The agile career | should new grads take any job or wait for the right one?

HBR published an article over the weekend titled "Should New Grads Take Any Job or Wait for the Right One?" advising graduates to avoid setting their expectations based upon a single career path, and to instead accept each opportunity as a means towards building valuable experience, and taking steps towards accomplishing longer term goals.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/should-new-grads-take-any-job-or-wait-for-the-right-one

As an entrepreneur and former product manager, this guidance resonates. When building a new product, oftentimes, we have uncertainty around which features, which components of the value proposition will resonate with our target customer. What matters less is how frequently you are right versus wrong in your assumptions, and what matters most is how effectively you incorporate observations/feedback when you are wrong.

Careers tend to take a similar trajectory-- oftentimes, graduates land a job that aligns with their belief system and goals at the time they went through the job search process. Most graduates (over 70%) will find that their first job isn't the right one and will leave before they reach the two year mark. In a highly functioning market, the switching costs-- i.e. the cost to the company and the employee to replace the individual in a role, relative to the value delivered-- must be minimal, yet the reality is that many graduates will stay in the wrong role for too long because of things like stability, portability of benefits, and a general lack of certainty around the best next step, and many companies fail to exit low performers because of the impact on morale, sunk costs of recruiting and onboarding and administrative difficulty.

Nlyst was built to address these challenges by creating a platform for companies and candidates to engage directly, while removing as many of the barriers related to switching costs that create friction as recent graduates explore their early careers. Our view is that a career where recent graduates have the opportunity to test, iterate and fail forward (incorporating learning and experience into their next role) will help graduates find their long-term career faster than the current model.

Explore www.nlyst.com to learn more.