The habits at your first job that get you the second one

The person who hires you for your second job will probably ring somebody from your first. Not HR. A supervisor, a shift lead, the manager who saw you on a Tuesday afternoon when the delivery was late and the system was down. That phone call is the real product of your first job. The wage is just what they pay you while you build it.

So work backwards from the call. What do you want that person to be able to say about you? It's usually something dull and enormous. He turned up. He did what he said he'd do. I never had to check his work twice. Hardly anyone can say that about a twenty-year-old. Be one of the few who can.

Reliability is about variance, not average

Most young men think being reliable means working hard. It doesn't. It means being the same on your worst day as on your best one.

A manager can plan around someone who's consistently average. They can't plan around someone who's brilliant four days a week and unreachable on the fifth. The brilliant-but-patchy person creates more work than he does, because everything he touches has to be checked by somebody else.

Pick an arrival time and hold it. Not the time on your contract — five or ten minutes before it, so that when the contract time arrives you're already working rather than hanging up your coat. Do that for six months and you'll have a reputation you didn't have to talk about.

The other half of this is your phone. Answer it. Reply to messages within the working day. If you're going to be late or sick, ring before your shift starts, not twenty minutes after. The lateness is forgivable. The silence isn't.

Learn to take an instruction properly

Almost every young man's first serious workplace failure is the same one. He gets told to do something, says "yeah, no problem," goes away, and produces something that isn't what was wanted. Then he feels stupid, and the manager decides he needs supervising.

The fix takes about forty seconds. Before you walk away, ask three things:

• When do you need it by? Not "soon". A day and a time.
• What does finished look like? An email? A spreadsheet? A cleared shelf? Ask for an example of a good one.
• Who else is waiting on this? Tells you how much it matters and who to talk to if you get stuck.

Then repeat the task back in your own words. "So you want the stock count done by four, written on the sheet in the back office, and Dave needs it for the order." Ten seconds. It catches about half of all misunderstandings before they cost anybody anything.

Write it down while they're still standing there. A notebook in your back pocket isn't old-fashioned, it's a signal that you intend to get this right.

Close the loop without being asked

When a task is finished, tell somebody. One line. "Stock count's done, sheet's on your desk."

That sounds trivial. It's the single habit that most separates people who get promoted from people who don't. A manager's job is largely holding a list of unfinished things in their head. Every time you close one out loud, you take something off that list. Do it enough and they start giving you bigger things, because handing work to you actually reduces their load instead of adding to it.

The same applies when it goes wrong, and it applies faster. If you can't finish something, say so early, and say what you're doing about it. "The supplier hasn't got back to me. I've left a message and I'll ring again at two. If there's still nothing I'll try the other firm." Nobody expects you to be able to fix everything at twenty. They expect to not be surprised.

Take the job nobody's queuing for

There's always one. Cleaning the walk-in. The filing nobody's touched since March. The customer who rings every Friday to complain about the same thing.

Take it, do it properly, and don't make a performance out of it. Two things happen. The first is that you learn something nobody else in the building knows, because nobody else in the building has been in there. The second is that people notice — not immediately, and not with a speech, but they notice.

The trap is doing it resentfully, or doing it once and then referencing it for a year. Both cancel the benefit.

Find out how the place actually makes money

Most people never learn this about their employer. They know their own tasks and nothing about the mechanism those tasks sit inside.

Go and find out. What's the margin on the thing you sell? Which customers are worth the most? What's the busiest hour of the week and why? Who actually decides what gets bought?

Ask the person who's been there longest, not the person with the most senior title. Buy them a coffee. Most people who've done a job for fifteen years have never once been asked to explain it by someone who genuinely wanted to know, and they'll tell you more in twenty minutes than a training course would in a day.

Once you understand the mechanism, you stop being someone who completes tasks and start being someone who can suggest things. That's the jump that gets you paid more.

Own a mistake inside the hour

You will break something, send the wrong thing to the wrong person, or lose an afternoon's work. Everyone does.

What determines the damage is the gap between the mistake and the disclosure. Report it immediately, to the person who most needs to know, without a wall of excuses. Say what happened, what you've already done, and what you think should happen next.

A mistake reported in ten minutes is a small operational problem. The same mistake discovered by someone else three days later is a character problem. Managers forgive the first constantly. They rarely forgive the second, because after that they can't trust anything you tell them.

Don't grovel either. One clear apology, then move to the fix. Extended self-flagellation puts your manager in the position of having to comfort you about a problem you created, which is a second favor you're asking of them.

Keep your own record

Once a month, spend ten minutes writing down what you did. Projects, numbers, problems you solved, things you learned to operate. Keep it somewhere that isn't a work computer.

In eighteen months, when you're applying somewhere else, you'll have specifics instead of vague impressions. "Ran the Saturday shift on my own from June" beats "worked in a busy retail environment" every time, and you will absolutely not remember it unless you wrote it down.

Be easy to work with, not easy to walk over

Be pleasant. Learn people's names, including the cleaner's and the delivery driver's. Don't join the complaining circle in the car park, and don't be the reason one starts.

But being agreeable isn't the same as having no position. If you're asked to do something unsafe, dishonest or plainly wrong, say no, calmly, once, and be prepared to explain why. Young men often think these are opposites. They're the same skill: treating people well enough that when you do push back, it clearly isn't about ego.

Leave properly

When you go, give full notice. Write down how to do your job so the next person isn't stranded. Work the last week as hard as the first. Thank the people who taught you something, by name, in person.

Then ask two of them if you can list them as a reference, and stay in touch twice a year. Not with a favor attached. Just a message.

The second job almost never comes from a job board. It comes from a man who remembers that you turned up on the Tuesday when nothing was going right.