In my past work as a career adviser for Ph.D. students and postdocs, I would often get to know folks at one of the most stressful points in their lives. They were navigating immense uncertainty, seeking answers to questions like: Will anyone hire me? Where will I live? How will I obtain visa sponsorship? If I move, will my partner be able to find a job?

As I coached them through the steps of career exploration and finding, applying for, negotiating and accepting a job, I would witness these students and postdocs gradually gaining confidence, clarity and excitement for what was coming next. Often, several months to a year later, I’d run into them and ask how the new job was going, looking forward to once again sharing in their enthusiasm. However, their mood would be different this time. They might say something like, “It’s … interesting,” or “There’s a lot to learn.”

I remember this period well from my own first post-Ph.D. job. The satisfaction of gainful employment in an exciting new field quickly gave way to other feelings: frustration at being a beginner again, confusion about how to perform new tasks and uncertainty about whether I’d made the right professional choice. I found myself missing my former colleagues and routines.

Since that first new job, I’ve started (and wrapped up!) several more new positions. And with the benefit of that perspective, I can say that the good news—or bad, depending on your point of view—is that those feelings are completely normal. (One 2023 poll of workers who had recently started a new job found that 46 percent had moments when they regretted accepting the job, and 65 percent experienced self-doubt and feelings of incompetence.)

But I also know that there are strategies I can use to help boost my confidence in myself and my new job—and also help my new manager feel confident in me. If you’re dealing with new-job jitters, too, here are my top three tips.

Approach New Relationships as Informational Interviews

The tasks you accomplish at your job do matter. But if you think about the arc of your whole career, in my experience, the relationships you build matter even more. Your professional reputation is built one person at a time, and the smallest early gestures of courtesy, collegiality and competence can go a long way toward smoothing your path for the rest of your time at your job.

One strategy I’ve found useful is to work with my supervisor to identify a list of key collaborators I should meet early on and to schedule 30-minute meet-and-greets with them in my first few months on the job. If possible, it’s very useful to meet collaborators before you need something from them, so that your first conversation can be relationship-building rather than transactional.

I think of these meet-and-greets as informational interviews, and ask questions like:

• How long have you been here (this company/office/team)? What brought you here?
• How do you typically work with the person in my role?
• What are you hoping I’ll do in this role?
• What should I know, in order to collaborate effectively with you?
• What’s your favorite part of the place where we work? What’s fun to do here? Any hidden gems I should know about? (Recommendations for eateries, lunchtime walks, events, etc.)

Note that the more personal questions (“What brought you here?” “What’s fun to do here?”) can be just as important as the professional ones. Are they fellow recent arrivals to your organization or longtime veterans? Do they hate lunchtime meetings because they prefer to use that time for marathon training? Are they design enthusiasts who care deeply about a document’s font? Remembering these kinds of details can help you collaborate better in the future.

Have 5 Key Conversations With Your Manager

Having navigated a number of job transitions now, I know that I will someday want to ask my current manager to be a reference for an entirely different job. What do I want them to be able to say about me as a colleague and employee? What will I need to accomplish in order for them to be able to glowingly recommend me? I recommend proactively spending your first few months aligning with your new manager, to ensure that you achieve your goals as well as theirs.

A great tool for this are the five conversations described in the book The First 90 Days by Michael H. Watkins. The five conversations that Watkins recommends, to achieve this alignment, are:

1. The Situation Conversation: How does your boss see the current state of your team/organization? How did the team/organization get to this state? What are the current challenges? (This is so helpful to ensure you don’t spend your time early on fixing things that your boss feels aren’t broken, or criticizing things that your boss is very enthusiastic about!)
2. The Expectations Conversation: What constitutes success, and how will it be measured? (Working with your boss to write down specific goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days can be very helpful! Your goals for the first 30 days might simply be things like completing required trainings, meeting new colleagues and getting set up with systems and recurring meetings.)
3. The Style Conversation: How will you and your boss communicate daily? (What’s on Slack or Gchat, what’s handled via email, what’s in person?) What are your work styles? How often should you report back on progress? Which decisions require sign-off? What are their communication pet peeves?
4. The Resources Conversation: Where does the money that funds your work (and your salary!) come from? What resources are available, hard to find, or totally unavailable? How do you get them? Is this adequate for the goals you’ve set? If not, what will you do? (Note that “resources” can mean money, but also things like meeting space, office supplies, administrative or information technology support, or snacks. I’ve been surprised that often, what’s easily available in one organization requires moving heaven and earth at another!)
5. The Personal Development Conversation: What role do you hope this job will play in the arc of your career? Where is your boss in their own career journey? How can you help each other? What are your boss’s goals for your development, and which of your strengths are they excited to use?

These “conversations” won’t happen in a single one-to-one check-in with your boss; rather, they will unspool over the course of your first days and months. But if you’re able to even touch on each of these conversations early on in your new job, you will be arming yourself with the information you need to be successful in the long term.

Start Crafting Your Job From the Very Beginning

My final tip is to take advantage of the early days in your job to start communicating with your manager about the intersection of what you’re good at, what you love to do and what your job requires. Finding that sweet spot should be a goal for both you and your manager, as it will hopefully enable you to thrive in your role for a long time to come.

To that end, I want to provide one last technique, inspired by the “Good Work Journal” from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s book Designing Your New Work Life: It’s what I call the “Friday Summary.” For the first few weeks, try sending your boss a quick wrap-up message at the end of each week, including:

• One thing you learned
• One thing you produced
• One thing you’re looking forward to and/or a strength you’re excited to use

As an example, it could look like this:

“Hi, boss! It’s been a great first week. I looked through the sample agendas you mentioned, and I feel like I have a good handle on our approach to stakeholder meetings. As you requested, I took a shot at drafting the agenda for next week (see below) and look forward to discussing at our one-to-one. Facilitating those meetings will be fun for me; I really enjoy getting to work with groups in these settings! Wishing you a good weekend.”

Starting a new job is a skill in itself—and like any other skill, it simply gets better with practice. So have patience with yourself! Little by little, without us even noticing, one day a new job becomes simply a job—and each job is just one of many chapters in the story of our careers.