What It Feels Like for Being A Fresh Graduate — Middle Manager in A Startup Company
(A personal experience). To be graduating and being a young manager, would be an ideal situation and an achievement for many of us. Moreover, there are always some downsides to all good achievements. Here are some of what it actually feels like.
Today’s professional world might be way more flexible than the old ones. Today, we might not need to always undergo all the process of passing the math test, the psychology test, and all those HR drawing tests that we don’t understand how that can read our personality, to get into a job.
With this flexibility, a political science graduate like me can have various experiences of jobs. From managing the government’s project in 2016 to being the Operations Manager for an Event Management Service company, to being the Community and Marketing Manager for a blockchain-startup company, then to an Edu-tech company. None of the works I mentioned earlier, had any direct link to my study.
Have been working for a full time, professionally even during my university years, allowed me to escalate my career track quickly after I graduated. Right after my graduation, I was working in a tech-startup company. Within three months of working, I managed to move my position from a team member, into a manager. As cool as it sounds, everything has a downside. Here are what actually feels like for being a fresh graduate, 22 years old, and became a middle-level manager for an international tech-startup company.
People Will (somehow) Underestimate You
Being a middle-level manager, our jobs are not only working at the office and working with the team. Facing meetings with clients, pitching the projects to the prospected clients, there were so many times that I got this “underestimate look” from the clients. It is somehow normal for them to question my credibility in handling their project when they know that I’m just 22 years old fresh graduate, plus when I still somehow look like a High School or University Student.
The truth is, the clients probably won’t just merely underestimate for whatever we are saying or proposing. But they will prefer more to refer back to an older and more trustable colleague of yours, to listen to.
There were times when I had to meet the recurring client of our big project. The client refused to just have an initial coordination meeting with me (as the leader of the project) and asked for our Co-Founder to come joining the meeting as well. So unnecessary, right? Besides, it was also another challenge for me to speak out my voice and presentation even louder, so that I would get heard.
At the end of the day, they will still listen to you if you perform well. But being 22 and leading a team with people who are older than you, you will need to do efforts three times harder than most of the other people. You will need to voice out your opinion and present your project, a bit harder than everyone else.
You Will be Paid Less, for Yoru “Megajob” Roles
It’s a problematic condition that’s really happening and challenging for most of the millennials. Once we’re graduated from a university, it is basically normal to have an entry-level salary, under the assumption that we’re so fresh and you are still “learning” in the professional world. But shouldn't it be a different case, if even since your university years, you have earned a few years of professional experience in a good company? For me, it should have meant that with the said experiences, we should have had a higher starting point and not at the entry-level. It is common in the Startup world to treat fresh-talented millennials with a less reward but more tasks, as they are required to “learn more”. It might be both right and wrong. But what I learned from this, is to set a clear timeline.
If you think you’re those millennials who work your ass off and always aim to contribute more and take more responsibilities at your job, you should set a clear timeline on when and how you think it’s the time for you to move from a “learning phase” to the “rewarded phase”. Set a deadline on when you think it’s fair to demand a higher reward from the company and stop being stuck in the “learning phase” treatment.
DON’T take the wrong scenario:
work — expect to have a high reward— receive a low reward — performing low as a complaint for the low reward.
But choose this scenario:
work —expect to have a high reward — (if by any chance you still) receive a low reward — perform with the attitude on how high you think you should be rewarded, and go beyond the expected, set a certain timeline to achieve certain goals — when it comes near to the deadline, show what you’ve contributed and ask for higher reward — what they will give you later, will show you how you should act next.
Your Team Will Not Take You Seriously
As a millennial, it is a challenge to lead other millennials. It is even a bigger challenge to lead Gen Z. And it’s also a challenge to lead older people. Most of the time, you will feel like your team will not always take you seriously. As a young leader, you somehow have to make sure that you have the “they like me” trend, that you can be chill with your coworkers or team members.
Sometimes, you will face these certain conditions:
- your team will not really take you seriously
- you cannot be fierce, as it will be seen as being bossy. When the other (older) leaders do it, it’s fine
But that’s okay. As young leaders ourselves, we should take all the hardships as the stepping stones to learn. And we should also believe that if we can pass and excel this step, we will be even better in the future, than those peers around our age.
Take all the chances you have
It’s really important to just “fck it, I’m gonna do it”. What I have learned to be in the places where I was forced to act older than my age is that I had to have a thick skin. No matter what happened, we deserved the position that we got, and we had to face it excellent-ly. We will only regret the chances we didn’t take, and results will never betray efforts.
