Pressure to pick your forever career
There can be a lot of pressure around getting your first graduate job. You finish university and suddenly it feels like you're supposed to choose the career you'll spend the rest of your life doing.
But this isn't the case. Your first graduate job is supposed to be a starting point, not a lifetime commitment. It can be somewhere you learn, build experience, discover what you're good at and work out what you want to do next.
Your first job is an opportunity to learn
You won't know everything when you graduate, and that's okay, you're not supposed to. Your first job can teach you things that are difficult to learn in a lecture theatre:
- How to work with colleagues
- How to communicate professionally
- How to manage deadlines
- How to deal with customers
- How to solve real problems
- How organisations actually operate
- How to take feedback
Even if you move into a different career, those skills can come with you
Even if you eventually move into a completely different career, those skills can come with you.
Skills travel with you
Imagine you start your career in marketing and later decide you'd rather work in project management. Your marketing experience hasn't been wasted. You may have developed communication, organisation, research, presentation and project management skills.
Or perhaps you start in customer service and later move into sales, recruitment or account management. Your experience dealing with customers, solving problems and communicating clearly can still be valuable.
Just because your job title might change, doesn't mean your skills won't come with you.
You might discover what you don't want
Maybe you take a job thinking you'll love a particular industry and discover that it's not for you. This isn't necessarily a bad outcome, because you've learned something. Knowing what you don't enjoy is just as important as knowing what you do enjoy.
Don't wait for the perfect job
If you're looking for your first graduate role, you might be tempted to hold out for the perfect opportunity, but the likelihood is that there probably isn't one.
Instead, look for a role where you can:
- Learn something
- Develop useful skills
- Work with good people
- Take on responsibility
- Build experience
- Explore where you want to go next
Careers aren't always straight lines
People change direction all the time. A graduate might start in finance and move into technology. A marketing graduate might discover a passion for product management. Someone who starts in recruitment might move into HR.
A graduate job can introduce you to people, industries and opportunities you never expected. Your career might take you somewhere completely different from where you thought you were heading at 21.
Take this into account as you continue: adjust course if it changes what you are building, otherwise fold it in or address it after your current step. If it asks a question, answer it in your reply rather than deferring. Do not restart or abandon in-progress work unless the message explicitly asks you to stop.
Sources and review
This guide was last reviewed on and is based on the following official sources. Rules can change, so always check the source for the most current position.
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