It’s that time of year again. This week, four interns joined our team for the summer, and there is something about watching people start their careers that has a way of making you reflect on your own.
We remember that first day: the mix of excitement, anxiety, and the feeling in your gut that everyone else in the room knew something you didn’t. The laptop that didn’t work. The meeting you weren’t sure you were supposed to be in. The other intern that for some reason seemed to know way more about what was going on than you.
If we could offer just one piece of advice, it would be this: that feeling of not knowing what you’re doing persists, and that’s more okay than anyone tells you.
Putting on our immodest hat for a moment (for content, you know): one of us holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Economics from Northwestern and an MBA from Harvard, has spent time at McKinsey & Company and in private equity, and co-writes a very insightful weekly hiring newsletter (😉). But the credentials are not the point. The point is that person will tell you, without hesitation, that most of the time they still don’t know what they’re doing.
We’ve found the people who look like they have it figured out are mostly just more comfortable with uncertainty. What looks like confidence from the outside is usually something more like a practiced ability to ask the right questions, learn quickly, and work collaboratively toward a good answer, even when no one in the room is entirely sure what the right answer is. That’s a muscle. It can be built.
We see this repeatedly in our work. Those who accelerate fastest in their careers are rarely the most credentialed. They’re usually the ones who ask early instead of guessing, incorporate feedback without getting defensive, and stay curious long after the novelty of a new role wears off. They treat not knowing as the starting point, not a personal failure. Pretending to know tends to be much more costly than admitting you don’t. It costs time, trust, and occasionally expensive mistakes that a simple question would have prevented.
You may be wondering why we’re comfortable saying this in a newsletter read by many of our clients and colleagues. It’s because we think the most underrated professional skill is the confidence to raise your hand and say “I have absolutely no idea how to do that, but I’m confident I can figure it out.” That combination of honesty and self-belief is what actually builds trust. And in our experience, the people willing to say it out loud tend to be the ones who do figure it out.
Welcome to the team, interns. None of you need to have it figured out. Neither do we, most of the time.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team