YOU DID IT! You have graduated and gotten your degree. Now you wonder, what’s next. I was just like that when I reached the final semester. I was lost and unsure on how to navigate the career landscape. Many of us graduate with general degrees that grants us access to jobs in varying fields. We are even given opportunities to take on jobs that are not part of the field we studied such as the booming IT sector through traineeships or boot camps. With this myriad of opportunities, we can get paralysed. We need to weigh in multiple factors such as salary, culture and career growth. Choosing your first job can be daunting.
In this guide, I hope to outline my own journey and the factors I considered during job hunting. They are namely personal interest, compensation, culture, career growth & opportunities and work life balance. I hope this will give you insights into your own journey so that you are able to make a more informed decision. This is a 2-part article with the first part about identifying an industry or job that matches your wants, and the second part is about matching these wants with what is available and managing multiple offers.
Before you read, I want to make a point about context. Advice taken must be seen with context. If not, they can be applied wrongly and do more harm than good. Everything that I did must be understood with the context that I was in. Hence, I will share details of my own educational journey.
I graduated from NUS with a degree in Real Estate and a second major in social work. The academic honours achieved was highest distinction and I took 4.5 years.
I want to also declare that my achievements are not just a product of my own hard work, but also the opportunities given to me by those who journeyed with me such as my parents, teachers and friends. I would also like to attribute what I achieve to God. He is the one who has blessed me with these talents and opportunities. I would not be where I am today if not for His blessings.
Alright, now that’s out of the way, lets dive in.
Job Landscape
The first thing you need to think about when choosing a career is understanding the job landscape. Most people dream of a job based on their interest and then looking at the landscape to see if there is such a job. I however think a better way is looking at the landscape first, and then picking a job that matches our interest best from the landscape. This is because:
- We are limited by the job landscape. We live in a real world that has real world constraints. There is no use thinking about a job that you have no access even if you have strong interest in it. For example, I want to be an EPL soccer player, but have dismissed the thought rather quickly after a grasp of my own soccer talents and the SG soccer landscape.
- We usually choose jobs not based on what we want but what is closest to what we like. The ongoing narrative is to find your ‘passion’ so that when you ‘do what you love, you never have to work a single day in your life’. I do not believe in that because (1) most of us do not have ‘passion’ for that one job and a career is mostly picking something that you are most interested in or you hate the least or, (2) even if you find a role you enjoy, there will always be things about the job that you dislike. You will never 100% love your job. While this sounds grim, I do want to be upfront about the realities of the working world. This would also help you to better manage your expectations. Hence it is far easier to find out what is out there, and then from there, pick something that is closest to what you are interested in or the most tolerable to you. I also want to highlight that it is perfectly ok to not love your job, many of us don’t, so do not be pressured into finding that ‘perfect’ job.
When we see things in this context, it makes more sense to choose a job based on what is available than dreaming of an perfect job and then finding out that it does not exist.
Your next question would be how to find out the job landscape. This is where networking plays a very important role. Knowledge of my job landscape (real estate sector) mainly came from asking seniors about the jobs they landed and where their batch-mates work at.
You can leverage on technology as well such as LinkedIn. LinkedIn has this amazing tool that allows you to search for people based on their educational background. Use that tool to find out where seniors from your course ended up at. Look at their first job and the jobs they landed up after that. This gives a brief idea on the career progression and opportunities available. For the job landscape of real estate, there are three very board scope of work I could go into. They are (1) finance , (2) development , (3) planning/policy work.
Interest
After finding out what is available, I went to identify my interest. I was clear from the get-go that I was not doing finance because I cannot imagine myself looking at numbers day in and day out for the rest of my life. I was open to development work because I found it interesting as it utilises multiple skillsets such as valuation, marketing and leasing. I was also open to planning/policy work as I found it meaningful.
You can identify your interest from internships and academic modules. When I was searching for internships, I intentionally choose internships that varied differently. This helped me to find out the roles I enjoyed or disliked. Finding out your interest can be quite difficult because there are cognitive biases and cultural influences (for eg how do you really know you want to do finance. Maybe you are just choosing it because your parents/society has always told you it was a ‘good’ job. I’m guilty of that!!).
A good article that helped me find out what I was really interested in can be found here. Annnd if after all that you still cannot find your interest, you can consider an elimination strategy. Eliminate jobs that you do not like from the landscape, and choose instead from the jobs left on that list.
Compensation
The next thing I considered was compensation. Most of us work for money after all. There is nothing wrong with that, and while it is not everything it is still an important factor. Between development and policy work, policy work pays better in the real estate sector.
Compensation can be found out from seniors. It may feel unnatural to ask for your senior’s salary, but if you explain the rationale of trying to decide the best career choice, and promise to keep it confidential, they are usually ok to share. If you still feel awkward, you can also ask for a salary range instead. Compensation can also be identified from online websites such as Glassdoor.
Culture
I also considered culture. Before I elaborate, I am going to define what is culture. Culture is not what HR tells you when you go for career fairs. HR will usually tell you that they have a ‘family’ culture. I believe a more accurate way to discern culture is when you talk to non-HR employees. This can include people they send to career fairs (but do note that they maybe bias as they could be pressured to present the company positively) or seniors who are working in those companies. Culture can also be identified through Glassdoor reviews, connecting with current employees in LinkedIn, and internship experiences.
When you ask about culture, ask specific, in depth and detailed questions. The word ‘culture’ is a giant black box, so define in your own terms what culture means to you and ask those questions. For example, good culture to some may mean teammates that are willing to help you when have questions, bosses that celebrate your successes and mourn your failures together or bosses that respond with empathy and wisdom when you fail. That was how I defined culture, hence I asked questions like ‘How did the team react when you needed help?’ and ‘When you made a mistake, how did your boss react?’. This gave me answers to my specific definition of culture and a better understanding of the company. This is a good post from woke salaryman on work culture.
For my industry, between policy work and development work, culture ranges and depends on organisations instead of the type of work.
Career Growth and Opportunities
I also considered the career growth and opportunities given in the job. This two factors will help build a career moat that will provide me with the skills and knowledge that allow me to work in good jobs both now and in the future. Career moat is probably a foreign concept to most of us. It essentially means developing important and unique skills so that you are not easily replaceable in the workforce. A good article that talks about the concept is over here. The career growth and opportunities provided in the job can be seen from where fresh graduates progressed after working a few years in the job or talking to the HR.
For myself, between public and private sector, I felt that I stood a better chance at career progression in the private sector as they have several established graduate development programs. Furthermore, I was not a government scholar and may be less prioritised in terms of work opportunities to shine.
However, I have to add that in my own personal experience, the general consensus from public officers are that people are promoted not based on educational achievements, but by their talents and hard work. This includes PSC scholars, who even though they are rotated and promoted at a faster pace, it usually comes with a lot more work. The accelerated promotion pace is not virtue of them being a scholar but because they are growing at a quicker pace. If you are a non-scholar interested in entering the government fast track (aka PSC track), you can do that by applying for the Public Service Leadership Program.
Work Life Balance
Finally, work life balance. I have priorities outside of work and hence it was important for me to have some time for myself after work. Furthermore, a career is a marathon and not a sprint, and I wanted to make sure I do not burn myself out. Hence, I decided that work life balance was important to me, and made it one of my factors when evaluating a job.
My Decision
A visual summary of the criterions I just described can be seen in the table below. The table below provides a general and oversimplified overview of my personal career landscape.
As you can see from the table, just based on the number of ticks, finance was out of the picture. I was deciding between development and planning/policy work. I choose planning/policy work in the end as I found the work more aligned to my personal values. Development work would have been better for my career in the long run, but, I ultimately felt that it was not as important as my work being more aligned to my personal values.
Thus, it was from this I decided to focus my efforts on applying for jobs in the planning/policy role.
Summing up….
Weww, congratz you have reached the end of part one. To sum up, part one was about finding out what you want in a career. In the next article I will talk about matching these wants with reality and what to do when you have multiple job offers.
If you found this useful, I do appreciate if you give it a clap. Do feel free to share what you resonated with in the comments below as well. Stay tuned for part 2!
