When I prepared to graduate from university, I assumed the biggest challenge I would face was finding my first real career opportunity. What I didn’t know was that was just the beginning. Figuring out how to do your best work in the early years of your career is the steepest challenge of all.

When you start your career, everything is alien. Back then, when I found myself in unfamiliar territory, I had the benefit of learning how to navigate the office environment by observing my new coworkers. Not every example was perfect, but I learned so much via a gradual and consistent assimilation of best practices and knowledge.

It was so much more than learning how to do my role and how the various workplace systems operated. I observed the nuance, behaviors, and unspoken professional protocols by witnessing how more senior leaders started and ended their workdays, talked to others, prepared for meetings, navigated conflicts, and provided counsel. Those insights proved to be priceless.

With the ascent of remote and hybrid teams over the past few years, the landscape of our work has undergone a profound transformation. Many young professionals started their careers during this tumultuous period, interviewing for and starting new jobs in remote environments. This has had far-reaching implications and holds the potential to significantly shape the career trajectories of early career professionals for years to come.

Smart companies are taking proactive steps to support this cohort’s professional development. I’ve spent several years coaching remote workers at organizations across the United States and in various parts of the world. Here’s what I’ve learned about the unique challenges facing early career professionals and how managers can help their employees overcome them.

Confronting Early Career Hurdles

Through my work, I’ve observed several challenges early career remote professionals commonly encounter:

• Fewer “observe and learn” opportunities. When you work alongside others in the same location, you can experience how leadership operates and witness how other people communicate and collaborate. If you’re remote, opportunities to observe and learn may be limited to your onboarding period and then to your interactions with your team.
• Delayed feedback. Remote teams rely heavily on technology to forge connections and communicate in real time. That can have a number of advantages, but when you’re working remotely, it may be challenging at times to ask your manager for guidance in the exact moment you need it. When you work side by side, it can be easier to receive spontaneous feedback in real time. As a result, it may take a little longer to receive feedback if you’re saving certain questions for meetings with your manager.
• Lack of experience. Mid-career and senior professionals have a deeper bench of knowledge and experience to draw upon as well as a network to lean on when needed. When you’re in the early phase of your career, you’re less likely to know what to do next if things are hard. Furthermore, you may not know when to raise your hand for help.
• Limited networking opportunities. One of the key drivers of career growth is networking within your organization. When you work remotely, it can be hard to get to know individuals outside of your team.
• Workload management. One of the biggest learning curves for new professionals is how to self-manage your own productivity and prioritize competing demands. In the early days of my career, when I had a “how do I do this?” question, I would look around and then ask someone for help. Even when I didn’t have questions, I was constantly learning by observing how others managed their workloads and addressed challenges as they arose.

If you’re a leader who’s invested in the professional development of the emerging talent on your team, here are four ways you can lend your support:

Empower Your Team to Track Their Accomplishments

Based on my experience coaching tens of thousands of employees, I’ve observed that aside from acknowledging key milestones, early career professionals often overlook the compounding benefits of consistently tracking and reviewing their accomplishments. As a leader, guide them in making that a consistent habit.

I always ask the professionals I coach if they have a system for recording their wins at work. Questions I ask include: Do you have a place where you save praise or positive feedback? Instead of simply crossing items off your to-do list, do you take time to document your wins?

This practice has numerous positive ripple effects that extend beyond mere recognition. Not only does it contribute to an accelerated boost in an employee’s career confidence, but it also provides them the opportunity to monitor progress in real time, bridging the gaps between one-on-one meetings with their manager. Moreover, consistent tracking enhances productivity and aids in recalling achievements, particularly when tackling challenging tasks. Most importantly, it sets the stage for more meaningful and insightful discussions about performance, facilitating in-depth conversations that are crucial for professional growth.

As a leader, encourage your team members to commit to tracking their accomplishments on a weekly basis. In addition to listing outcomes, encourage them to reflect on the skills and strengths they leveraged to generate their wins and to consider how they can continue to build on those strategies in the future.

Identify Reverse Mentoring Opportunities

Often when we think of mentoring, it’s from the vantage point of a more senior professional providing guidance to a more junior member of the team. But it’s important to remember that knowledge sharing works both ways. Mentorship presents a valuable opportunity for early career professionals to forge connections within the company.

Where possible, identify opportunities for reverse mentoring or knowledge sharing where early career professionals can be paired with more senior colleagues to share a skill, insight, or expertise the senior colleague doesn’t have.

Reverse mentoring can unlock several benefits for both parties. The upsides for early career professionals include sharpening interpersonal skills, stimulating creativity, enabling a sense of purpose, increasing job satisfaction, and accelerating the opportunity to connect with potential sponsors for career advancement. Benefits for senior professionals include learning new workplace perspectives, acquiring new skills, and increasing their awareness of intergenerational cultural and marketing trends. Furthermore, reverse mentoring can effectively address knowledge gaps that senior professionals may not realize they have.

To identify knowledge-sharing opportunities, start by doing a skills audit on your team. Reverse mentoring can cover much more ground than the latest social media trends or Gen Z lexicon. Dig deeper, looking at hard skills such as technical abilities, design know-how, or language proficiency — but don’t overlook soft skills such as critical thinking, responsiveness, and problem solving.

Create Open Space for Conversations

When you’re at the start of your career, you may be hesitant to speak up in a team meeting or share an observation with a more senior peer. Dedicating time during the work week for more informal connection is a smart strategy that enables inclusion, especially for quieter voices.

As a people manager, one way to create open space is to hold time on your calendar for office hours and let your team know they can schedule time to connect informally. This enables someone to schedule an ad hoc conversation outside of the regular cycle of meetings.

Not everyone is comfortable with asking questions or sharing feedback face to face, so providing a separate space can impact the dynamic of an interaction or conversation. Provide ways to share feedback synchronously or asynchronously — for example, through digital communication tools like Slack or by soliciting feedback anonymously via an online submission tool.

Provide Shadowing Opportunities

Having junior professionals shadow their more senior colleagues is an effective way to create those “observe and learn” opportunities that are harder to come by in a remote environment. A shadowing opportunity may be as straightforward as accompanying a more senior professional to a meeting, or it could involve scheduling recurring time to gain step-by-step insights into how to complete a key task or project. 

Shadowing opportunities provide so many benefits for junior professionals, including leveraging the power of observation, facilitating learning and development, fostering collaboration, creating safe spaces for questions, and deepening relationship building across and within teams.

. . .

If you lead a remote team, there are impactful shifts you can make that will pave the way for early career professionals to forge connections and accelerate their professional development. Even what seems like the smallest interaction can pave the way for a career-changing opportunity. As leaders, ensuring the upcoming generation of leaders is valued and supported as they forge their careers will deliver significant returns.