Your first job: why entering the world of work is harder than you were promised

“So, how’s work?”

Your mum asks over Sunday lunch, and you say “fine”. Because what else would you say? That in three months you still haven’t worked out who is who on the second floor? That you don’t know whether the report you handed in two weeks ago was any good, because nobody has said a single word about it? That on the bus on Monday morning you wonder whether this is it — eight hours a day, for forty-five years? That you miss the people from university more than you would ever admit? All of it sounds like complaining, and you aren’t allowed to complain. You finally have a job, after all. This is what you studied for. This is what everyone wanted for you.

A first job is one of those transitions that the people around you expect you to experience as a victory. And it is a victory. But it is also a loss — of a structure you knew, of the people you grew up alongside, and of a picture of yourself that worked as long as you were a student. This loss is hardly ever talked about. So many people go through it alone and think there is something wrong with them.

A promise nobody made out loud

Nobody told you a first job would be easy. But many people heard a quiet promise throughout their education: if you work hard, you’ll get good marks; with good marks you’ll get a good job; with a good job you’ll be happy. That chain worked for twenty years. Every link had clear rules, clear deadlines and a clear end.

In 2000 the psychologist Jeffrey Arnett described a period of emerging adulthood, which he placed roughly between the ages of 18 and 25. The features he listed are identity exploration, instability, a focus on oneself, a sense of being “somewhere in between”, and a sense that possibilities are still open. A first job often falls right at the end of this period or just after it. And suddenly it seems that the age of possibilities has closed: now you are what you do. This feeling isn’t necessarily true — careers change many times nowadays — but it is very strong.

In Slovenia, many people have a lot of student work behind them. It is valuable experience, but different: student work was temporary, often without responsibility for the whole, and you always had another identity to lean on — “I’m only a student”. A first proper job takes that support away. For the first time you are entirely what it says on your business card.

A first job is therefore a transition in the full sense of the word: not just a change of title, but a change in who you are. I have written about how life transitions work in general in New job, new city, new chapter: the psychology of life transitions. Here I would like to focus on what is particular about a first job.

When there are no more marks: silence as feedback

From your first year of primary school onwards, you were given marks. You may have hated them, but you knew where you stood. Every few weeks someone told you: this is good, this you can’t do yet.

At work, that structure is mostly missing. Your manager is busy, your colleagues are busy, and when you hand something in, often nothing happens. Nobody says “excellent”, nobody says “this is wrong”. For someone who has lived with regular marks for twenty years, that silence is very loud. The mind fills it in by itself — and almost never with the most generous explanation. “If they say nothing, it’s probably bad.” “Maybe they’ll let me go after the probation period.” “Everyone else knows what they’re doing, except me.”

That last thought has a name: Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves. In a first job it is almost the rule, not the exception. Not because you are an impostor, but because you don’t yet have any inner yardstick with which to judge yourself. Before, the system of marks did that. Now you have to build it yourself.

Back in the 1980s, the researcher Susan Ashford wrote with Larry Cummings that feedback in organisations isn’t just something you receive, but also something you have to actively seek out — by watching others and by asking directly. They also described why this is hard: asking means risking hearing something unpleasant and showing that you don’t know something. For a newcomer this fear is greatest, because they think they should already know everything. And yet the newcomer is precisely the person everyone expects to ask questions.

Time without an end

University has a rhythm. A term begins, intensifies during exams, and ends. Then comes the summer. Even when it was hard, you knew there would be an end.

A job doesn’t have that rhythm. The week repeats, the month repeats, the year repeats. A few weeks of annual leave seem laughably little when you were used to long summer holidays. In the first months, many young people experience something they find hard to put into words: not tiredness from the work, but tiredness from there being no end in sight. “Is this it now?” is a sentence I hear very often.

This question isn’t ingratitude. It is a sign that your inner clock is set to a rhythm that no longer exists. Adjusting takes time. It helps to create smaller endings for yourself — a goal for the month, something to look forward to at the weekend — and to know that the sense of endlessness settles over time as you build new kinds of rhythm.

Where did everyone go?

One of the least noticed losses of a first job is the loss of a group. At university you were part of a year group. People were the same age, in the same position, with the same worries. You didn’t have to make an effort to meet anyone — you ran into them in lectures, in the canteen, at parties.

When your studies end, that group scatters. Someone goes abroad, someone moves to another town, someone works shifts. What’s left are messages that grow less frequent. At work, people are mostly older, have families, and go home after work. They are kind, but they aren’t your year group.

This creates a kind of loneliness that is surprising, because you are among people all day. It isn’t loneliness without contact, but loneliness without people who understand where you are. With a friend still doing a master’s, moaning about work feels silly. You can’t tell your parents, because they would worry. Nor your colleagues, because you would seem ungrateful.

It helps to know that in the years after university most people go through a similar reshuffling of friendships. It doesn’t mean you have lost the ability to connect. It means the conditions have changed and that new connections will need more intention than the old ones did. I have written about this period more generally in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents.

The youngest in the system

When I look at a workplace systemically — as a group with roles, alliances and tensions, much like a family — the newcomer in a first job is almost always in the role of the youngest. This role has its advantages: not everything is expected of you, you are allowed to ask, sometimes someone takes you under their wing. But it also has its traps.

The first trap is that the system quickly draws you into its old tensions. The youngest in a team is often the one a colleague complains to about the manager over coffee, while another complains about that colleague. Without noticing, you become part of a triangle — someone through whom two older members of the system deal with their tension without speaking to each other directly. For a newcomer this is flattering, because it feels like trust. But in the long run it puts you in a position where you have to take sides before you even know what is going on.

The second trap is that the youngest often gets the work nobody else wants — and accepts it without a word, because they don’t dare say no. Some of this is normal. But if after six months you still don’t dare ask why it is always you, it may be time to look at whether some older role is repeating itself. You can read more about how we find ourselves in family roles at work in Attachment at work: how the pattern shows with your manager and colleagues, and about the unwritten rules a newcomer only discovers by breaking them in The first ninety days in a new team: why it is more emotionally draining than you expect.

What happens at home in the meantime

A first job doesn’t only change you, but your family too. This is one of the things we pay particular attention to in relational family therapy, in which I am training: when one member of a system moves, everyone has to move.

Parents are often more emotionally invested in their child’s first job than they show. To them it is proof that they did something right. So your “fine” at Sunday lunch may also be a form of protection — for them, not for you. If you tell them it’s hard, they may start giving advice, get frightened, or someone may say “well, at least you have a job”. And next time you say “fine” again.

Here is a short conversation (composite, not a real person) that plays out, in different versions, in many homes:

“How’s work?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine? You wanted this.”
“Yes, I know. It’s just … I don’t know if I’m any good at it. Nobody tells me anything.”
“If they don’t say anything, it’s fine. My boss didn’t say anything to me for thirty years.”
“And how did you know it was fine?”
Her father thinks about it. “I didn’t. I just got used to it.”

This conversation doesn’t solve anything, but it opens something. The daughter learns that her uncertainty isn’t a personal failing. The father wonders for the first time whether “I got used to it” really is the best possible way. Something shifts in both of them, because they talked about work as it is, not as it ought to be.

Sometimes there is something else in the background: the family’s story about work. Perhaps your parents worked in a factory, and to them office work is only half “real” work. Perhaps someone in the family was disappointed with their own career and now quietly hopes you will succeed in their place. Expectations like these are rarely spoken, but you carry them to work with you every day.

Expectations are not a mistake

When a first job turns out harder than you thought, you may turn against yourself: “I expected too much. I was naive.” That isn’t fair to you.

In a 1992 meta-analysis, John Wanous and colleagues showed that the match between what newcomers expect and what they actually experience is linked to satisfaction, commitment and the decision to stay in the job. The finding matters because it doesn’t say that expectations are a mistake. It says that the gap between what was expected and what was experienced is a burden in itself. As early as the 1970s, Marlene Kramer described “reality shock” in young nurses: the collision between the values they had learned at school and what they met on the ward. That collision wasn’t a sign that they weren’t cut out for the profession. It was a sign that school and work are two different worlds, and nobody had built a bridge between them.

So your expectations came from somewhere — school, home, social media, where people post about new jobs but not about the first three months in them. It is useful to look at them rather than condemn them. The knowledge base has a tool for this, the expectations table, which helps you separate what you expected, what happened, and what of it is in your hands.

Exercise: the first yardstick you build yourself

Because there are no more marks at work, you have to build part of the yardstick yourself. This exercise helps with that. Do it once now and again in a month.

1. Write down three things you have done at work in the past month — specific tasks, not general impressions. Next to each, note how well you think you did it on a scale from 1 to 10.
2. Next to each, write what your rating is based on. Did someone say something? Was the result visible? Are you inferring from silence? If you are inferring from silence, mark it.
3. For one of the marked tasks, prepare a narrow question for your manager or a more experienced colleague: “About that report — what would you have done differently?” Not “Am I any good?”, because there is no good answer to that.
4. Ask the question this week. When you get an answer, write down one thing you will take on board and one thing that was better than you thought.
5. In a month, repeat the first step and compare the ratings. The point isn’t for them to be higher, but for them to rest on something firmer than guesswork.

The exercise is small, but it addresses something big: the move from a world where someone else assessed you to a world where you have to create part of the assessment yourself. If a voice keeps declaring all your work not good enough in advance, you might also read Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear.

When it isn’t just a transition

Everything I have written so far says that a first job is hard even when the job is good. But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the problem isn’t the transition, but the workplace.

If your manager regularly humiliates you in front of others, if you are shut out of information you need for your work, if work piles up to the point where it can’t be done, or if someone harasses you, that isn’t “normal for the beginning”. Newcomers are particularly vulnerable to this, because they have nothing to compare it with and feel they have to put up with it. I have written about how to tell a difficult relationship from something more serious in Workplace bullying or just a difficult relationship? How to tell them apart and what you can do about each. For legal questions, the right route is a trade union or a lawyer.

Second, sometimes a first job simply isn’t the right one. Not because you weren’t persistent enough, but because it turned out you don’t want to do this work. Leaving a first job isn’t a defeat. It is information you could only have got by trying.

Third, if in the first months you experience lasting low mood, sleeplessness, a loss of pleasure in things that used to make you happy, or thoughts that nothing makes sense, it is no longer just adjustment. That is the time to see your GP. If thoughts of suicide appear, in Slovenia you can call the Crisis Line (Klic v duševni stiski) on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

Where talking can help

When young people come to therapy because of their first job, they rarely come only because of the job. Often they come because something bigger has shifted in them: their identity, their relationship with their parents, a feeling of having lost direction. The job was just the place where it showed.

Together we can look at which expectations are yours and which you took on from others, where at work you are repeating a role you know from home, and how to build an inner yardstick that doesn’t depend on whether someone praises you. It isn’t about learning to “cope better”. It is about staying in touch with yourself through this transition. I also work with English-speaking clients, so if English is the language you think in, we can talk in English.

What to remember

• A first job is a transition, not just a new obligation: you lose a structure, a peer group and an old picture of yourself.
• Silence isn’t a verdict. With no marks, you have to seek feedback yourself — with a narrow, specific question.
• Loneliness among people is common in the first months and doesn’t mean you have lost the ability to connect.
• As the youngest in the system you quickly become part of old tensions — watch out for the triangles you are invited into.
• The gap between what you expected and what you experienced is a burden, not a mistake — and sometimes the problem is the workplace, not you.