#22 The 3 biggest career mistakes I've made

A lot of you may have opened this mail and thought, “she’s just started her career, how can she have already any mistakes?”. Well, unfortunately, I live and learn. Nevertheless, I’m so glad I made these mistakes at just the precipice of my career, for I will remember these for the rest of my career. While I am a huge proponent of making your mistakes and learning from them, for these, I ask that you learn from me because they are pretty avoidable in my opinion. Here are the biggest career mistakes that I have made (so far):

1. Wrong phone number

Yes, I actually did this. In the summer of 2023, while I was looking for summer internships, I was pretty demotivated that I wasn’t getting any shortlists or interviews, while all my classmates were able to get at least one or two internships. It was only after I got a strong enough referral at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), that they made the effort to reach out via email and mentioned trying to contact me but being unable to get through. I dismissed it and attributed the same to a network error, assuming that is why my phone didn’t ring. When my first round of interview was finally scheduled, my interviewer called me out on it and said that my phone number was wrong. I had written 11 digits. This was how my first ever job interview in life had started. Needless to say, I was completely flummoxed and had absolutely nothing to say. In trying to fine-tune all the other relevant aspects of my resume, I missed the most BASIC one. Ever since that day, I have made it a habit to double-check, and sometimes even triple-check all my details. Oh and, the same interviewer turned out to be my manager when I joined the organization. Imagine my first-day jitters. Thankfully, we maintain a good relationship to this day. 😃 

2. Forgetting to do an aptitude test

This was more of a ‘I’m-not-ready’ mistake rather than ‘I-forgot’ mistake. We all have been there, having the opportunity and dismissing it because of imposter syndrome. In short, I had (once again) asked for a referral at HSBC via LinkedIn for a full-time Business Analyst position during my final year at DTU. I received the link to apply, sent my application and waited. To my complete and utter surprise, my profile got shortlisted for an aptitude test. At the time, waiting to be ready had felt like a better option than just taking the test and not getting through. I studied for a week, to ‘feel’ ready, and finally opened the link for the test. Unfortunately, as I had misunderstood the date, the test link was no longer valid. I realised that I had missed a great opportunity simply because I told myself that I wasn’t ‘ready’, whatever that meant. Being an investment bank, HSBC had long been a dream company for me, and I let a real good shot slip from my hands. Ever since then, my motto has been to just do the hard things, even when you’re scared as shit.

3. Not researching the pay

This one is pretty recent, and in some ways, I’m glad I made this mistake during my first job. While I was interviewing for my current job, I did not even made the effort to find the pay range for my role, whether online or from someone in the same role, to deduce if I’m being underpaid or overpaid. While I understand that salaries in corporate can never be the same, even for same roles, because they will always differ for different qualifications and other factors such as years of work experience, I still believe I could have made the effort to find, at the bare minimum, a broad pay scale for my role. The point I’m highlighting here is not being underpaid, but a genuine lack of effort on my part. Hopefully, when I look for my second job, I’ll remember this and negotiate my salary better.

So here are my career mistakes (so far). Don’t be like me and learn from me.

In my next edition, I will talk about the one thing I did (really) right.

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