Don’t Make This Career-Planning Mistake…
It’s become quite clear that a large share of our young people — especially those with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree — aren’t doing any real career planning. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to realise that time spent on campus won’t contribute to their professional development, or that campus years won’t advance their career plans at all unless they’re also hands-on and involved in actual production. The result: nearly all new graduates, especially in applied sciences, dismiss the fact that limited workshop coursework and an internship they didn’t take particularly seriously will leave them with insufficient production experience. We suspect this comes from good intentions, but a lack of foresight.
We’re writing the paragraph above without singling out any particular field of higher education — this could be a Faculty of Engineering, a Faculty of Applied Sciences, or others. Because no matter how good the literature is, and no matter how well-equipped our professors are, theory can add, at best, a fast-forward button to a career plan. Just like we said in the title:
You can’t manage what you haven’t made!
Let’s set aside the long apprenticeships lawyers and doctors go through and give an example from our own field, so the point lands: you’re picturing yourself as a quality controller, a colour management specialist, a production manager or assistant, a planner, a cost estimator, or perhaps a sales representative. (You can drop those fussy job-title suffixes and just say “specialist” instead.) You have the fundamental theory all these white-collar positions will need. You even earned your diploma with good grades.
Without confronting the realities on the ground, it’s simply not possible to succeed at any of the roles above, no matter how advanced your theoretical knowledge. If you’re going to work in a colour-management role and put on a white coat, you should first have personally lived through, say, at least ten real cases in each of seven different printing techniques, just to get started. You need to have seen the paths to a solution, tried them, experienced them, and either solved the problem or failed to. Gaining that experience after you’ve already put on the white coat will take at least as long as your years in school did. That will set you back from being someone who graduated from such-and-such faculty with good grades, and instead make you a white-coated apprentice. And remember, that shows up in your salary too. Whereas working for a period directly at the machine — encountering real cases first-hand in whichever printing technique you’ve decided to specialise in (offset, flexo, rotogravure, digital, etc.) — would have carried you into that white-collar role as a trusted, white-coated employee.
We could multiply the same examples for the other white-collar roles listed above, but there’s no need. You’re young people who’ve put in at least fourteen years of hard study — you’ll understand. If you’re not out in the field, and you haven’t experienced and don’t know what’s actually going on out there, you have no chance of managing either the people or the work on the ground. Start from the field. Remember: the answer to any question isn’t hidden in a textbook — it’s hidden in a case you’ve actually lived through.
And of course, most important of all: have a career plan. If the field you studied isn’t the field you want to work in, then you either don’t have a career plan, or you have the wrong one — which is an even bigger problem.
Wishing you success in your career…