CAREER MANAGEMENT

Your First Year in a New Job

Here are 12 things you should consider as you reach the first anniversary in a new job.

Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash

Why should I reflect on my first year in a new job?

Three months after starting at a new company, I wrote an article called ‘The First 100 Days in a New Job’. Since then, several colleagues have told me how useful it’s been as a checklist to help them get settled in their new role, which has inspired me to complete the story by reflecting on my first year.

This is important, because you’ll be coming up to your first end-of-year review, you’ll be setting development objectives and you may also be completing a probation period so now is the time to reflect.

Here are twelve prompts for your reflections.

Throw yourself into your role

It took about 48 hours for me to pick up my first major project, which involved upgrading and updating the software that we use to talk to banks, which sounds simple but doing that for many billions of dollars whilst not allowing your team to miss a single payment is a major challenge. Taking over part way through, my challenge was learning how to work with a team of 30 across the UK, Netherlands and India whilst holding accountability for…