Simon's job log: 1

The difference between university and business

Working for an SME, with only eight employees, introduces a number of quirks and unique situations which I don’t think would occur in a larger organisation. Everybody knows each other by their first name and peoples’ personality takes on a disproportionate significance. If you can’t get on with someone in such a close-knit environment, you haven’t got many options.

I’ve been in my current role as a web developer (that means I develop interactive websites like this one) for nearly two years now (don’t remind me - I’m still trying to find out where those two years went) and I can honestly regard myself as part of the furniture. There was a time, however, when I was a fresh-faced graduate, making the leap from student to employee. As I have found out, there are quite a few things which can differ between university and the workplace. University can help you with some parts of finding a job, but there are some things you can only find out by actually working for an employer.

Dealing with customers

One of the most frustrating aspects of my job is it sometimes feels like the goalposts are always changing. At university, it was all so simple. Everything was structured, you had a timetable and as long as you followed the lectures and did the exams a degree was waiting at the end for you.

Working for a company and dealing with customers is quite different. If there is a structure to a project, it’s usually very loose and can often be circumvented, diverted or just totally abandoned in order to satisfy the customer. After all, the customer is never wrong! That doesn’t mean you can never say ‘no’ to a customer, but it does mean you have to be more diplomatic.

The pace of work

On the first day of my first graduate job, I was thrown in the deep-end. I had to sort out a bug with their CMS (Content Management System - an automated way of updating a website). I was terrified, mainly because what I was presented with was far more complex and complicated than anything I had been taught in a lecture, or come up against in my final year project. Fortunately, the fact I tend to do web development in my spare time got me out of that predicament, because it meant I had the skills to solve that problem.

What that experience demonstrated however, was just how different work can be in a business from the work expected of me at university. Compared with the workplace, some of the things I had to do at university were child’s play. When you enter a job, waving your degree around like some golden passport, you realise that employers expect a lot of you in return for that graduate salary - sometimes more than you ever learnt (or were expected to learn) at university.

This is where it helps to have a passion - or at least be interested - in your new job and what it will entail. The field of web development and the technologies involved update so quickly that the skillset I left university with has already become outdated. You have to constantly keep learning new things just to stay current with the latest trends and techniques.

That wasn’t difficult for me as I had filled in the time between graduating and getting my first graduate job by volunteering to build or maintain websites for local companies and charities.

So beware - If you graduated a while ago and have got used to the student lifestyle, you may find that when you get your first graduate job, it could be a bigger shock to the system than necessary.

• Simon is currently training for the 2008 Dublin Marathon. He has a training blog, 5,000 steps. 

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