You may think choosing a career path might be easy because you are taught in your studies about the different roles you can apply for after you graduate. The great thing about university is that they give you more of an overview of the industry and typically roles that match your degree. But, how much time is spent on the ENTRY LEVEL roles? Or how much time is spent on planning your first role.
Being a Finance Manager or Assistant Accountant for a commercial company may sound amazing, but when you see these professionals only see their title. Not the previous titles they have held in the past to get themselves where they are. You will be very surprised to see where they actually started to where they are today. And no, they didn’t just graduate and started in that role. They spent years doing internship, entry level roles to really build their experience. Some well known professionals in today’s world had face many failures.
Lets take a look at one example below:
Harland David Sanders – Now you may not know him by name but I am sure you have heard of KFC? Yes, Mr Sanders found success very late in his life. Many people don’t really know the struggles he faced before he became rich with a well recognised food chain that today is still so popular. Mr Sanders had many part time jobs which included salesman and train steamer (the person who put in fire in the steam train engine). After he discovered his secret chicken recipe, he was rejected 1,009 times!! He even offered to give his chicken for free, just so people would taste it but many restaurants said no. After so many attempts..he finally got one café to say…YES! His passion for himself and his product made him succeed. Today KFC is worth 1.8 billion dollars.
Other successful and famous people that had many failures that you can easily look up are:
Richard Branson – Virgin CEO
Steve Jobs – Apple Founder
Bill Gates – Microsoft CEO
What every graduate needs to understand is that success is not completing university. It’s the hard journey AFTER university. You may not always get the perfect internship or entry level role. It may not be glamorous or a big named company. That doesn’t mean you wont be successful. Mr Sanders acceptance of many part time jobs made it a little easier for him to understand people. His sales job made him relentless, it made it understand the sales cycle which helped him get that ONE chance.
Focus on gaining the experience, the skills you’ll learn and how you can develop and then your success will come.
Keep your options open.
By Fainaaz Ali – Director of Ecare Careers