How to Prepare for Your First Day at a New Job

Congratulations on landing a new job! Now, it’s time to impress your co-workers and, more importantly, your new boss when you arrive for work.

Here’s how to prepare for your first day at a new job.

Get the Right Clothes

You might have followed some sensible networking tips to land your new job. One of the ways that you became a successful in-person networker is by dressing for the part. To continue to be successful, you’ll need to keep on dressing for success.

Even if your new job is business casual or doesn’t have anything resembling a dress code, you’ll find that appearances still matter. Simply put, if you don’t care about your appearance, you don’t care about your influence.

Go out and buy the classiest clothes suitable for your new place of employment. If everybody is dressing business casual, make sure that you’re wearing the classiest business casual attire of anyone at the company. If the company has a more professional dress code, make sure you look like you belong on the cover of GQ.

You’ll find that your appearance is a factor that will dictate how well you do with your company.

Don’t Bother Packing a Lunch

You might have read some very sage advice on a personal finance website about bringing your lunch to work instead of eating out. For your first day on the job, though, you’re better off using apps to help organize money than cutting back on the “eating out” expense.

Why? Because your new coworkers and/or your boss will likely want to take you out to lunch. You probably won’t even have to pay for it yourself. However, if you are required to buy your lunch, be sure to have money handy.

It’s probably a good idea to be ready to eat out with co-workers every now and then, anyway. Going to lunch with co-workers is like networking and it’s a great way to develop professional relationships.

Be Ready for Small Talk

To repeat a theme that’s been emphasized here more than once already, it’s important that you keep networking even after you’ve already landed your job. That’s because you never know what’s going to happen in the future and you’ll be glad you’ve developed good business relationships if you’re ever in need of work again.

On your first day of work, you’ll want to leave a good first impression. Be ready to engage in small talk with your new colleagues. Fill your head with subjects to talk about (write them down and memorize them if you have to). Be ready to shine with your interpersonal skills from Day 1.

Prepare to Arrive Early

On your first day on the job, you shouldn’t just arrive “on time.” Instead, you should arrive very early. To that end, make sure you get to bed early and set two alarms so that you’re sure to be up bright and early.

Now that you’ve got a job, it’s time to make a great impression with your colleagues and your boss. Ensure that you’re fully prepared for your first day on the job so that you’ll be successful.