PROJECT JOB

Job Search Step 7 — Settle

Your first year is critical. Establish yourself quickly

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Guidance on how to settle into your new job

There are whole books written on this subject, and I cannot replace them. However, I want to give you a starting point for thinking about your first six months in your new role. For more, read my PM stories here.

It may have been a long time since you’ve moved employers, so you’ll be out of practice. Starting a new job, particularly as a Secondhalfer, is challenging on two counts:

1. First, you’re likely not the young Millennial or Gen Z’er who will go out after work with the crowd, so you need to find different ways to fit in, make friends and build networks;
2. Second, you need to throw out much of what you know about work — the culture, the movers and shakers, how decisions get made, how things get done, and re-learn them, fast.

It’s useful to think about your new job as having two distinct activities — related but very different.

• First, the onboarding process, which gets you physically started and operating in your new role and
• Second is the integration…