My daughter is looking for her first professional job after graduating from University of Oregon with her Psychology degree. So, if you know of anyone looking for a freshly minted graduate with a Bachelor’s in Psychology, please send them my way.
That having been said, talking with her and hearing her enthusiasm for her first professional job has me reflecting on some of my first jobs.
I’ve been working since I sixteen and had my license. Before that it was primarily mowing lawns in the summer, shoveling walks in the winter and occasional babysitting gigs. There isn’t much to be said about finding jobs mowing or shoveling. Either someone needed the work done or they didn’t. If they needed it, either they planned on doing it themselves or they were willing to let me do it. Some rejection, but nothing personal.
My first job once I was sixteen was working for a large grocery chain. I bagged groceries, stocked shelves and helped customers out with their bags. Once in a while I’d have to go out and collect carts.
I got that job based on a connection my Dad had with a manager at the store. That got me the interview and, probably, the job. But, I was a hard worker, so I don’t think they ever regretted it. In fact, when I came back to town the first couple of years of college, I was able to go work that job during the summer by just showing up. The money was decent for the time ($3.75 an hour – due to our union, working Thanksgiving netted double time and a half which was GOOD pay).
The only excitement while working there was once when a shoplifter tried to make off with a 12 pack of beer. The manager had been watching him so told me to go out of the door to cut the guy off if he tried to bolt. The manager waited until the guy stepped outside the door (you had to wait for them to actually leave the store), approached the guy and asked him to step back inside and he bolted. He saw me and headed back the other way, right in to arms of the manager who tackled the guy. I recall the 12-pack of beer bursting open and cans of beer scattering all over the parking lot. The cops were called and I had to pick up the cans of beer.
During the last couple of years of college I worked at KMart. I’ve written about this job a bit, so there’s not much else to report. Well, I did have to help with a shoplifter there, too. There was a special code the security person would call that meant several of us guys were supposed to go out of the store and be prepared to hem in a shoplifter who might bolt when confronted. It didn’t happen often. Usually they just went back in the store to get their picture taken, read the riot act and be banned from the store. Occasionally the cops were called to come pick up the shoplifter. On this occasion we waited outside and the shoplifter bolted. He headed in one direction and spotted the guy waiting for him and veered off between me and another guy. I’m by no means a physical guy, so it probably surprised the guy as much as it surprised me when I paced him, got behind him, grabbed the shoulders of his coat and threw him down to the ground, scraping my own knee and putting a small tear in my slacks. But, the adrenaline was flowing and I felt like I’d saved a bus full of school kids from falling off a bridge.
When I graduated from college, I decided to move to Portland because, relative to Spokane, Portland was “the Big City” and certainly had more jobs in my field than where I was from.
I moved there without a job, so within a week or so I’d taken a job working in a food court in the mall which was walking distance from the apartment I was in. I applied for and took that job because of it’s convenience though I’d really never done much food service at that point.
This particular food court had seven or so “stations” where you could get different kinds of food from a grill to a baked potato to some other choices. I recall working the baked potato stand – we typically rotated from one to the other over the course of the evening to avoid too much boredom – when an older man approached and ordered his potato. As I was preparing it, he looked up at me and said “You don’t really want to be here, do you?” I didn’t know how to respond. The honest answer, of course, was No, I wanted to be doing something else, but that didn’t seem to be the right thing to say to the customer waiting for the baked potato I was making. But, it was a bit of a wakeup call that regardless of the job, I should try to do a good job. I ended up being an assistant manager there in three months because they had a need and I was 22 with a Bachelor’s Degree and I was trustworthy and showed up on time and didn’t steal.
While I was working that job, I was also madly applying for any and all jobs that seemed in my field. And meeting with little or no success.
In the end, on a whim, I applied for a job through a temp agency. They were looking for someone to do some data entry with an opportunity to convert in to a full time position.
This would have been late 1988 and the printer that I had at the time was a state of the art (for 1985) 8-pin dot matrix printer. An example of the quality can be found as the pic at the top of this. It was not good. The printers today have such an amazing resolution compared to what I had then. This was the same printer I had during college (which, to be clear, was a luxury!) and used to print multiple papers. And you had to tear the sides off the paper because the paper was fed with toothed wheels through the printer. Yes, it was the dark ages. Anyway, the letter was not a pretty letter. But, after a short interview with the temp agency, they put me through to the company and I did well in the interview there, as well. Obviously it helps to have a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus on Computer Science if you’re applying for a job that was largely data entry, but the data I was entering was actually related to discrete electrical components, so having some understanding of how to read a datasheet was obviously a benefit.
I did this job for a month or two and started to see that it was going to be mind numbing. I was doing data entry and, worse, there were actually two of us doing data entry on the same data and then we had to do a visual comparison between the data. This was not fun stuff. So, within a short period of time I was building scripts to do the comparison automatically and to aid in the data entry. The job got easier when I was building tools because that was interesting and I was producing more data as a result.
About six months after I started there, this was a company called Logic Automation, a small startup at the time, they had an opening for an engineer. I asked about it hoping that since they’d seen my work for the last six months, it might help me out. And it did. The folks I talked to didn’t know I had a BSEE so once they knew that and knowing that I was already a proven worker, my interview was fairly perfunctory. I knew all the interview questions and nailed them solidly and quickly. The job was mine! After only six months of working there as a temp…
That was what I consider to be my first professional job. Since then I’ve moved between jobs with larger and smaller companies, moved from more or less technical positions and eventually decided that I enjoy helping teams deliver products as a manager. The job suits me. I still get to leverage my experience and my technical side to help problem solve, but I also get to interact with my team and other groups to help everyone be more successful.
I’ve found when looking at a baby that it’s nearly impossible to look at the baby and imagine what the adult will look like. At least, I don’t possess that skill. Similarly, it would have been impossible for me to look forward in time from any of the jobs I had up to and including my first professional job and predict where I’d be today. Contrariwise, I can look at an adult and look at the baby picture and see how the one became the other. Likewise, I can look backwards from where I am now and see how all the jobs and positions lead backwards from where I am to where I started.
One interesting, at least to me, thing to note: In every case since that first job, all the jobs I’ve taken with the exception of one – and that didn’t last long and was a terrible fit – came about because of connections, because of networking. For me, at least, it’s been a truism that those relationships have been key to my progressing through my career. As a result, I’m a firm believer in not burning bridges and also a firm believer in always trying to leave on good terms because unless you pick up and move to an entirely different part of the country, odds are you’ll bump in to those folks again professionally. I still have lunch every few months with two of the guys that were in that first group I hired in to and that’s been mumble mumble 25 years ago, now.
I’m excited for my daughter. I’ve no better idea than I imagine my daughter does about what she’ll consider to be her first professional job but I’m certainly excited for her. She’s about to start a career. She’ll make all sorts of great decisions and some number of ones she’ll probably regret, but what a ride it’ll be for her!
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