Congratulations! You’ve finished your high school, college, grad school, or trade school experience, and you’re being rewarded for your work with a diploma, certificate, or degree. Well done! Now what are you going to do with it?
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In the workforce, just doing your job “okay” might keep you in an entry-level role, but it won’t help you advance. And when there are layoffs or plant closures, the employees who were just “okay” might be the first to go, and they’ll have the toughest time finding new jobs in a tough economy.
Since your first job won’t fund the lifestyle you want, you need to strive for excellence, so that you can get — and deserve — promotions throughout your career.
So let’s get some of the basics out of the way, and then address the issues that most people haven’t told you until now.
First, the job hunt probably doesn’t work the way you expect. Apply for a hundred jobs or more, with a completely honest, carefully written and proofread résumé using lots of buzzwords. This is serious: In most cases, human eyes don’t see a résumé until it’s already been selected, and computers are programmed to look for certain words to prove qualification for a role. For example, I spent my career in transportation, which some people call logistics, some call shipping, and some call traffic. Which of these synonyms would the hiring manager have programmed into his system as a requirement for consideration? If I guessed wrong, no human being even saw my résumé, so I made sure they were all in there. The same goes for every talent, every specialty, every qualification.
Next, once you get your first job, start saving for retirement. Don’t think you can put it off until you’re making more money. If you learned nothing else from math class, learn this: The magic of compounding interest is most effective if it starts early. Start your retirement savings as soon as you start your first job. Always save at least as much in your employer’s 401(k) plan as your company will match, and then save more, separately, in your own external investment account. A lot more. The more you save, the earlier you start, the earlier you can retire with comfort, and the better you’ll be able to provide for your children and grandchildren.
And yes, as soon as you’re a responsible adult — which hopefully is today — start looking for Mister or Miss Right. Marrying young, and raising children young, is good for you and good for them. I know it’s tempting to think you’ll be better spouses and better parents when you’re older, after those promotions and raises start coming along. But there’s an odd thing about that: Whether they admit it or not, companies usually see singles as less responsible, and they see married couples as more responsible. So marriage often helps you get those promotions or employment changes. A wedding ring shows that you’re willing to make a commitment and accept responsibility, two of the fundamental requirements for moving up the ladder.
Now for the hard news, the truths from which you may have been sheltered in college.
America was an amazing, rapidly growing economic engine for a century, but for the past fifty years, that engine has been sputtering. We are now back on the right track, but some states are still resisting economic growth through high-tax, high-crime, and high-regulation policies. As a result, it may be time for you to consider moving. There are states currently welcoming business growth, creating opportunity for energetic young workers, and there are other states happy in their stagnancy. It might be time to move. You have the happiness and prosperity of your future family to consider. Choose carefully.
Depending on your school, your major, and your peer group, much of what you’ve been told the past few years has been completely wrong. For example, you’ve been told that marijuana is harmless, that billionaires are the enemy, that labor should be outsourced to the Third World to make more profit for pot-smoking millionaires-in-the-making here at home. It’s all hogwash. Pot does do physical and mental damage (particularly in diminishing ambition and drive), and billionaires are the ones who create jobs for the rest of us, and when you outsource jobs to the Third World, you are eliminating needed jobs here at home. If you want to be a well paid employee someday, you need a well paid employer to hire you.
Many of you — the chemists, engineers, and biomolecular researchers — have been told to become an expert at your job, and you’ll do great. But that’s not actually enough. In the real world, it’s not enough to be an expert at your job; you need to learn as much as you can about your colleagues’ jobs, too, and about all the other departments in your organization.
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No, I’m not talking about trying to take their jobs away from them. It’s just that, for a modern company to succeed, it can’t be made up of a bunch of silos that never interact. A company needs people who think and work cross-functionally.
No matter your role, you need to understand enough about production, and marketing, and regulatory, and purchasing, and quality, and finance, to be able to anticipate their needs so that your own deliverable is also everyone else’s deliverable.
So pay attention to your colleagues, and pay attention to your company’s problems. When you’re the one who makes your company succeed, then you will succeed as well.
The old paradigm is being rewritten. A.I. means we don’t need to outsource documentation to India anymore. Robotics means we don’t need the cheap labor of China anymore. Tariffs mean foreign goods aren’t as cheap as they used to be. This all means that America can be competitive again, and American manufacturing is responding.
Whether your teachers and professors have noticed it or not, the focus of today’s American company is on re-shoring, and even on-shoring — bringing back the supply chain from third-world vendors to convenient vendors here at home. To some extent, that will be your job: helping evaluate bids, updating blueprints, handling the PPAP approvals, writing new ISO procedures — supporting the change in vendors from distant foreign suppliers to both established U.S. vendors and brand new U.S. startups, suppliers your employer couldn’t afford before but that are now, finally, competitive again.
For many of you, hopefully for most of you, this will be a wonderful opportunity: starting out in the business world during America’s Semiquincentennial, and being a part of America’s manufacturing renaissance.
For a very long time, America’s schools and businesses accepted the idea that America’s days as the engine of the world were behind us. Whether they like it or not, the nation is finally recognizing the danger in such a belief.
America is back, and the young employees of today, the future managers of tomorrow, can be a part of straightening out the mess you’ve inherited.
So it’s your job to bring America back from the brink. Finally, it’s considered okay again to make decisions based on what’s truly best for your company, your family, your neighbors, your community.
By rebuilding the American business community, you’ll be rebuilding America.
Get to it, folks! God bless!
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade compliance trainer, public speaker, and consultant at The Trade Compliance Coach. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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