Business Column: The Problem with the Semi

As young people, we are faced with a problem that most of us will have to deal with in the next few years, and one that is not always simple to overcome. We each have a trade or a knowledge base, and when the time comes to put our best foot forward and be counted we will be tested on this trade and our conduct will be important to future success. But it’s not always easy to come out all-guns blazing when you haven’t worked before, or you are in junior years of a degree course, because you simply don’t know enough or have sufficient experience. Here you face the problem of the semi (professional, that is).

It has always surprised me how quickly we are called upon as Young Professionals to have all the answers. Just 12 months out of some very ‘academic’ A–levels, it is possible to take a position of considerable responsibility in an Engineering Scholarship programme, and after two years students from Surrey are holding down jobs way above their pay grade across all industries from hospitality to husbandry. Of course it’s a great thing to be tested and pushed, far better than being a glorified tea person for an extended period of time in your formative years. But much like launching an ocean liner that little bit too early, it’s not always wise to apply great pressure too early on.

There have been cases (see Habitat’s UK intern Twitter debacle earlier this year) where interns simply haven’t been up to the job. More often than not in my experience people with a bit of common sense and just enough training can flourish in the vacuum of corporate requirements, but in the same token I can think of more than a few examples of where blagging through a meeting or sales pitch simply hasn’t worked, and I doubt the person delivering the semi–professional approach learnt much from it either. It’s a fine line between a baptism of fire and just going down in flames.

The internalisation of doubt will be familiar to any of you who have started a business, worked for a start-up, or even just delivered a coursework presentation that you weren’t all that sure about. In these times you have little choice but to extrapolate a combination of minimal experience and gut feeling into a cast iron suggestion to peers or potential customers. Great fun sometimes but it is really a wise choice?

Perhaps we are putting ourselves into the fire a little too early, it’s not that degree courses should be longer, or placements deferred later, perhaps just that we need to temper ourselves earlier in our lives to minimise the time of being in semi-professional purgatory. Much like a badly made garden shed if you cut out the materials badly and stick them together wrong to start with, it’s pretty difficult to stop it leaking for the rest of its life. The same applies with learning bad professional habits.

We all go through times of being a junior of our trade. Indeed these can be some of the most enjoyable times of our lives. What I would venture is that in tough financial times you need to give yourself a better than even chance of coming out of a testing situation with minimal cuts and bruises, and a firm understanding of what you would do better next time. By preparing yourself with additional skills and pushing your comfort zones when the opportunities are presented, you can elevate yourself to being experienced (perhaps beyond your years) and reap the rewards.