6 Benefits Of Working For a Big Company At The Start Of Your Career
After graduating from a university we are thrown into the adult world full of potential, energy, and motivation slightly overwhelmed with the abundance of opportunities out there. When it comes to choosing the career path, it is easy enough to get lost — so many job opportunities in practically every sphere you could imagine. Although it is not necessary to make your first job a life choice, the important thing is to choose a workplace that will help you grow your core competencies and essential skills so that chasing your further career aspirations would be much smoother.
Should it be a world-renowned corporation or a developing startup with a compelling idea? The answer is “there is no right answer” because we all have different values, priorities, and a very specific set of skills. However, in this article, I advocate for the benefits of working at a big company because that’s exactly where my career started when I was 19 and where it escalated two years after.
1. You learn to understand processes on a large scale
In an enterprise, all departments are interconnected, and you might soon find out that almost every action you take, the task you perform, or the decision you make will affect other divisions, one way or another. What you learn here is, first of all, that making mistakes is fine, and most of the time you can resolve any problem by simply talking to your colleagues and finding a common solution. Two other things are responsibility and realization of how business processes work — thinking ahead should become one of your greatest assets.
2. You have experienced mentors
It’s no secret that the application process to big corporations is highly competitive and may involve up to 5 stages, from hard skills tests to video- and personal interviews. This is how they ensure that only the best talents fulfill the positions — these talents are skilled and ambitious professionals, eager to learn and develop, and ready to pass on their knowledge. The latter is exactly what you need — a strong network of mentors who would teach you new skills, knowledge, behavior, and attitude.
3. You learn soft and hard skills fast
Whether it’s a new software that you discover you’ll be using for the next several months or a seemingly unapproachable colleague you have to work with every day — the thing is, you’ve got to adapt fast. Big companies extremely value your flexibility and readiness to learn something new. Spoiler: sometimes they even hire you not because of the numerous skills you have, but because you are determined, passionate, and eager to challenge yourself. If that’s the case, you have to be prepared to prove your determination later by showing actual results and connecting with as many fellow workers as you can, because, well — communication is key.
4. You learn to push yourself and become more demanding
Apart from having professionals work with you side by side and being softly pushed to acquire new skills and knowledge, working at an enterprise teaches you to constantly push yourself and not wait for others to tell you to be proactive and more ambitious. With every little achievement and small mistake, you learn to aim higher and rigorously approach your tasks. Being an average employee who blindly obeys his manager is no longer enough: instead, you start asking more of yourself. Not to prove to the higher management that you earned your place but because you start to feel the compelling need to become a true expert at what you do.
5. You learn to critically assess your performance
Many big companies employ a performance assessment scheme which is brought by to you via specialized assessment check-lists, weekly or monthly talks with your manager, discussions of how well you achieved your KPIs — the type of the scheme varies depending on the approach your HR manager chose. The idea of those assessments is not only to see whether you have or have not achieved your goals but, more importantly, to develop your ability to critically assess your performance.
By “critically” I mean evaluating your work, attitude, development of soft skills, and goals achievement realistically. It is easy enough to check all the boxes on an assessment list and say “hey, I did great”, but it’s a great deal more difficult to see the real picture and ask yourself: did I do good, or could I have done better? What are the areas that might need closer attention? If you didn’t manage to reach some of your aims, what has gone wrong and what can I do to avoid mistakes next time?
6. You learn to make better decisions on your own
I have worked for two FMCG corporations, and despite the different products they offered to the market, one of the things that I learned was macro-management. Unlike micro-management, where you experience almost a step-by-step control over your daily tasks at work, macro-management leaves enough freedom to operate autonomously and make small-scale decisions by yourself. This approach makes you work on your independence and helps develop a crucial skill of identifying, weighing, and choosing between the alternatives. There is nothing wrong with being an implementer and doing exactly what you’ve been told — yet implementers rarely become true leaders or fulfill top positions. If you want to build your career the right way, then decision-making is one of the skills you’ll need to acquire.
