Three important lessons in picking your graduate pathway

Having reached the end of my Commerce degree, I’ve realised I’m not alone in many of the difficulties I’ve been through, and through multiple tosses and turns, I have some pointers that might help you along your own search.

Even though I’m adamant about most of these points because I’ve had repeated experiences (backed up by others) that support them, I’ll try to be as objective as possible and provide both sides of the areas I’m discussing, so you have as much information to inform your decisions as possible.

You don’t have to know what you love from the get-go

These days, there’s a massive expectation that you have everything figured out by the end of your degree. All you hear from uni clubs/events, close friends/family and, of course, LinkedIn, are stories of people who seem to have found their dream role and have their life all sorted. In reality, this could not be further from the truth — it turns out that when you look below the superficial layer of most of these recent graduates, they’re almost (if not more) clueless than you are. Remember, social media such as LinkedIn only shows you what people want you to know about them, but never tells you how arbitrary the thought process was behind coming towards an important career decision.

In reality, it’s next to impossible to know exactly what you want to do in your career, provided your severe lack of experience as a student. Put it this way — do you really think there are so many students coming out of uni who want to go into such similar roles in professional services, consulting, banking and other big corporates? Here, I’ll give you two pointers for what I believe is a far more practical approach:

Maximise your exposure to new roles and opportunities in uni

You almost certainly won’t stumble upon exactly what you want to do for the rest of your life, but you’ll find out: A) things you definitely don’t like (eg. I realised quickly in high-school that I hated blood and the human anatomy, so I didn’t want to do anything in the medical field; I realised early on in uni that my initial plan to become a lawyer would soon be botched because of how much I dislike reading things I don’t really care about) and B) things you might like (eg. you might find that you like a good mix between communicating with teams/clients, and doing your own work, or you might find that you like a good mix between quantitative work like modelling and qualitative work like research and presentations). I always find it hard to ‘recommend’ what path someone should take after uni when they have barely any internship or extracurricular experience, because as you’ll read below, there’s no ‘one’ career path which suits all — it really depends on your preference.

Consider generalist roles early in your career

As you might have seen from the above, I have a strong position that there’s going to be some dissonance between what you choose as your graduate career and what you end up doing for the rest of your life — and that’s fine, because as with many other things, it’s an iterative learning process. Granted this, there are many roles which allow you to achieve this learning process to a greater extent, especially if you have less certainty around what you do and don’t like. Going into consulting as a graduate, I can speak for that fact that in a similar grad role to mine, you get exposure to multiple industries, types of projects, people, countries and working environments, all as a fresh graduate. This would, therefore, be useful for someone who is not passionate about a particular industry or line of work yet. And while I think over-mulling on things like exit opportunities as a fresh graduate is going to cause you more stress than benefit, it’s important to also consider how a graduate path with a broader focus will likely enable a broader choice of career options if/when you decide to move on.

Thinking about pay is fine, but it’s probably less important than you think

I’ll start by being the devil’s advocate. Hot take — people who claim things like ‘Why do you care so much about pay?’ or ‘Is pay the only thing you think about?’ come from an enormous place of privilege (this is coming from someone who has thought like this in the past, and have reflected on what it actually means to different people). While there are some who have the freedom to not care about their graduate compensation, it’s perfectly valid for others, based on their financial commitments to both themselves and others to only be satisfied with a certain baseline pay. For instance, one might be looking to be financially independent or reach a certain savings target.

On the flip side, it’s important to strike a balance between your need to get paid and optimising for longer term career goals, or, looking from a financial lens, your long-term earnings potential. Some graduate salaries are hard to resist — and top firms will design them that way, so they can score the ultimate prize: you! But I think far too often, fresh graduates overweight the importance of graduate pay over their longer term career interests. Some things to consider might be:

• How much your graduate pay increases over time in the role (eg. some roles will offer high graduate salaries, but very low growth in salary, even with promotions)
• How long you think you’re going to want to / be able to stay in the role (eg. if you get burnt out after 1–2 years and have to take a job with lower pay, was that worth it?)
• Where can you move onto after the role (eg. there are plenty of roles which have very average graduate pay, but you’ll learn enough that firms will pay you 1.5–2x your current pay to move to them)

A simple litmus test I would suggest is: How much is earning an extra $30–50k for a couple of years going to impact me when I’m 30? The answer is likely, not too significantly. But a role where you’re confident you like some of the work, like the people and believe will teach you plenty, will serve as a strong bedrock for a lasting career, where your earnings will grow alongside your skillset.

Looking at what others have done is helpful, but often misguiding

I have a quick story to tell for this — last year, The University of Melbourne invited James Gorman AO (the current CEO of Morgan Stanley, who went as a graduate into McKinsey, a management consulting firm, after he graduated from Columbia Law School), to speak to some of the cohort. Having been in a couple of the hottest fields for university graduates, I asked him — “Do you still think management consulting and investment banking are valuable careers to enter into, even with companies like tech firms and startups paying more, making graduates work less and even providing better work?” (a rogue question, some would say). His answer was simple and remained in my mind:

Just because something has worked for others, doesn’t mean it will for you.

We have such a tendency to look at the paths of those before us to try to imitate their success. While your intentions are fine (as I will mention below), you’ll quickly realise that having a set ‘plan’ for every single role you want to enter in the next 10–20 years is simply unrealistic. The amount of arbitrary factors which feed into your career decisions make micro-planning (eg. based on specific graduate paths, exact internships) next to pointless.

For instance, if you see an ex-MBB as a founder of Australia’s next big tech unicorn — you’ll immediately think, maybe I should go down the same graduate path! Their experiences in consulting must have taught them so much about their industry and how to operate a profitable business, right? Not necessarily wrong, but for every founder who comes from a consulting background, you have another (if not more) from a plethora of other fields, be it finance, larger corporates, another startup, tech, quant, academia or the like.

This brings us back to James’ piece of advice — yes, a path might have worked for someone else, but this doesn’t mean imitating it guarantees you any shot at being on the same path as them. Viewing your career in a more holistic sense, and finding more about what you want out of it, what you want to do for the world and who you want to do it with will provide you the most long term value — because for 99% of us, we are simply not able to imitate the path of another. It’s stunning how much those entering the workforce underestimate the role of randomness and coincidence in determining their career trajectory.

I’ll finish on a contrasting note — which is that when you do have a few careers that you actually are interested in, you can use platforms like LinkedIn to your advantage. Here, my advice is — if you want to know if a career is likely going to be a good fit for you, look at the people who have taken the same path that you want to and have moved on, and see where they have moved on to. Learn more about their journey, talk to them and imagine yourself in their shoes at 30, 40 and further into the future. Is it something that you’re comfortable with and excited about?

I told myself I’d keep this to three points, but I would like to sneak in one final piece of advice, that perhaps I’ll expand upon in another piece if some of you are interested.

You’re not going to get anywhere if you’re not attractive to employers.

There’s a simple analogy that might help here — when Jordan B. Peterson is asked — “How do you find the love of your life”, his answer was simply:

It’s putting the cart before the horse. The right question is — How do I make myself into the perfect date?

I’ll preface this with one of my most important pieces of encouragement to any person looking for a graduate job. Remember, you’re the prize — it’s not you begging someone to give you a job, it’s you taking your pick of what career you think is the best fit for you. This applies to everyone. From the moment you think otherwise, it’s a lost battle, and you’re setting yourself up for a career that starts with dissatisfaction (a harsh but unfortunate reality). But to be able to think like this, you need to set yourself up to be employable.

I consider there to be two necessities in a candidate when they’re being considered for a position:

1. Can they do the job? That is, do they have the prerequisite skillset, and the inherent drive (hard to define) to build upon it on the job, so that they can do what is expected of them (or beyond) consistently?
2. Are they willing to do the job? That is, do they have the attitude, mindset and work ethic to apply themselves fully in the workplace, and do so for a long enough period of time (ie. not leave the job after a couple of months)

So many people talk about student clubs, their events, careers fairs, personal projects, case competitions and side hustles during university as being helpful for ‘building your resume’ — but why do employers want to see this? After all, if they’re going to teach you what you need to know on the job, why do they want you to learn so much during uni anyways?

It’s not only because they want vetting that will indicate if you can perform on the job (1), but I prefer to look at it as — How will an investment management company know you are actually interested in investment management if you’re not majoring in finance, haven’t invested a dollar in your life and have no finance-related work experience? Even if you do get interviewed, you’ll have to impress so much in the knowledge department (1) to make up for your lack of interest before the interview (2).

And that’s a wrap! Hopefully you found these tips helpful — feel free to message me for any specific tips on what I’ve mentioned, or what you want to hear about into the future.

I’ve also compiled a list of select pieces of advice that I haven’t delved deeper into here, for those interested:

• Typical careers like management consulting, investment banking and tech are actually less attractive than you think
• Gain interesting experience during your degree, and remember all the interesting internships that exist (you have your whole life to become a financial analyst, but can use a few months during your uni degree to try out something more eccentric)
• Take the word of someone you know is trustworthy over a website
• Uni careers sites give some very poor advice (a harsh truth)
• Don’t network with the express intention of getting something out of it (eg. referral, interview) — show genuine interest in them and the role, and everything else will come naturally
• Student clubs are a great way of meeting people and getting something on your resume, but there’s so much else you can do to a) stand out and b) do something that interests you (think about — starting your own NFP, a small business out of a hobby you have, building out a great business idea with your friends, etc.)
• Don’t lose sight of who you are during graduate applications or when working— if you abandon your friends and hobbies just to get a job, even if you do well, you’re not going to come out feeling as good as you’d think