Challenges of Early Career

People don’t get much guidance during/after high school

I started to realize how long I have been helping people succeed at work when former clients start referring their young adult children for career advice. I take it as a compliment and a special privilege when someone entrusts their precious offspring to me, and I do my best to be helpful.

Young adulthood (let’s define this arbitrarily as the period from about 18–25 years) is a time of great change with equal parts opportunity and risk. It rivals the pre-school years and adolescence in its developmental complexity, but generally gets a lot less attention. This is in part because the core concept for young adults is “separation/independence” because that is what the psychology textbooks say and because parents are tired enough by that point to embrace the notion of letting go. So many 18+ year olds head out of high school and into the world with heads high and expectations for success higher. And then they run into reality.

Our K-12 public schools do many things well, and we ask them to do too much for the resources we give them. We expect them to fill in the gaps left by declining community and family resources due to the metastasizing of workplace demands over the past 30 years.

While focusing on the mission of educating and preparing kids for college, most high schools do little in the way of preparing their students for work or a career. This results in young adults at 18 (or 22, because colleges don’t do much about career planning either) suddenly confronting the demands of the work world with a limited grasp of the steps and skills required to succeed there. This knowledge/skill gap is the proximal cause of the referrals from my former clients of their young adult children, usually in the context of some urgent work-related challenge or “crisis” such as:

Fortunately, there are effective strategies for dealing with each of these work challenges:

Challenge: I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up

I don’t know if I should go to work or get more education

I can’t find a job

I can’t get all my work done at work

My boss doesn’t like/respect/listen to me

I’m not getting along with my peers at work

I hate my job and want to just quit

It would be ideal if optimal work/career programs and resources (both on-line and human) were available in schools and in the workplace for ease and equality of access. In the real world, concerned parents and their young adult children will need to search as best they can for free-standing services that can help them succeed at work.

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