Back in university when I was in business school, I had a laboring job in the summer working at a milk processing plant. I ran filling machines, packed products in trays and on skids, sorted leaking milk packages, mixed products on the blender and basically did all the various jobs in the company’s production department. It was a good job in that it was a unionized environment and paid well as a result so I was able to fund university myself.
One regret I have with this job is that near the end of my tenure there when I was about to finish university, I should have made a better effort to introduce myself to some of the senior executives there and enquire about the possibility of working in the company post graduation. The company I worked for was in turn owned by one of the largest food processing companies in the country so there might have been some great opportunities available.
The thing is that I already knew that following graduation, I was going to move to New Zealand and start working there which is exactly what I did. Things worked out for me in that regard, too but in hindsight I wish I’d have taken the opportunity to network a bit with some people at the company even to keep in touch with while I was in New Zealand and when I ultimately returned home.
I think about one instance in particular that makes me want to kick myself. About 1 year before I graduated, there was a big project at the plant I worked at where a number of the packaging machines were being ripped out on a Saturday evening and reinstalled in a more organized fashion without any lost production time so that it would be ready for the start of production on the Monday morning.
On the Friday afternoon right before the project was going to start, the maintenance staff were already starting the work while production was still operating and the work was already well underway.
I was walking from the lunch room back to the production area when I literally ran into the President of the company. I’d never met him but had heard him speak at a previous company event and he seemed like an approachable person. He worked up in the office area and production was at the opposite end of the very large building we worked in so people like me didn’t have much of an opportunity to see him.
We made eye contact and said hi to each other and started talking as we took the long walk down the narrow hallway to the production area. I asked if he was going to look at the work being done and he said yes, that’s why he was checking it out. He jokingly asked me if the work was going to be done for the Monday deadline and I said that yes, it would be done. Notwithstanding the fact that I wasn’t actually working on the project! I had nothing to do with it but he asked an honest question and I gave him an honest answer. We continued walking and talked a bit more and then went our separate ways once we got to the entrance of the production area.
In hindsight, I wish I’d have at least introduced myself a bit more formally and basically given him a 30 second commercial about myself, that I was soon going to graduate from business school in the next year, and ask him who he’d suggest speaking with in the company about possible opportunities in the company once I graduated.
What would he have said in response?
At worst he may have suggested sending in a resume to their HR department but perhaps he’d have given me something better.
Maybe he would have suggested speaking with his assistant about getting some names to contact.
Maybe he’d have asked me for a resume to forward to someone.
Who knows? I’ll never know because I didn’t do it. I had a good name in the company with my bosses so I think I’d have had a good chance to stick with the company in some capacity. Again, I ended up moving overseas anyways and things worked out just fine but who knows what would have happened had I asked him for some advice regarding staying with the company fulltime?
