Starting out in your career can be difficult. To help navigate those first tricky years I have put together a list of career advice and tips I wish I had known in my early 20s.
Two weeks ago it was my birthday and it’s been a reflective time, to say the least for me and my career. Recently it’s been a year of firsts – a new job, pandemic, living with my boyfriend full time, new career challenges. In general, it’s been tough I’m not going to lie.
But it’s been a time where I’ve learnt a lot about myself, my career, my life, and the people around me. It’s also made me think about the career advice I would give myself if I was just starting out.
Rom-coms & Career Advice
If there’s something you must know about me, it’s that I love a good rom-com – preferably the iconic 90s and early 2000 romcoms that feature Hugh Grant, or a strong female lead character. However, whilst I enjoy watching these types of films, they are also massively unrealistic on 20 something-year-old women in love and careers.
In The Devil Wears Prada, aspiring journalist Andy ‘Andrea’ Sachs is a recent graduate who ends up landing a job as a personal assistant to the Editor-in-Chief Miranda Priestly of Runway Magazine (based on a true story), a job that ‘a million girls would kill for’.
It’s a film where Andy was frustrated, undervalued, her career was impacting her relationship and she was in her early 20s. The film very well touches on poor work/life balance, toxic workplaces and bad managers.
Whenever I watch this film, I can always relate to Andy in some way or another; the rushing around to last-minute deadlines, excessive demands, finding a workplace bestie and knowing ultimately when to walk away from a job/ company.
I want to share with you what I’ve learnt in my career at 22 (and currently learning) and what career advice I wish I knew in my early 20s.
So here is my career advice I wish I knew earlier in my 20s:
1. Your first job doesn’t have to be your career for life.
A very hard lesson that I learnt in 2020, your first job straight after leaving school or university does not have to be the job you stay in for the rest of your life. Gone are the days where the way to climb up the career ladder is by staying in one place. A job for life is rare now.
Big companies and corporations prey on school leavers and target graduates at career fairs and exhibitions for their naivety and inexperience sadly. As I mentioned in a post I wrote last year, it’s not your fault if you suddenly start hating your current job role. If you can feel the warning signs of resentment and frustration at your job, then it’s time to take on another challenge or a new journey.
Job hopping isn’t bad, nor does it damage your CV and you may have friends who are still stuck in the first job they had since they were 21 but as long as you are happy with where you are at that is the key to careers in your 20s.
2. Make sure you have a workplace bestie!
This should be essential for any career and one of my favourite pieces of career advice. I’ve spoken about how it’s great to have a partner who supports your career outside of work who will cheer on when you get promoted, start a new job and be a shoulder to cry on when you may feel like quitting a job, but what about inside the workplace?
A workplace bestie is that one person in my company who I know that I can always go to for venting, grabbing coffee or a lunch break with, catching up with and also being a good friend outside of work. A work friendship can be a fantastic mentor, provide a different perspective and just help you enjoy your job so much more.
Most of my workplace BFs have been individuals who I didn’t necessarily work directly with or saw every day. They were the people who went out of their way to get to know me and were extra welcoming when I was a new joiner.
3. Careers change all the time and absolutely anything can happen!
I believe all jobs have a honeymoon period and maybe on some deeper level or not, they are what we perceive to be a ‘dream job’. You can never predict when a job will suddenly start feeling normal or becomes a nightmare. I expected I would have stayed longer in my previous job and that I would have been a qualified Chartered Accountant.
However, from time to time what you choose to look for in a job and how you handle a career changes. There may be unexpected bumps and there may be a realisation that you should have done something completely different to what you are doing now. The way to respond to this is by being open to the opportunities and focus on the now rather than the future.
4. Never stop learning in your career
Time and time again I’ve heard this career tip a lot since I’ve started working and it’s so true. Your 20s should be about learning new skills, how to do something or how to improve, from mistakes etc.
I was always grateful whenever I would learn how to do a particular type of testing or a new Excel shortcut that would save me time. In my new role, I’ve learnt how to run payroll, perform bank reconciliations, multiple types of accounting systems. Plus the more management side of accounting, it was one of the reasons why I accepted the role.
What you learn now, you’ll take with you for the rest of your life, and it will stick with you. A career should excite and challenge you every day and the only way to feel that is by learning – something money cannot provide.
It may be easy to focus on the details of the salary or the job role but ultimately, it’s the learning that will be a guide for the future.
5. Say ‘No’ from the beginning (the best career advice!)
One of the best bits of career advice I can give you. Something I still am learning to do better is being able to say ‘no’ in my job and this could be for taking on too much work, responding to requests outside of business hours or it could be knowing when to walk away. It’s important to set up workplace boundaries from the start.
As someone who may not have an extensive number of years of experience upfront, it’s completely normal to feel as if you should be saying yes to everything and everyone that comes your way. However, this shouldn’t include tolerating toxic behaviour.
An example of a time when I spoke up was when I had worked with a controlling and abrupt manager who emailed my entire team that my work was insufficient (despite spending hours and hours on this piece of work) and then made me watch him on a Zoom call redo my work.
In that situation, I expressed how I no longer want to contribute to this project and that they should find another resource who could be a better match. The hardest lesson I had learnt is that you cannot rely on other people to stand up for you in your career, you need to speak up for yourself.
No can be the new yes and it’s a skill that I wish I did from the beginning of my career.
6. A hobby can become your full-time job. If you want to change careers it can help your next move.
The career tip that everyone wishes they had done earlier including me. I enjoy having a website, learning about SEO and digital marketing and having space online to express myself. It also helped me get hired for my current job at Weezy (the cool rapid food grocery start-up).
What you do outside of work or at university can hugely help showcase your talents to hiring managers and is CV worthy. If you want to start coding, do it now, if you’re taking online courses to learn a new language or reading books about side hustles – try it.
Whilst I understand that there’s a lot of posts on Instagram and LinkedIn which showcase 20 something-year-olds bossing the influencer lifestyle or becoming a founder of a company, having a side hustle or a hobby does not mean you have to place the same pressure to achieve this now.
There are so many jobs that can come from hobbies – examples include coding, managing social media accounts, having a website/blog, writing, art, sports etc.
7. Have more faith in your career!
If there is one piece of career advice, I could hope you take from this article is to have more faith in yourself and your career whilst being in your 20s.
It took someone in my team to sit down with me and tell me this – fear is the opposite of faith. Any major career event (especially ones that happened during the pandemic and COVID) will feel scary – a new job, first career move, first-ever redundancy and the way to get through it is by having faith.
It’s so tempting to compare what other people are doing in their careers, how your brain thinks you should carry out a job role and to get into the ‘I could have done this better’ mode but your career success should come from you. If it excites and challenges you on most days, then that is enough.
I hope you found these tips helpful and please share this article with anyone you know who has just started out in their career!
What’s the best career advice you had early in 20s (or at any age!) ? Comment below!
