When starting out in the workforce, there are several common challenges for young employees. Inexperienced workers sometimes don’t understand that they have a role to play in their job that no one else can fill.
If someone else could fill it, then that job would belong to someone else. Speaking as an employer, I can say definitively that if I didn’t need a person to do a job, I wouldn’t be paying them.
This is the simple logic of responsibility. Young employees sometimes don’t understand that they are not being paid to hold a title but are being paid to fulfill the obligations of a role.
There is a balancing act required of everyone who works. We have to find a way to work hard while we are at work, prioritizing the duties of the job over the distractions of our personal lives. Then we have to find a way to leave those duties and those responsibilities at work when we go home. We have to play two parts.
For young employees, finding a way to overcome the distractions of personal life while at work can be a significant challenge.
Prioritizing Work
The primary challenge for young employees comes down to priorities. Adults who have worked for years and years are fully aware of the importance of setting a priority on the duties of work over the day-to-day tasks of maintaining a social life.
Having a social life is good, obviously, and young people feel a special urgency in seeing friends and going out. That is fine. The problem that young employees sometimes have is in realizing how to balance an active social life with work.
Staying up until three in the morning on a day before working an eight-hour shift is on example of losing sight of that balance.
In my experience, I’ve seen young employees struggle to maintain a commitment to the duties required for the job in the face of social opportunities. Answering phone calls on a cell phone and texting while at work are just the first and most common examples of this priority challenge.
Reliability and Communication
A young employee’s challenge in the category of prioritizing work can spill over into other areas. If a person doesn’t think work is important, he or she may not consider work when making plans.
Everyone deserves time off. Vacation is a must. This is true for people young and old. Experienced workers understand that communicating with employers is the only way to take time off if you want to still have a job when you return from your vacation.
Though I have not seen young employees simply fail to show up for days at a time, I have seen employees miss shifts “accidentally,” arrive late without good reason and request days off after a work schedule has already been posted. Of course, every business has its own policy for scheduling, but the point stands: To be a reliable employee, one must communicate requests for time off with appropriate lead time.
Short notice can be almost as bad as no notice at all. Compassionate employers will try to accommodate as much as possible, but there is a line. The tendency to fail to consider his or her own role in a business can cause big problems for a young employee.
This particular challenge for young employees boils down to two basic failures. The first is an unwillingness to prioritize work, and the second is a failure to realize that communication does not happen on its own. When you buy concert tickets, your boss doesn’t get an electronic update on his cell phone. You’ve got to tell him.