The People Side of Work

A recent graduate looked through job descriptions and found, in posting after posting, a reason she might already be out of the running.

She had finished school two weeks earlier. The search had barely begun, and already the postings asked her to measure herself by years of experience that arrive only after a first job.

She had plenty of company, each at a different stage of the same climb. On May 26, The City Tutors and Kingsborough Community College brought them together with people who had found their way in: Resorts World New York City, Flik Hospitality Group, and others in entrepreneurship and entertainment.

Among the learners, the worry took a different form for each. For Nisrat, it lived in the postings that listed years she had yet to earn, read by people she would meet only on paper. For others, it sat in the first message to a recruiter. One Kingsborough learner, a 21-year-old enlisted Marine, brought the question to its simplest form.

He had learned discipline and responsibility. Now he wanted to know how discipline and responsibility could carry him toward work.

He asked Matthew, Director of Community Development at Resorts World New York City:

Where do I start?

Matthew had been in nursing school, worked in finance, spent years as a stockbroker, and later moved into community outreach. His answer treated a career as something a person builds in motion: choose something that gives you information, study the field, talk to people, use the resources around you, and pay attention to what the beginning reveals.

Around the room and on Zoom, the other mentors met the same worry from their own corners of working life.

Lisa Marie, a recruiter at Flik Hospitality Group, placed it in the first message and the first introduction. “Don’t just come through like, ‘Hey, I need a job,’” she told learners. “Let’s make it a conversation.”

Ava, from Warner Bros., carried it into entertainment, where preparation and confidence shape how someone enters a room before a single line of work has been seen. She spoke about bias and ageism as forces that change how a room receives a person, and she told learners to prepare before they walk in: know where you are, know what you bring, and keep enough belief in your own voice to use it.

Matthew set it inside Resorts World’s community work, where communication is the job itself. Learners asked what that looks like day to day, and his answer moved from students to partners, from food pantries to neighborhood projects. The lesson was flexibility: pay attention to who is in front of you, understand what they need, and adjust while holding to the larger purpose of the work.

The answers began to gather. Each mentor, from a different corner of working life, kept returning learners to the same handful of moves, and those moves gave shape to situations the room already knew: a hard conversation, an intimidating posting, a first step into a field, a moment of pressure.

Then the learners began to fit it to their own lives.

Shengjie, two years past a Baruch MBA, took up the communication that had run through the answers and gave it his own name: “active listening with empathy,” most of all when the message is difficult. For him the lesson was simple: listen closely, speak clearly, and help people stay steady when the conversation turns hard.

Nisrat, the Fordham graduate from the opening, left with a new way to see the search. The first page of LinkedIn postings had made it feel overwhelming, each listing prompting the same question about whether she had enough experience. The advice turned the search into something to move through: read past the first page, keep looking when a listing gives you pause, and read each requirement as a description of the work itself.

Jade, a Kingsborough ASAP student, was back at the entry point: how do you get a foot in the door while still early in a field? What she took away ran along the same line as the rest of the afternoon: research a few industries, look for openings or internships, keep testing what fits. Starting, she could see, was a way of gathering information.

Rubiya’s question about leadership under pressure opened the theme wider: stay calm, name the problem, fix on the outcome, draw on the people around you, ask for help. The people side of work, she could see, includes knowing when to lean on others.

Another learner raised “workplace character”: how you present yourself, how you build knowledge, how you become someone a room recognizes when you walk in. It was the point the mentors had circled all afternoon. People read your preparation, your questions, your listening, and your follow-through before they know the full range of what you can do.

Ava closed on the reminder that every learner carries a different story. Some were graduates. Some were still in school. Some were searching for a next step. She told them to research, prepare, find their voice, and walk into rooms with confidence.

By the end of the afternoon, the opening question had a sharper answer.

Where do I start?

Start with what you already carry. Learn to explain it. Ask what the work requires. Use the resources around you. Talk to people who can show you how a field works from the inside.

The first step comes into view once learners can put direct questions to people who have already learned to move through those rooms.