5 ways uni didn’t prepare me for work

Last month, I explored 5 ways university prepared me for work, outside the subject matter of my degree. I learnt a lot of transferable skills from university and many of them really helped me adapt to the working world. 

But today we are going to explore the other side: the ways uni didn’t prepare me for work. Starting a full time office job has been a massive learning experience for me. I’ve had to navigate office politics, working in a diverse team, managing upwards and dealing with tough feedback.

Here are the top 5 things I missed out on at university. 

1. Interview Skills

Being good at interviews is a different skill to being good at your job. 

In a short amount of time, you need to sell yourself and your abilities to someone who knows nothing about you. You need to be able to talk up your successes, think fast when put on the spot and succinctly highlight the challenges you overcame. When the interviewer asks follow up questions you need to quickly recognise what they are getting at and how to best respond.

In a short amount of time, you need to sell yourself and your abilities to someone who knows nothing about you. You need to be able to talk up your successes, think fast when put on the spot and succinctly highlight the challenges you overcame. When the interviewer asks follow up questions you need to quickly recognise what they are getting at and how to best respond. And do all of this while coming across confident and professional.

Uni did not prepare me for any of these crucial skills. 

Up to the point of applying for jobs, I never had to convince anyone that I was good at what I did. At school and university I let my grades speak for themselves. In my friendship groups, I made friends by being kind and amicable, rather than boastful and loud. I was very lucky that I could generally just cruise through life without ever needing to question myself.  

This meant when I first came to doing interviews I immediately struggled and took a dislike to the process. Talking about my successes was alien to me. Dealing with people doubting my skills was alien to me. I knew I could do the job, but I couldn’t work out how to get that across to the interview panel. 

Over time, and a lot of trial and error later, I have improved my interview technique. Although interviews are still not something I enjoy (does anyone?!), I don’t feel as uncomfortable anymore talking about myself. I’ve realised I was never naturally bad at interviews, I just needed time to learn the skill.

While most career services at university offer some training for interviews and applications, I can’t help wondering if some of these skills could be introduced into courses as well.  

2.Teamwork

Now, some university courses do quite a good job at teaching teamwork. Some of my friends who studied engineering spent huge chunks of their year working on group projects. I was highly aware of the pain they went through trying to get the other people in their group to work together and was very smug that this was not part of my course.

However in the long term, the joke was on me. The skills my friends learnt in their group projects are really useful for life after university. 

In my job, I work very closely with the other individuals in my team. While most of these people are nice, that doesn’t mean their ways of working are anything like mine! I am often surprised that others struggle so much with things that are so straightforward to me and that they find things easy that I just can’t get my head around.

Working in a team is all about good communication and taking into account other people’s strengths. However, in my course, everyone had similar strengths. We were all very good with numbers, very logical and generally not very creative. Even when we worked together in mini groups, I never got an understanding for how to work with a range of different skills sets.

Teamwork sounds like a basic skill that should be easy for everyone to do. This is not the case. Do not assume that just because you have a big friendship group or are in lots of societies that teamwork is something you know how to do. It is only when you have to work with people that you don’t necessarily want to work with, that you really start to develop these skills! 

Since graduating, I have had to learn how to resolve conflicts, bring diverse people together and make best use of different skill sets in order to ensure team success.  

3. Giving and receiving feedback

Feedback is a big buzz word in the world of work. Almost all organisations will emphasize the importance of giving and receiving feedback. Some companies even have shiny portals for requesting and keeping track of comments from colleagues.

Feedback is vital so we can understand how we are performing and get ideas for how to improve next time. I also agree that giving and receiving feedback is a great thing, however, I didn’t always feel this way.

A few months into my first ever job after uni, I received some negative feedback from my manager. That day, I ended up going home early and spent the whole afternoon crying. I was sad that I was failing at my job already. I took the negative feedback as a personal attack and for a while after that became very closed off to receiving feedback from anyone, worried that it would knock my confidence and make me upset. 

At university, the only feedback I ever received was regarding the work I submitted and usually that was just a percentage score of how many questions I got right. The idea of getting feedback on how you went about a task or the way you acted was completely unfamiliar to me. 

I had no experience in the right way to react and no coping mechanisms in place for how to use feedback constructively.  I also had no experience of giving feedback and learning the right way to pitch it so others can improve. 

Instead, this is something I’ve had to teach myself in my career. I eventually got over my fear of feedback once I grew a bit more confident in my job. Through discussions with more experienced staff, I learnt new techniques for handling constructive criticism and use it to my advantage.

4. Office Skills

On my first day at my first job, I was given my new laptop and shown how to log in. And that was it. I was then expected to get to grips with my email, documents and new programmes with no tutorials or support. 

I had never used a work email before and it took me a while to get the hang of it. A month into my job, I got told off for not having a method to keep track of emails when I was unable to find some information I had been previously sent. 

In addition, one of my first jobs was to create a data visulisation using a technical programming language. I was not given any formal training or guidance. Instead I was told to google online information or use free apps to teach myself. I distinctly remember feeling confused. I had assumed the organisation would be super professional and give me a full on induction into everything.

At university, we had a worksheet or tutorial for everything we were expected to do. There was never a situation where you were told to use a new programme without a session to learn how to do it. Uni did not prepare me for this sort of learning!

It took me a while after graduating to get used to a world where the information you need is not provided straight away. I wish I had spent time at university learning new skills outside my degree in order to get more used to this.  

5. Career Management

For a lot of people, life up to the point of graduating university is a bit like a conveyor belt. You just keep following the next step without having to make any big decisions. After school you go on to college. After college you go on to university.

But then university ends and you discover that there is no longer a set path to follow. You suddenly have to start making your own decisions and plans for what you want your life to be like. Uni did not prepare me for navigating my career!

I am the sort of person who doesn’t really like thinking about the future. I prefer to live in the now and just see where life takes me. This means I never gave career planning much thought at all. I just assumed new opportunities would arise and I’d find myself where I need to be.

While this is true to an extent, at some point it is helpful to start actively planning what you want to do. For example, recently I’ve been thinking about when I might want to move companies, when I want to get a promotion and when I might like to take a career break.

Career planning is something I am still in the process of learning. But I’ve realised, if I don’t start planning my future, I will risk just staying in the same place because it is easy and familiar. 

*

Some of these skills are things you naturally learn in your 20s as you grow up and are exposed to new experiences. However I do think where there is the opportunity for university courses to add in more life skills, they definitely should as a few years down the line, these are the skills that really stick with you. 

You can read the 5 ways university did prepare me for work here!