The Life of a Job Seeker: Episode 20
Episode 20: Adapting to a New Job
While finding a new job might be difficult, adjusting to and sustaining the job can be more difficult in some instances.
Upon resuming his job role, Faruq was trained on how to handle different equipment and resources necessary to enhance his work, and he learnt very fast. However, soon he learnt that technical skills were not all he needed to succeed on the job; a lesson he learnt the hard way.
The Challenges
The first challenge he had was with meeting deadlines. As with many organizations, he was swamped with loads of assignment on daily basis that stressed the hell out of him. When faced with multiple tasks, he found it difficult to organize them, set goals and accomplish them within the stipulated time. He found it difficult to request help from his colleagues when he needed it or even approach his subordinates to allocate jobs to them because he was more comfortable working alone.
His inability to organise duties and operate efficiently concerned him and his supervisors, as his assignments were frequently completed and submitted when they were no longer needed. To make up for his tardiness, he began working late at night and even on weekends, to the point that he had little time for himself. As a result of the poor work-life balance, he became increasingly stressed and sickened by the job.
As with many job roles, beyond the technical aspects of his job, he had other social responsibilities including, working with other teams to complete projects, interfacing with clients among others; these were another source of problems for Faruq.
He struggled with critical thinking and communication
During brainstorming sessions at work, he found it difficult to think clearly and come up with creative ideas to solve problems; and when he did have new ideas, communicating it to the audience was another problem, as he struggled with public speaking. He was always nervous and worried that his ideas may be worthless hence he ends up keeping mute, not contributing anything, and looking stupid among other members of team. His inability to communicate effectively made the company exclude him from representing them on important occasions.
When he oversaw project execution, he had to lead teams. It was a nightmare for him since he found it impossible to properly assign and convey tasks to his team, encourage them, and even resolve team disputes.
Most of the time, his co-workers had to take on more work to compensate for his shortcomings. Soon, he lost the respect of his co-workers, and the job he once adored turned sour.
He received numerous penalties for his flaws, and the company eventually had to let him go because his deficiencies were generating major problems for the company.
The negative experience the company had with Sophia and Faruq; the two people recommended by Kobi damaged Kobi’s credibility at work, and future recommendations from him may no longer be trusted by the organisation.
Episode Lesson
Lesson 14: Soft skills, in addition to book knowledge and technical abilities, are required to keep any job.
Succeeding on a job goes beyond having technical or practical skills. It requires that one possesses desirable human qualities called soft skills. Soft skills are a combination of human skills that requires emotional intelligence. These skills include creativity and innovation, communication, problem solving, time management, decision making, teamwork, adaptability, among many others.
They help you understand how to groom yourself, how to speak to and treat people, how to discuss and solve problems in the best possible ways without misunderstanding and chaos, how to lead people, how to handle situations, the list is endless. If a person lacks crucial soft skills and possess nothing other than practical or book knowledge, then that person is considered unemployable, and if the person manages to secure a job, sustaining the job becomes a problem.
Research shows that the lack of soft skills called employability skills is a contributory factor to the problem of unemployability in Nigeria, as these crucial employability skills are often not thought in school. However, the good news is, anyone can develop and grow soft skills. One way to do that is to enrol in a soft skills academy to boost your skills. Terraskills offer Graduate Employability Skills to equip graduate with requisite soft skills for gaining and sustaining employment.
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