Life in a corporate can be challenging, especially when you just graduated aka a fresher. Adjusting to the tedious work, deadlines, office culture as well as your colleagues, can be daunting at first. This inside story can help prep your mind before you step into a whole new world of corporate.
Just a word of caution; sometimes your superiors won’t say what they mean or won’t mean what they say. But somewhere between what they say and what they mean, they have a whole lot of expectations from you. You see what I’m saying? No?
Here are the top 5 things that your boss will never tell you but will secretly expect from you:
1. You must have strong business communication skills:
Before you mistake business communication skills for English fluency, let me tell you that business communication is a much broader concept. Business communication refers to the art of interacting with business stakeholders, vis-à-vis, clients, customers, superiors, and colleagues. The communication must be precise, concise, have clarity of thought and of course it should be grammatically correct. To learn more about business skills and how to master them, click here.
2. Don’t know the job/skills required to deliver a task? Learn them:
“But, the question is out of syllabus!” You might have said this a countless number of times in the examination hall but you can’t say that to your superiors. If you don’t know it, learn it. Also, you can’t take a lot of time to learn the skills, because after learning them, you actually have to do the job. So learn quickly and learn smartly. For instance, it’s better to watch a tutorial video which will give you practical exposure rather than read a blog/article on the skill.
3. Not just at the gym, stretch yourself in the office too:
Stretching is inclusive of but not limited to the working hours. While they call it a 9 to 5, it generally isn’t. The 5 quickly stretches to 6 or 7 and sometimes even 11 PM. It highly depends on how critical your assigned task is and how efficiently you can get it done.
Well besides that, they would also expect you to take extra-curricular initiatives voluntarily, and seamlessly deliver them besides work, like training your team members or colleagues on the new technology you just learned.
4. Email, Message or Phone Call: What to use and when?
Well, this one is an art you must learn sooner than understanding your CTC (cost to company) structure. Well not exactly, but the sooner the better! Besides mastering the domain of business communication, you must also learn which medium of communication should be used and when.
When the matter is professional, always go with emails. However, at times, you need to communicate something informally like interacting with your colleagues. In that case, send a text message or make a phone call.
5.Whenever in doubt, always ask
This was the first thing that my manager told me when I joined his project. There will arise various situations where you will feel that the issue is too trivial to bother your superiors with and that you can manage it yourself. But if you ever feel stuck, it’s always good to get your doubts clarified and your queries answered so that you don’t make mistakes and carry out the tasks smoothly.
Well, we hope that you find the above insights helpful for your corporate life. We meant everything we said and we said everything we meant. Did you get what we meant? No? Still in doubts? You could always ask!
