Starting a New Job as a Mid-Career Professional
Embarking on a new professional journey mid-career can be both exhilarating and daunting. It's a chance to redefine your skills, broaden your horizons, and challenge your comfort zones. Let's delve into the dynamics of starting anew in the middle of your career.
Those first weeks in a new job are when you make your first impression
It’s hard to change people’s perceptions once they’re…
- developed
- Here are five tips to help with this transition.
- Bill thought he’d never leave his job, but when another company reached out with an offer, he took the job
- He read The First 90 Days and learned he needed to make an impact fast, so he immediately started trying to solve problems
- Two weeks into his new job, Bill noticed his coworkers were standoffish.
Build relationships
When building relationships, you’re building trust, and you can move faster when people trust in your decision-making.
- How do you build relationships quickly?
- Be curious about others and their work
- Understand their roles and how you can provide value to them
- Respect history
- Show respect for what’s currently in place
Give yourself time
It’s hard to onboard in any new company and can be even harder to onboard remotely
- Give yourself grace to move through the Kübler-Ross change curve – at first you’ll be excited, then shocked at what may be different or harder in the new job, and then in denial that it’s that different
- You may even hit the lowest mood, a depression-like state, before starting to experiment and engage in a way that allows you feel good about your new job
Dig deep into the business
The more you know about the company and culture, the more effective you can be at aligning your work to the goals of the company & behaving in a way that’s congruent with the culture.
- Find out how the company makes revenue, what products does it sell, how do the products work, what are the quarterly and yearly goals, what metrics are used to measure the company’s success and substantiate its growth, and where is the company headed in the next three to five years?
The best way to work through all of these steps is to listen more than you speak and phrase every thought in the form of a question.
For example, if you have a great idea, you could say, “I think we should do this.” Everyone in the room will either:
- Shoot you down because it has been tried before and failed
- Dismiss you because you’re new and don’t know the business
- Think it’s interesting but still dismiss you
- Try and phrase your input as a question – “I’m curious, have we tried to do this?”
Understand How Others Perceive Your Job
Ask questions about how others perceive your job to understand their expectations of you, your role, and your overall function
- Just because you have the same title or functional job at your new company doesn’t mean you bring the same value to the company
- Every company has different expectations for different roles
Learn dependencies
Who are you providing work output to, and how do your cross-functional stakeholders use it?