The 10 questions of graduates who wish to leave their 1st position and blossom in the 2nd.

In a professional career, the first job is often the one in which you get to know yourself and in which you learn your first operational skills. Still novices on the job market, it is not uncommon for these young graduates not to know how to project themselves into the 2nd job, especially when they have experienced some disillusionment in their 1st position.Manuelle Malot and Silvia Marichalar answer the questions that graduates ask themselves in order to reflect on their early career and help them access a second job aligned with their priorities and values. Manuelle Malot and Silvia Marichalar (from the Career Centre for Life) answer the questions that graduates ask themselves in order to reflect on their early career in order to help them access a second position in line with their priorities and values.

1. What are the signs that it’s time to start thinking about leaving my first job?

Alarm bells should start ringing when you’re not learning anything new in your job. If, from one year to the next, you can’t add anything new to your CV in the description of your missions and responsibilities, that tells you that you’ve arrived at a plateau in terms of skills acquisition and that your progress is slowing down. Try to imagine a log curve: when you reach its peak, it’s time to think about moving on, changing jobs either internally or externally. That’s why it’s important to update your CV every year, because when you don’t add or modify anything (new skill, number of people managed, budgetary responsibility, new mission, etc.), you have to start asking questions.

2. How do I find a second job while still in employment?

The first piece of advice is to network internally and externally and be proactive. You often hear that you should have 2 of your 5 weekly lunches with people in-house and 2 with people from the outside. The 5^th one is up to you!

It’s very important to maintain your network so as to facilitate the emergence of opportunities internally and externally. It’s also essential to actively keep an eye open, regularly update your CV and work on your LinkedIn profile. It’s important to listen, apply for jobs that interest you and learn how to approach your network to identify those who might be able to help you gain access to a sector, position, company or specific individual.

When you’re still in employment, you polish your weapons and get ready!

The public health crisis has accelerated the development of tools and platforms that allow interviews to be conducted remotely. These new practices are probably here to stay. They’re more flexible, and it’s much easier to free up an hour for a remote interview on Zoom, Teams etc. while in a job.

3. How do I explain to a recruiter that I want to leave my job? What should be my narrative?

You need to explain that you have really enjoyed your job, that you’ve learned a lot, but it’s no longer allowing you to develop as much, either professionally or personally. If you wish to explore a path in-house, you can add that you would like to put all that you have learnt to the benefit of another department, branch or subsidiary, while emphasising your motivation to serve the company.

4. Do I need to stay in my first job for a certain amount of time before I can flag it as valuable experience?

People used to say you should stay 3 years, but that figure has been steadily going down in recent years. Generation X stayed in their first job for 37 months on average, whereas the oldest members of generation Y (born between the early 80s and the mid-90s) stayed for 27 months, and now the average duration for millennials is 22 months.

Nowadays you can start looking around after 18 months without it being frowned upon by recruiters, whether in-house or externally.

Ultimately, it’s about saying “I’m not developing anymore even though I’m in a position in which I should be constantly learning new things.”

Some professions structure the progress of one’s early career, like auditing and consultancy (junior 1, junior 2, senior 1, manager, etc.), and it’s not always easy to speed up that progress. But external recruiters always look quite favourably on applications from young candidates with 2 to 3 years’ experience, because they tend not to be too demanding yet in terms of salary, and they’re mobile, operational and competent!

5. How can I emphasise the value of my first job?

It’s never too early to do a skills assessment, a useful process when it comes to highlighting the value of your first job experience. The Career Centre for Life has created a self-assessment model with simple tools that will allow you to identify the skills involved in 3 to 5 missions. This gives you a precise and exhaustive overview of your experience and is a way to reassure yourself with regard to the skills you can sell to your future employer.

Once you’ve highlighted your skills, start looking for the sectors to which they are transferable, or which company might be interested in them. It is essential to take this time out for analysis to expand the scope of your opportunities and prepare your applications. That way, you can more easily imagine switching from one activity to another (marketing towards data, sales towards marketing, etc.) without hesitancy or preconceptions. It’s simply about highlighting the coherence of transferring the skills acquired.

6. Is it still important to emphasise my curriculum and academic knowledge after my first job?

In France, yes! For recruiters, it’s a gauge of your academic ability and foundational skills that will allow you to progress.

Your first job is often specialized, it provides a guarantee that you will have developed cutting-edge, up-to-date and specialist skills. That will ensure your immediate employability. But what guarantees progress in the long term is the candidate’s potential, and one key component of that is their diploma.

7. Should I adopt a different approach to my second job? How should I position myself?

The approach is different because your initial experience gave you operational skills and expertise, albeit over a short period, in a particular sector or position.

Candidates applying for their second job must therefore position themselves as able professionals who, thanks to their directly operational skills, can resolve problems and tackle the mission entrusted to them.

Changing jobs is also often an opportunity to negotiate your salary.

If you stay in the same company but the scale of your position changes, you can expect an increase of 6–10%, and a little more if you change companies, around 12–20%. But these figures vary depending on the sector and position in question. For example, if you leave the world of financing or consultancy, where young recruits earn quite high salaries, and join a smaller structure, the increase will be lower.

8. Is it easier to move from a big firm to an SME or vice versa?

There was a time when career paths were sketched out in advance, and recruitment and recruiters in France were highly standardised. The model was copy-and-clone. Now you can create a company, make mistakes, bounce back and take up a position in consultancy or in a big firm, something that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago. Nowadays you can more easily highlight the value of what you’ve learned from your experience, even if it was challenging.

However, there is a certain logic that you need to keep in mind. In a big firm, your position will be much more specialised and so it’s easier to follow a path from specialisation to a more general position than the reverse. If you’re in a small company with quite a general role and you’d like to take up a specialised position, you might be told you lack some small cutting-edge skills needed for the job.

Let’s take an example: in the marketing department of a big firm, there are people who specialise in packaging, pricing, data, CRM, digital technology, etc., whereas in a smaller structure a marketing manager will have an overview of all these areas, and so returning to a hyper-specialised job in a big firm will be more difficult.

9. Is it during their second job that people really achieve fulfilment?

It is true that in their first job people sometimes experience disappointment. This can happen more or less quickly, depending on the person, position or sector. It is actually more a question of nostalgia for leaving behind the student life than disappointment with one’s working life. This syndrome arises when young graduates think to themselves, “all that for this? Cramming for exams, university, internships, etc. just so I could get a job in which I struggle to measure my impact or utility?”

This is a perfectly normal mindset. The reality of circumstances catch up on you. When it comes to your second job, you have been forewarned and are ready. You know from your first job what really counts, what interests you and what you like.

You’re able to find the words and feelings that relate to what is or is not important to you. That allows you to structure your priorities so you can better choose your second job based on your professional and personal life goals. So yes, your second job will allow you to more easily find fulfilment because you will know yourself better.

This is also the reason why people always say not to impose barriers on yourself, not to tie yourself down when you’re looking for a second job. The coherence in the transition from your first to your second job is determined in hindsight and not beforehand. You will be able to explain all your choices after the event; a coherent narrative can always be written later.

10. What are the main obstacles for graduates looking for their second job?

Graduates usually don’t know how to highlight the value of their skills and experience in a world outside the one they know.

The challenge is being able to project oneself and understand that skills can always be extrapolated and applied to many different environments.

Others may not have enjoyed their first job and are afraid of finding themselves tied to a particular sector or position that ultimately they don’t like. They are afraid of having to start again from scratch.

To orient and support them, the Career Centre for Life looks at the basics as part of a highly pragmatic approach:

• Target: this is about the job market: knowing the market means knowing who is recruiting, visualising all the different opportunities so you can identify a target
• Service rendered: this is about the candidate: who they are, what they know, what they like doing and the reasons why the market should agree to pay them to do it.

This analysis allows graduates to understand what makes sense and to confront the reality of the job market. Once it has been completed, the Career Centre for Life offers methodological help with your job-hunting strategy: adapting the tools you use (CV, social media profile, application, etc.) and preparing for recruitment procedures (tests, interview simulations, negotiating your position, etc.).