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Getting that first job

What will you do for your career?

written by Michael Schmitz

Upon my graduation, I had to make a life-changing decision: Do I want to work in Germany, close to my family, or move abroad to Norway, the UK or even Australia, possibly damaging my relationships at home forever?

Which countries are close enough to qualify as home, how much travel is too much?

Not an easy choice to make when you are focused on both enjoying life and building your career - with the economic necessity nowadays, a choice that many are facing.

If you are about to select your first job, you might want to think about the things that constrain and anchor you.

I knew that being abroad for a few weeks might be fine, but moving completely to the other side of the planet was too much for me – at least at that point in time. So I made my decision.

This allowed me to greatly limit the search space for my career (Australia was right out, even though mining jobs are offering crazy salaries and benefits) and I looked at everything that was within a few hundred kilometers of my hometown, checking travel times, career opportunities and salaries and taxes and benefits for dozens of industries and offers.

However, it is important to first widen your search space as much as possible, before you start introducing your constraints – in the last article, we spoke about the data gathering phase, and unless you know what kind of opportunities await a bit further ahead, it might be premature to close doors.

But now that you know about the status of industries and roles globally, you can start filtering.

What are you willing to do?

Where are you willing to go, what kind of job are you willing to do?

Do you want to party or be home early every day?

Or can you go all-in, drop yourself into a 60 hour a week burn-out type of position (not necessary to burn out, but we talk about that later).

Are you willing to travel daily, weekly or every few months?

Do you think that your language skills might make you more valuable in other countries?

If yes, which countries interest you, and in which countries are you willing to move?

Especially as an EU citizen, moving abroad is fairly easy, but you might need to learn a new language and leave family and friends behind. Are you willing to do so?

This is not something you can do quickly and without discussions.

Especially if you already have a family or want to move together with your partner, you might need to dedicate some time to this discussion.

The biggest risk when moving abroad as a couple is not related to your own feelings.

Instead, it’s the happiness of your partner that often suffers if the partner doesn’t have career options or a good social network.

You might also want to discuss various timelines and think about your moves as an experiment.

Just try it for a year and keep your options open.

When you think about your constraints, you might also want to think about risks.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Are you afraid of losing your position in the local soccer team (This is a common concern for many students I have met)?

Are you afraid of disappointing people that have come to rely on you to structure their day or that need your help with some tasks?

Could you end up stranded, lost and confused and with nobody to go to when you move to New York?

Certainly, there are risks, but not all of them have to be constraints.

The correct way to handle risks is to analyze them: Find out whether their occurrence is likely (low, medium, high) and what kind of damage they would cause (low, medium, high, fatal).

What will you do to mitigate the damage if that risk becomes reality?

How can you minimize the chance of it becoming real?

In my job search, I spent a good deal of time thinking about what would happen if I didn’t like the town I moved too.

I want to bring my family?

If they changed jobs to follow me, would they be able to go back?

Analyzing this problem on the two levels mentioned above (minimize/mitigate) will help you in finding a good balance between constraint and opportunity.

It would be sad to close the door to a great chance because you overestimated a risk – or because you didn’t invest a bit of time in finding a workaround.

As with many things, a professional approach will help you out here (hey, you are ready to become a professional, so start early!), so take your time in drawing a risk table for the various options and review it with friends and family.

You will be surprised how many solutions you find – and be much more motivated to actually pursue the opportunities you really want.

This review will leave you with a greatly limited list of opportunities, but most of these should be highly interesting.

How do you now identify your priority in preparing yourself for these roles? Our next article helps you find the best opportunity - quickly.