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Success early in your career has a significant influence on professional opportunities in your future. Yet, early in your career, you have the least knowledge and experience to understand and respond to the new situations and decisions you have to address in your new workplace.
How can you be prepared to understand and respond to the team dynamics when you are the “new kid on the block”? How do you understand and respond to the changes in project schedules and requirements that can produce conflicts within your team and with the client? How do you chart a course for learning on the job in your first 3 months in the role?
These are lessons we learn often after the fact, after we’ve struggled, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing.
What if you a chance to learn about workplace challenges before you encountered them, enabling you to be better prepared for success?
SkillsCommons has teamed-up with an author, Jeff Kahn, who has worked in large and small corporations, in high pressure and academic circumstances, in technology-intense and in social-networking business to produce, test, and market a series of short essays about the wide range of challenges early career people face in their workplaces. Jeff has been a member of the SkillsCommons team (and the MERLOT team) for over a decade. We are happy to bring to you more Affordable Learning Solutions in our library of workforce development resources.
Strategies for the Workplace: 50 free podcasts. Each short (5 minutes or less) podcast covers a single topic that can help in your early career.
Would you like all the essays in a digital or print book format?
Prospective employers require that students possess and demonstrate key skills, including:
- Clear and Effective Communications
- Productive Teamwork and Collaboration
- Structured Decision Making
- Efficient Time Management
- Analytical Problem Solving and Critical Thinking
- Operative Technical Literacy
- Coping, Adaptability, and Resilience
- Career Planning
- Professionalism
Getting Ready for the Workplace is a collection of 50 concise articles that will equip the reader with the context and techniques needed to transition from the classroom to the workplace. The content is:
- Applicable across industries
- Relevant over time
- Identified by workforce professionals as critical for employability
- Field tested with students and recent graduates
- Easy to adopt into an upper division course or graduate school curriculum
The articles are divided into 8 subjects, allowing the reader to concentrate on a specific area at a time or sample widely. Each article starts with a brief overview of a concept and includes the key take-away. An application section follows that goes into greater detail on the topic or discusses how the ideas and methods can be applied more broadly and in workplace situations.
Click Here to purchase Getting Ready for the Workplace on Amazon
There is an expression, “Experience is what you have just after you need it.” Particularly early in your career, you will be exposed to many new professional situations, and you will learn things and gain insights in the process. Unfortunately, because the terminology, business challenge, or interpersonal dynamic will be unfamiliar to you, your ability to engage, contribute, or lead will be less than you wish. After all, it is hard to be confident, poised, and show executive and management potential when you feel unsure of the territory.
Don’t settle for less than you need! This collection of concise essays focuses on:
- Clear and Effective Communications
- Productive Teamwork and Collaboration
- Analytical Problem Solving Critical Thinking
- Structured Decision Making
- Efficient Time Management
- Operative Technical Literacy
- Adaptability and Resilience
- Career Planning
- Professionalism
In this new, second edition, each article reflects feedback from the first edition and a supplement containing key insights and thought-provoking questions to stimulate group discussion or deepen self-study. Rather than the first edition’s single volume of all 200 articles, the second edition has been reorganized into three volumes to allow for the supplemental material and to keep each volume’s size manageable.
The material is intended for a professional in the early stage of his or her career. Whether unfair or not, the pool of young professionals in any organization is observed by executives and quickly sorted into those with more management potential and those with less. The folks with promise are quickly moved into the position of team leader or first-line manager. This gives those selected a career advantage because they get to practice leading and managing. They are also exposed to the “management curriculum”, a set of topics that entry-level staff do not work through. My hope is that digesting the content in this book will better equip you to engage and your performance will mark you for advancement.
Here’s a free sample of the type of brief, easy to consume essay and Jeff talking about it.
Adaptive Leadership (PDF)
30-60-90 Day plans and a video of Jeff taking about it (PDF)
There’s more information on the website: www.strategiesfortheworkplace.com
Jeff welcomes your contact and feedback. You can email him at: strategiesfortheworkplace@gmail.com
SkillsCommons provides additional ways to get ready for the workplace through work-based learning (internships, apprenticeships, and practicums).
Combining practical applications through internships and apprenticeships, along with readings to help you prepare for the workplace, can be a powerful combination.