by Josephine Daly Tempelaar
Today is my 22nd birthday and as I woke up to face the reality of getting one year older, a wave of anxiety washed over me. What am I supposed to do with my life? Like many of my contemporaries, I constantly ask myself what I want to do with my career. Therefore, I decided to reflect on where I am today and jotted down 22 things that I have learned so far. I admit I am far from being an expert. However, I am a second-year Communication Science bachelor student with over seven years of working experience, as well as the co-founder of a business I started back in 2019. This has provided me with both interesting and surprising insights into what it means to be a young professional today.
- Never let application requirements stop you from applying for a certain position. When I applied for my first internship, the company had highlighted right on the top of the application that they were only looking for people who had completed their Master’s degree in a relevant field. Having only started my Bachelor’s a couple of months ago, I did not let that fact stop me from applying as I knew that I would be perfect for the role. Two weeks later I was hired.
- Every work experience has taken me one step closer to where I want to be. Be it voluntary work, internships, school council activities, or running my own business. Each experience has helped me either rule out what I definitely do not want to be doing in the future, or helped spark an interest that I want to explore further in my career.
- Do not take shit from bad bosses. During my short but rich work life, from having started my work experience at a strawberry stand outside of our local grocery store at the age of fifteen, I have unfortunately had quite a few encounters with bad bosses. These are not unique to me as I, more often than not, also hear about poor working conditions and unacceptable treatment from my fellow peers and friends. Some of the experiences that we share are that we do not get paid nearly enough or on time. We are refused sick leave or days off, even though we have worked way over our contracted hours. Most commonly, we are approached and addressed in a rude manner by our own boss. I mean, after having worked at my previous job for more than two years, my superior kept on calling me Matilda (which is not my name- and yes, I did inform him multiple times). Experiences like these are unacceptable and it is a shame that this is how young professionals have to begin their careers. Unfortunately for us, it will take time until we can overtake these roles and make improvements to the established hierarchy. Until then, we need to stand our ground and know our rights before heading into a new workplace. If reporting poor treatment feels futile, it is best to simply quit. There will always be thousands of other job opportunities out there run by better bosses.
- Do not be afraid to speak up when something is wrong! It is important from an early age to stand up for what is right and wrong, especially seeing that it is so common that young professionals get mistreated in their workplaces. Dare to speak up, start a discussion or question that statement. And if you feel like you are not in the safe position to do this, ask for help from a colleague, friend or HR.
- People are surprisingly unprofessional. I often find myself to be the youngest professional in the room and by far the most professional one too. It has surprised me how often mature “professionals” in their daily workplace are unorganized, unreliable, and quite blatantly unqualified. If a bunch of twenty-year-olds are capable of organizing events for over hundreds of people, sticking to a tight schedule and checking for typos in a PowerPoint, so should the senior managers of some of the most notable companies in the world be too.
- Fake it until you make it. It works!
- In a room filled with men, be proud to be the first woman. Not only do I find myself to be the youngest professional in the room, I often find myself to be the only female professional. This saddens me over and over again that we cannot accomplish basic gender equality in the standard meeting room. Nevertheless, instead of letting this drag my mood down, I try to hold my head up high and represent those women that are not there. And with my generation, I strongly look forward to seeing more and more women enter the same room.
- Starting your own company is challenging
- … but such a rich experience! Without Rawstraw, I would not have learned all the ins and outs of pursuing an idea, creating a business model, developing a new product, learning how to source rye, creating a budget, establishing a production chain, creating a marketing plan, graphic design, managing online advertising, writing grant applications, growing a company, managing stakeholders and investors, creating a pitch, participating in pitch competitions, acquiring new customers, managing finances, all whilst loving my job.
- Do more volunteer work. Since high school, I have tried to stay engaged with local NGOs whose work align with what I think is most important in society and in life. Along with the valuable work experience and new contact network, voluntary work has provided me with a deeper understanding of the issues we face today while helping me grow on both a personal and professional level.
- Act on your ideas. For those that know me, this is something that I never stop nagging about. Whenever my friends and peers present an idea of theirs that they have been thinking about for a while or have been wanting to pursue, I always tell them: Do it! Being young and on the starting line of our careers, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Whether it is a business idea, an Instagram page, a website concept, or simply just an unrefined idea, as long as you believe in it and you find it fulfilling, give it a go and see where it can take you.
- Being a group-member is much harder than I thought. 9 out of 10 times, I find myself in the team-lead role, without always having been assigned it. After all of the group projects I have been dealt in university, I have gained valuable insights into how faulty my team working skills can be. For example, I secretly change people’s wording in the shared team document because I regard my sentence structuring as slightly better. I have a hard time compromising, and when I finally do, I tend to sulk like a baby. I also easily get stressed when deadlines approach; subsequently, I take on other people’s work when they are not finished yet. For all the slackers out there who do this deliberately, you are welcome! Needless to say, communicating more with my team members and trusting my group partners is something I need to work on in the future.
- Stakeholder management is everything. Having run my own business for over three years now, I have learned one very important lesson which I have not been able to name until I heard the term in our Corporate Communication course here during my Bachelor’s. Stakeholder management. Caring for the people you work with or work around, and doing so sincerely, is crucial. As I mentioned above with bad bosses and treatment, this is something they were clearly lacking. I try to make this (acknowledging and showing appreciation for the people we work with) my business’s main focus.
- I refuse to work in greenwashing… I mean advertising! Name one advertising bureau that has not engaged in greenwashing, and I might change my mind. (Green washing= companies making false green claims about their products or services, while in fact not at all living up to their statements and using such green advertising for financial gain and to look good).
- The environment should be our number one priority, so choose a job that really matters. This perhaps does not apply to all of the students currently trying to make some extra income by the side of their studies by working in cafés, bars or cinemas. However, I am thinking more long-term with this one. For me personally, the environmental aspect will be one of the most important determinants when choosing the career path that I want to take. If we do not work for a better tomorrow, there is no point in working at all, since climate change and decreasing resources will deteriorate our living conditions.
- I love Amsterdam. But I do wish it did not rain as often.
- Internships pay too little for the work that is invested. Interns put in just as much work as any other employee. Pay us accordingly!
- I get bored easily doing the same task. I need a workplace with different challenges and lots of them.
- Where is the diversity in workplaces? At the University of Amsterdam, I have had the honour of meeting a diverse array of people from different countries, cultures, and upbringings, with different genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. Getting to know new people with unique backgrounds, and sharing different ideas and perspectives during our conversations have been my most cherished exchanges and experiences thus far. A concentration of such diversity has been very hard for me to find within the borders of Sweden, and it has been increasingly difficult to find in my previous workplaces, where I noticed that most of the companies I worked for looked very much like myself. White, CIS and homogenous. Exposure to a mix of ideas and inputs is essential for a business to flourish and for a work crew to be representative of its people. This is not accomplished by hiring similar-minded and similar-looking employees. When I approach my future employer, I hope that my workplace matches the diversity that Amsterdam offers.
- Older co-workers have a hard time listening to younger ideas. This became very obvious to me in my previous work roles where I tried to give fresh input and share the knowledge I had from my education, as well as the experience I had from running my own business. Unfortunately, my older coworkers and superiors either turned down my ideas or did not pay attention. Well, might I dare to say, unfortunate for them…
- Do not forget about food allergies! There are quite a few of us gluten-and milk intolerant, including people with other dietary requirements (such as vegetarian, lakto-ovo, pescatarian, vegan, yeah you name it). Yet, employers always seem to forget about us in social settings…
- I am strongly looking forward to being a force of change in the future work landscape. After 22 years on this earth, I decided to celebrate my birthday by reflecting on what I learned. Some of these learnings made it into this list. I share most of these reflections and experiences with the people around me, and these are important to highlight as young professionals embark on a new journey toward building their careers. Perhaps these insights can help inspire, inform and above all, encourage people to be the change that they want to see in the workplace. As for me, I have only just started, and I look forward to seeing what the future has in store.