Today I wanted to share a few insights on the working experiences I’ve had. I started my career on a graduate scheme where I was promised learning and development opportunities and a chance to grow personally and professionally. Within a few weeks of joining I realised I had entered an unstructured work environment. Is this a bad thing? No, not necessarily as some employees perform better in this kind of a setting. But being a newbie into the working life I feel I could have benefited from additional training, increased responsibility and more diverse tasks and projects. My energy was used on monotonous tasks, whereas I believe I had the scope to add more value.

One thing I will always be grateful for is having the opportunity to meet very talented and hard-working individuals who provided me with useful advice and different perspectives. Perhaps I just wasn't the right fit into the company culture. I needed a blend of both unstructured and structured processes to help plan out my day, whilst allowing room for creativity.

This makes me question if candidates in other schemes have experienced a similar situation?

I'm confident there are numerous graduate schemes out there, where you will reap the rewards financially and gain practical hands-on training. They would provide opportunities to help you grow as an individual, make a positive impact and conduct some very interesting work. In fact if you're on the right graduate scheme, it could be one of the best things you've experienced in your whole career. Everyone's experience is different but the scheme should meet what it claims. If companies are seeking high-calibre candidates to add value into their organisation then in return they should ensure they have the necessary resources in place for them to succeed. Candidates should be offered opportunities for progression and support in building a long-lasting career & network.

Many days I found myself at work not having anything to do. Getting paid to do nothing, sounds like the perfect job right? Sure it's great for a few days but continue this longer and it's ridiculously easy to fall into a lazy mind-set. You shouldn't feel like you're on holiday at work - work is work for a reason. "An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. Even from a company perspective it's a highly inefficient and poor use of resources. Nonetheless this experience did help me build a lot of patience to adapt to unideal situations and the resilience to keep going. I engaged my mind in doing external courses to keep learning and to sharpen my skill-set.

University never really prepares you for the real working world. It's one thing learning the theory behind a concept but you never really understand it until you put it into practise. However this scheme did secure me my next position where I had an excellent manager, a lot of support, my hard work was valued and I was working towards well-defined goals. That really helped give me a confidence boost and think about what I wanted to achieve from my career.

Today I run the Marketing and Operations section and manage a Certification Body, in our own business. Being in a situation where I have dealt with ineffective management, I have learnt techniques to manage employees better. Having the freedom and creativity to explore different ideas, see what works and what doesn’t and most importantly learning by doing. You can read about something 100 times but until you’ve applied this knowledge you can never be sure. It’s still a continuous learning process but one thing you shouldn't blindly rely on is motivation. You should be looking for discipline. Motivation comes and goes but if you have discipline you will push yourself to achieve what you have in mind. You can't go wrong with a combination of setting goals, having discipline and the right attitude.