Growing professionalism through experience on the job
By Jessica Levine UA’17 ’19 and Jim Stellar
One of the things that happens when you graduate is that you get a full-time (real) job that could, in theory, be your last job. Typically it will not be your last job, but the possibility has an impact.
We think that this possibility calls out something emotional in you that is like what happens on an internship but more powerful. By that we mean the expectations, demands, and possibilities are really there as a young employee and they were just not quite there on an internship. Partly that is because an employee on a paid internship is time-limited, ending so the student can go back to school. Another part is that the intern is less likely to be treated to the full institutional “secrets” that are shared with many regular employees. A final reason is that typically a regular employee is older, even if just by a few years. While that increase in age may have allowed some additional frontal lobe brain circuits to develop to better serve cognitive-emotional integration, the experiences of the end of college and the beginning of employment are very rich, like leaving high school to go to college. Those general life experiences can play into the employee’s maturity and what they take out of their work.
All of these factors contribute to the development of a more serious beginning of professional wisdom that somehow we all can recognize in a person and often even on first impression as Malcolm Gladwell made famous in his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. This blog is about those gut-level factors, written by a pair of authors who knew each other in college as student and professor. We wrote a previous blog on maturing experiences in a college education and the power of the groups that she joined to set that professional tone. Now that former student has a major job with a company and that company actually has a program to train professionals.
Jessica is currently a Learning Consultant at Exec|Comm where she empowers professionals to communicate with greater impact. Exec|Comm is a 42 year old consulting firm that helps professionals and organizations effectively develop their people’s communication skills.
Jessica’s role consists of two components: the first is helping her clients strategize to figure out which Exec|Comm workshops best fit the needs of their team and the second is teaching communications skills in the classroom. Jessica’s firm has worked with young professionals transitioning from college to their first jobs for many years. In those workshops, they help recent graduates be aware of the impressions they make, leverage their personal brand, and receive complex assignments confidently.
Here are two impressions of how cognitive-emotional integration shaped our own professional lives.
As Jessica writes:
Upon graduating in 2019, armed with several internships and a strong sense of professionalism, I believed I was well-prepared for the workplace. Throughout my life, I had been commended for my maturity and professional demeanor. However, I quickly realized that the real world demanded skills and knowledge beyond what the classroom could provide. Internships during college allowed me to focus primarily on education while getting experience, but transitioning into the workforce full time shifted priorities significantly. Many young professionals, including myself, enter the job market wishing someone had guided them on projecting confidence and poise. College primarily trains us to be excellent students, emphasizing detailed presentations and comprehensive papers. While these skills are valuable academically, they don’t always align with the fast-paced demands of a professional environment, where delivering concise and actionable information is paramount. Navigating these nuances takes time and experience on the job. The sooner one adapts to this, the more successful and effective they become in the workplace.
Jim experienced both his professorial and intertwined administrative careers. He writes: When I first stood in front of my students in a behavioral neuroscience course at Harvard, I was terrified. I was sure they would see through me, that I did not know enough to be standing in front of them commanding their time and attention. I did not know how to shake what was this imposter-syndrome feeling. I had no help, and over time, I adapted to it. Then, something interesting happened. I began to relax just enough so that I could not only deliver a lecture but also observe the students to see how the material was coming across and adjust, sometimes right then. It worked! Over the eight years I was at Harvard (their tenure rate at the time was in the single digits), I got better and eventually won one of the few Phi Beta Kappa teaching awards that the University gave. Later when I went into administration as a full professor at Northeastern University, I experienced the same adjustment, but this time I was ready.
By sharing these experiences here and looking at the same topic from two perspectives, we think we might develop some useful insights. Maybe this is like looking at the world with two eyes. Our visual perception of the world is not of two, but of one, fused image. But something happens along the way and we develop a depth perception that is much richer and stronger than what one can see with one eye.
We are now focused on the development of professional wisdom or maturity, spanning the college years and into and through the professional development even into the senior years of that experience. We will be back with more blogs, particularly on the topic of mentoring as those new blogs develop and mature in our minds.
