St.Louis Business Journal
PARENTS: ORIENT YOUR KIDS TO THE REALITIES OF ENTRY LEVEL JOBS

By Anna Navarro

June 2005  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.

Many parents get a boatload of complaints about work from their young adult children. Here is a sampling of what they hear:

- "My boss doesn't listen to my ideas for better ways to do things. She just wants me to keep doing things the same old way."

- "I'm better educated and have more technical skills than my supervisor. Why should he get to boss me around?"

- "Older workers dump the assignments they don't want to do on me. It's not fair."

- "If I could get some challenging assignments from upper management, I could get really motivated. The drones I report to really turn me off."

It's a difficult place for many parents. They want their kids to be happy, and they can even understand where their kids are coming from. It might be tempting to urge them to stand up for themselves. But that would be a mistake.

Instead, I suggest parents orient their adult kids to how the workplace really operates.

Start by teaching them beginners are nearly always expected to do a disproportionate share of the drudgery. Stone-age apprentices probably hauled rock that skilled masons shaped and put into place. Today's equivalent are the young graduates of Ivy League law schools who burn the midnight oil doing boring research for partners. It's not a pleasant system if you are at the bottom, but it does have a measure of fairness to it. Few people get to the top without doing at least some drudgery. Perhaps the most unfair aspect of it is that some very bright and hardworking individuals never escape the drudgery because they lack the formal education to be promoted.

Listen to your kid's complaints but give them honest feedback about which employer expectations are reasonable and which are not. Reasonable expectations include being asked to do the most boring and repetitive jobs in the organization, and staying late or working the worst shift to get a project completed. That, of course, needs to be distinguished from abusive situations where young workers are asked to do things that are genuinely disrespectful of their humanity or injurious to their health.

Help your kids understand that, except for abusive situations, most young workers would do well to hold their complaints for several months after entering a new job. Hard as it is, keeping their mouths shut and their heads down during this early period will help them develop the credibility to be heard when they do make an appropriate complaint. Few bosses listen to those who land in a new job and start complaining immediately.

Explain to the young worker in your family that while schools and families are oriented to nurturing, workplaces are focused on providing a product or service. That means most bosses don't behave like parents and most workplaces don't operate like families or schools.

For example, tell your newly minted worker that while they may have sat around the dining room table at home as kids and argued with adults about the issues of the day, taking that behavior into the workplace and attempting to argue with their managers, will be perceived as inappropriate and will most likely detract from their career prospects.

Other lessons include helping your adult kids not to expect feedback on everything they do. In school, grades were automatic. In the workplace, busy managers barely have time for annual or biannual performance reviews, let alone for feedback on projects or completion of routine tasks.

Young adults also need to know that there is often little equality in the workplace. Bosses are entitled to say, "I am the boss. Do it my way". Entry-level workers are expected to follow orders without grousing. If they don't, it's a strike against them.

Teach your kids that savvy entry-level workers wait for the appropriate moment to suggest new ways of doing things. That moment is often after they've proven they can follow orders, or when the boss asks for their input. Pressing their ideas before then risks having them dismissed as the impractical notions of a beginner who doesn't understand what the work involves.

These are painful lessons. But it's better for young people to be prepared to deal intelligently with the realities of the workplace than to resist them. They need to know that young workers with a "can do" attitude who willingly take on the worst jobs without complaining are the most likely to be noticed and promoted quickly.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.