Career Development | Winston-Salem, NC

A group of Wake Forest staff members gathered over lunch in Alumni Hall on February 28, 2019 to discuss Career Development.

Overview and Highlights of our Call to Conversation:

We each described our first job, whether we interpreted that to mean our first job when we graduated from college, or our first job…ever! We had all learned some valuable information about ourselves during these first job experiences, and some of the major themes from our time together are below:

• Our first jobs taught us a lot about trust, responsibility (for what we were doing and for other people either directly or indirectly in our care), work ethic, and negotiation skills.
• Being able to relate to the people you work with is important, and recognizing that every person in every position is important to the overall success of a business is also important.
• People work for a variety of reasons, but many of us have learned through our various jobs that it is important to be be surrounded by people with a passion and drive for what you are doing.
• The jobs you have along the way can teach you what you don’t like and what you aren’t good at, which is just as important as what you do like and what you are good at.
• Work experiences impact not only professional development, but personal development.
• People are so much more than the job they hold when you consider all of the many experiences that have gotten them there.
• Employers, as well as the clients or customers of the business, put a lot of trust in young and first-time employees. We pondered how and why this is different from today’s society in general, when an inherent trust in others is seemingly harder and harder to come by.