To many people, the first job becomes a pair of gears that grasps you, and doesn't loosen up to permit a second chance.
Another one of the interviewees put it a little differently: "Taking on my first job is the biggest gamble I've ever made." The assumption is that starting a job casts the fateful die forever. Yet the average person's career seldom shows less than three or four employers-and sometimes many more. As a group, the 20- to 30-year-olds show a particularly high average of job changes.
True enough, a first job may prove a key factor in setting career direction. But many people have taken a first job, disliked it, and gone on to a better second choice. And some may even fail in the first job and go on to better things with a second employer.
Peter Tremayne was the son of an affluent New Orleans builder. The Tremayne name made life easy for Peter, and being an outstanding quarterback at Tulane gave life a free-candy-counter feeling. Moreover, Peter Tremayne's endowments went beyond a husky frame and good reflexes. He had a 140 IQ, a good sense about people, and enjoyed working with them whether on the football field or in other school activities.
One of his schoolmates was a New Yorker whom Peter visited during vacations. The size, complexity, and excitement of the city seized Peter's imagination. By the time graduation came around, he had decided that he would go up to New York and find a job.
He had already made several other decisions. One was that he wasn't going to play professional football. His ambitions ran beyond investing the next ten or fifteen years of his life in an activity that basically he felt would keep him in a kind of permanent immaturity-and with imminent risk of life and limb.
Also, he had shrugged off" the offers of people who wanted to take their college hero into business with them. But the idea of parlaying his football exploits into a career, regardless of the Tulane alumni's good intentions, meant to him that he wouldn't really have done it on his own. Besides, the big game of New York seemed a more appropriate next stage.
Finding a job, unexpectedly, was not easy. Despite some assistance from his friend, who helped him find an apartment and gave him some leads, a firm offer of a job failed to materialize. The country was going through one of its periodic recessions and jobs were hard to come by, particularly for a young man who had majored in football. On lonely nights, he had reason to regret what in retrospect seemed a quixotic attitude in refusing jobs from his hometown admirers. After four or five months of employment agencies, personnel directors, and nothing but promises of something "later on," he seemed to be stymied. But his father had a card to play, and he phoned one evening to play it.
"Peter, take down this name and telephone number," and he gave his son the name of a college friend of his who might help. "He's the president of an interesting company, Miller and Huggins Management Systems. Talk to him. He's expecting your call."
The meeting between Peter Tremayne and Al Miller went very smoothly. And Al Miller's company, a management consulting firm, opened new vistas to Peter. The concept of organizations in the business of telling other businesses how to run their business, how to solve basic problems, how to approach the marketplace, how to restructure themselves for greater efficiency, reeked of enough godliness to satisfy the same ego needs fed by his football quarterbacking.
Miller took him on, starting as an assistant field representative. The job required visiting customers, making sure that there were no hitches or dissatisfactions with the firm's services.
Peter Tremayne's first six months in the field were supervised by a senior partner by the name of Andy Ander-son, large, jovial, and sharp. Time spent with Andy was the equivalent of a cram course in business management. He got close-up views of a number of companies-the inner workings, the politics-and observed firsthand the fear and quaking of supposedly secure top executives and the rapaciousness of younger men out to do in their bosses and take over.
Tremayne was smart enough to know that this kind of firsthand experience, when backed up by selected reading, put him in a strong position to move ahead. He loved his job and his prospects.
Al Miller kept in touch with young Tremayne's progress and saw that it was good. At the end of six months, they had a meeting.
"Peter, Andy tells me you've been doing a fine job, and I'm inclined to agree. Furthermore, he tells me that you are good at working with clients. I've decided to make you a regional manager, put you in charge of part of the Chicago field operation."
That night Peter phoned his folks to tell them the big news. His father couldn't have been happier and his mother cried profusely. Peter hung up with the same feeling he had had when his team won the conference championship.
But three months after Peter Tremayne took on the management job, he was in trouble. The negative reaction of the field representatives hadn't been anticipated. They had liked Tremayne as an occasional visitor from headquarters. As a boss, he was too inexperienced, and they resented the leapfrogging that had put him in charge. Tremayne made several bad mistakes in judgment, intervening between field consultants and their clients, and increasing rather than decreasing the heat. The disagreements, the quarrels, finally caught up with him. He made an enemy of the vice-president in charge of marketing. As a result, he had a talk with an unhappy Al Miller, who told him things weren't working out. Perhaps Peter had better start looking for another job.
The world collapsed for Peter Tremayne. He wasn't used to failure, certainly not one as personal and total as this. Peter was left stunned and shaken. The sleep he had lost in the job-hunting days came in a poor second to the galloping case of insomnia he developed as his plight rankled, angered, then scared him. He had had his big chance and fumbled it.
It was Andy Anderson who got him back on track.
"Peter, I know you've got the stuff. And Al Miller does too, but he can't do a thing for you without having a revolution on his hands. That's organizational politics. In this case, the big man is only as big as others let him be. Things didn't work out because you got boosted too far too soon.
But you've had good experience. Here is a list of six companies that could use your abilities to work with customers. In each case I've given you the name of a top person to see."
The fourth name on Andy's list was a winner. Tremayne met Greg Danziger, president of Danziger Industrial Engineering Management. Two weeks later, Peter was on the DIEM payroll as assistant marketing manager. And in this new position, things began to click, even better than at Miller and Huggins. A year later, his boss had a heart attack and retired. He was made acting manager and six months later got the job permanently. He had earned it.
For people who fear getting fly-papered by a first job, the Tremayne case makes it clear that the first job can be a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.
There were good reasons for Peter Tremayne's second success. For one thing, he brought experience to his new job. And even more important, the second job had requirements that, both in obvious ways and in subtle ones, were much better suited to Peter's strengths. The people he supervised now were less temperamental and more cooperative than the field experts who reported to him at Miller and Huggins. They not only liked him, they respected him-which made his life a good deal easier.
There are advantages to downplaying the idea that a first job represents a critical choice. One obvious advantage is that it allows you to be more relaxed. The second is that it makes you more capable of being objective in appraising job possibilities. Then you can use the same cool judgment in evaluating the experiences a first job brings and shorten the time it takes to get you into the "job-wise" category. You learn how to do your job better, and about the world of work in general.
Peter Tremayne's case makes an instructive point: A first job, even when it doesn't work out, can boost you upward.
Nervousness over entering the working world through a proper door, as well as anxiety about the commitment it seems to require, are both varied experiences. The next crisis strikes those who tend to look ahead, to anticipate situations beyond the immediate future.
