By Carly Stern

Excerpt from Bloomberg.com

“While the class of 2026 is graduating at a moment when full-time employment feels extra precarious and AI seems poised to change the nature of work, experts say the strategies for thriving in an entry-level role remain largely unchanged. Here’s their best advice for those just starting out.

Focus on what you can control

New hires aren’t supposed to have subject matter expertise, so center your energy on the qualities that fall outside of it: professionalism and diligence. Show up on time. Take notes in meetings. Deliver an assignment when you say you will. Don’t let the “boring stuff” get overlooked, Dresner says, because it has outsize significance in how you’re perceived in the workplace.

Vikki Pachera, who leads an executive search firm and previously worked at Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, advises reading the room. Take in all the details, from “superficial things like what people are wearing to what the relationships are, because a lot of organizations are political,” she says.

Paying attention to minutiae can have a big impact, particularly when figuring out how people like to communicate. Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School, recalls an instance at a previous management consulting job when a junior partner’s PowerPoint presentations weren’t landing with a client. The partner realized the client preferred memos, so he repackaged the content and watched it click. Alexander Wah, who joined a bank after graduating from college in 2019, had a similar realization at his first job. So he made a guide to his superiors’ individual formatting preferences. “Every time I would deliver something to each of those people, I would cross-check it,” says Wah, now the founder and chief investment officer of Prince Capital, who oversees interns and advises early-career workers.

“Teach yourself to be a lightning-fast learner,” Twersky adds. Being nimble is a big competitive advantage when the business landscape is shifting fast. A decade ago, the advice was “learn how to code, and now all these AI tools can partially do that for you,” he says. “No one knows what’s coming. No one knows what the future is. The biggest thing that you can do is be useful—and to do that, you need to be able to pick up and learn something fast.”

Just as millennials brought an intuitive mastery of social media, there’s a crop of college students who are as close to AI natives as we have, Wah says. Becoming versed in the newest efficiency techniques can help you distinguish yourself, and even put you in a position to educate those more senior than you.”

Read the full article at Bloomberg (Harvard affiliates have free access to Bloomberg through the Harvard libraries).