Dealing with uncertainty

For the last 3 days, starting on Wednesday, I was on an orientation retreat; the HR team at Sony wanted to imbue the new employees with a sense of "character" of what Sony is. If there was one thing that I took away from the orientation was that the company was "unconventional," which might be a good thing for a Japanese company.

Sony does face some serious challenges right now. My opinion is that the company is stagnating and the current environment doesn't really breed creativity, nor does it seem like it gives opportunities for new ideas (from what I've seen so far), though the upper management people keep telling this is exactly what they want, but I some what digress from the title of this article.

Many of the new grads coming into the company, after this retreat seemed to have a lot of anxiety about their jobs. From one of the promotional videos we saw describing the company as having a long history of innovation, the new grads seemed to feel like they had big shoes to fill. I wouldn't blame them, especially coming out of the Japanese educational system, where encouraging creativity not is one of it's strong points.

For the majority of these new grads, working at Sony will be their first job and most of them are quite worried if the jobs they are given is something suited for them. I for one had a very crappy first job doing incredibly boring work, cutting clouds out of satellite images (I studied how long for a boring job like this!?) after my undergrad in Canada. On top of this, most of them aren't really sure about the kinds of jobs they would be really be suited to since they don't really have any working experience.

Personally, there's been a lot of uncertainty in my life. I would never have imaged that I would come to Japan to study nanotech, then getting hired off by Sony after graduating after considering that I started off with a really pathetic first job. In the future, I really have no idea what kind of work I will be doing and where I'll be working. But I think the most important thing is developing the skills to deal with whatever comes up. Say if you got fired tomorrow and knew that you could just setup your own little company or just hop ship to do other things, I think that most people would have very little worries.