your job. That is an agreement you have entered into by accepting the job. The company pays you to get the job done, so get the job done!

What does it mean to go the extra distance? It means treating the business as though it was your own and doing things that you think will help the business without waiting to be asked. Here are a couple of thought exercises to go through:

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The promotion life-cycle looks something like this:
* 1-6 months – learning more than performing
* 7-15 months –performing more than learning
* 16-20 months – looking for your next role
* 21-24 months - notice period.

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The Best Assignment Doesn’t Win
You don’t get it! You have worked longer hours, produced better work but that other moron still got the promotion over you!

Being the smartest cookie in the cookie jar may have been enough to ace the exam or assignment, but in the office there is more to the equation than who is the smartest or who produces the best work.

Your talent is the starting point, not the selling point, because everybody else in your graduate intake is also talented, all in different ways. Talent is what got them through the selection process, just like you. Like all competitive environments, promotions (i.e. power) must contested.

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Dependence on Others to Perform
People are often the biggest obstacle to getting things done. But you just can’t get anything done without them either. As a new starter, you will encounter people who will……..

Accountability
Everybody reports to somebody! The CEO reports to the board of directors and they report to their shareholders as well as the regulators. This line of accountability keeps everybody focused on …

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The workplace is a coordinated and structured effort to create economic value. Technological advances are making these structures more flexible, sometimes non-existent.

For the most part however, they are still adhered to. The main components of this structure include the following:

- Physical attendance
- Core working hours
- Dependence on others to perform
- Accountability

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The nature of work and study have much in common to begin with, but the differences become evident very quickly as you settle into your graduate program.

The differences stem from the purpose of each:

- Work requires you to learn a skill and add value by repeatedly applying the newly acquired skill.
- Studying requires you to learn something new, prove you have learnt it and then move onto something new.

The repetitive and structured nature of work does take some understanding and requires acceptance because it exists in every job you will ever take on. Even if you are a project based professional such as a consultant, architect, engineer etc where no two assignments are exactly the same, the process you engage to address the assignment will soon enough resemble a repetitive pattern.

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