Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Anticipatory Socialization

Within the process of socialization is the first stage of anticipatory socialization. In this stage, future employees gain knowledge about the world of work in general as well as more specific information about the company they are interested in working for. In our book, Eisenberg et. al outlines these two types of learning as vocational and organizational.

In my life, I have learned the most about careers and work from my father. Mainly, I was instilled with a strong work ethic and the notion that if I want to get somewhere in this world then I really have to fight for it. So far, I think this advice has served me well as I can already see the benefits of my hard work.

As far as my current job at Nordstrom, I learned alot about the company before applying for the internship by not only reading articles about it, but also experiencing the store for myself. I have always been a big fan of the store and the fact that whenever I went there people looked generally happy made me think that it's not a bad place to work. Although our book makes the point that our expectations of a company are often 'inflated and unrealistic' I think this time my anticipatory socialization was pretty spot on!

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