Walked into my first Nokia office in Kolkata in 2006. No mentor. No map. Just instinct and a list of mistakes nobody warned me about.
My father had never worked in a corporate office. My mother didn’t know what a project manager did.
Nobody in my family had taken this path before me. There was no one to call when something felt off. No one to ask: “Is this normal? Am I reading this room right?”
I was on my own. And for the first few years, I paid for it.
Not in performance — my work was solid. In the invisible game. The one nobody tells you about when you join your first corporate job.
I didn’t know that speaking up in a meeting mattered more than the 10 hours of preparation I’d done for it.
I didn’t know that “let’s connect offline” was often corporate code for “your idea has merit but you haven’t built enough credibility yet for me to back it in public.”
I didn’t know that the real decisions — about who gets promoted, who gets the high-visibility project, who gets recommended — were rarely made in the meetings I was attending.
I thought I was playing chess. I was playing a completely different game. And I didn’t know the rules existed.
Here’s what took me years to learn — and what I’d tell any first-gen professional today:
The meeting before the meeting is the real meeting.
Decisions in large organisations are rarely made live in a room. They’re pre-sold in corridors, over chai, on phone calls. Learn who influences whom and have that conversation before the formal one.
Credibility is built in small moments, not big ones.
The email you replied to promptly. The commitment you kept when it didn’t seem to matter. The risk you flagged before it became a problem. Nobody announces they’re watching. But they always are.
Your manager’s boss matters more than you think.
Your manager advocates for you. But your manager’s boss decides. Know who that person is. Find legitimate reasons to be visible to them — not for politics, for your career.
Ask for the feedback nobody is volunteering.
Especially in your first two years. “What’s one thing I could be doing differently?” unlocks information no one will give you unsolicited. Most people are waiting to be asked.
Find one person who plays the game well and watch them closely.
Not to copy them. To decode what they understand that you don’t yet.
The corporate world was not designed to explain itself to first-gen professionals. But the rules are learnable. You just have to know they exist first.
Slow down. Level up.
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