I was a student for many years (5 years of undergrad, 2.5 years of grad school), and I became very comfortable with always being able to look at the syllabus and my grade and know what I needed to do and how well I was performing. Work isn’t like that. Like I think is normal, I get a performance review once a year. I find this unsettling, because even though I come in and do decent work, I still often feel like I’m doing something “wrong” and worry that I’m secretly on the cusp of being fired. Folks who have maybe been working for longer than I have, how do you feel and stay confident in your work?
My advice would be that every time you don’t feel confident, communicate that and try to get more information.
If doing that open communication gets you fired, it will lead to a better workplace where you can try again.
If you’re in a company culture that will support you, then exposing your feelings of low confidence will bring information to you that you can use to increase your competence, and it will also signal to your management that you need performance signals in order to calibrate your efforts.
I once quit a company because I thought I was about to be fired and didn’t want the firing on my resume. It was a small company, and the CEO was desperate to understand why I was quitting. Eventually my cover story about “oh it’s not right this and that” yielded to me telling the truth that I had tried to get ahead of a firing, and you know what he said?
“We think you’ve been an excellent employee and it’s obvious to me that we haven’t done a good enough job of communicating that to you.”
Sometimes a culture is truly bad, and totally incapable of supporting its employees. Other times a culture is just getting rusty in terms of providing those signals.
It’s normal, even in professional adult life, to need signals in order to feel confident in any kind of relationship.
That company was making the same mistake with me that I’ve made in some relationships: assuming that “the love” was obvious and a given. In my case, I should have bought my ex flowers more. In their case, they should have said “good job” more often.
I’d say the main thing then is to acknowledge that you need signals, understand that it’s normal and healthy of you to need those signals, and finally to understand that sometimes a company’s just being a little lazy about sending them. Other times the company is actively, purposefully, or possibly unconsciously but inescapably, keeping you sweating as a matter of policy.
In terms of differentiating between those two — company that’s slipping a little in terms of support, or a company whose very nature is antithetical to support — in both of those your best move is the same: tell them that you don’t feel confident, and that you need occasional positive feedback in order to feel secure in the job.