My top tip to a graduate getting into the workforce: be curious! It’s amazing what can happen if are curious and committed. Entry-level roles can lead to your dream job if you utilise the opportunity.
Don’t fixate on a narrow role. Be as open-minded as you can as you may learn so much from a role you may not have considered. It may open your eyes to even more career options.
I say this from experience. Early in my career I took a compliance coordinator role at a firm I had barely heard of, mostly because the office was close to home. Within a year I had moved into project management and picked up skills I still use every day. A friend from the same graduating class did something similar, starting as a junior analyst for a payments processor that handled transactions for real money casinos and e-commerce platforms. She had no interest in either industry when she applied, but the data modelling work she did there got her hired into a health-tech startup two years later.
The point is that the industry on your first contract matters far less than the problems you get to solve while you are there. Hiring managers care about what you can demonstrate, not the logo on your lanyard.
Graduates often make the mistake of filtering job listings by sector before they have enough experience to know what they actually enjoy. Casting a wider net early on gives you a much better sense of where your strengths sit. You can always specialise later, but the cross-sector exposure you gain in those first few years is difficult to replicate once you have settled into a single track.
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