Page 164 - Successful Onboarding

Personal Progress and Prospect: Early Career Support • 151

being proactive and addressing career advancement can temper anxieties
and focus the new hire.
Younger new hires harbor many questions about careers and work
norms that older new hires might take for granted. Young people with
technical backgrounds often feel overwhelmed by the “real world” just
after graduation and do not understand how they can ever be effective in
their careers. Younger new hires wonder what skills they need to get where
they know they want to go. Is it a certification, or international experience,
or specific work assignments? What specific elements of a new hire’s per-
formance require development for him or her to progress? Younger new
hires who happen to know how to build a career within an enterprise start
to worry about how to go about obtaining career sponsors. All new hires
worry about how to deal with difficult bosses and how to contend with per-
ceived failures on the job. “If I do something wrong, how do I recover, and
how seriously does the failure impact my future career prospects with the
firm?” Finally, employees at all stages of their careers wonder about how
to handle disappointment on the job. If they are uninspired by their cur-
rent work, will it turn around? Is it worth it to them to stick it out a year
or two if they are bored? What do they do to change their experience for
the better?
Offering the kinds of career support tools listed in the preceding table
addresses these concerns on a number of levels. Organizations help new
hires discover the full breadth of the career options available both inside
and outside the firm while providing the support required to explore
and test those options. With resources such as mentoring and career
pathing at their disposal, new hires can develop clarity early on about
career path options, and they can begin to plan what they need to do
to achieve their personal visions of success. Most importantly, perhaps,
early career support helps new hires feel better about their work life,
imparting the belief that their career journey will be rich, either within
or outside the organization. Any mediocre company can become great,
as can any employee, assuming they are on the right path. Offered
enthusiastic career support early on, new hires are thrilled to discover
their new employer is an organization that will support them on their
personal road to success.
Early career support, as we conceptualize it, can be provided by the
smallest of organizations. Centralized resources are powerful for larger