Why graduates who know themselves end up in roles they love

The role fit question

Most graduates pick their first role on extrinsic markers. Prestige of the firm, salary, brand on the CV, whoever gets back to them first as they are job hunting. Then a few months in, some might start feeling less motivated.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report shows that when younger workers’ engagement falls, it falls because of items that signal misfit. Just 37% of younger employees say they have opportunities at work to learn and grow. They are 13 points less likely than older colleagues to feel someone at work cares about them as a person. And they are increasingly looking for new roles.

Growth, recognition, connection are what matters most to their engagement with work, it’s the fit-related items.  Pay and prestige are not where the gap appears.

Why fit matters

Fit should not be a luxury concern coming after pay and progression.

A 2024 study by Hakanen, Bakker and Turunen, analysing 11,468 employees across 87 organisations and following a subset over three years, identified the three job resources that most strongly predict work engagement: skill discretion (the chance to use and stretch what you can do), job feedback and team empowerment.

The cost of a mismatch shows up first as energy drain and loss of motivation. You stop being the person you were at university because the work does not call on tasks you enjoy doing. And you might change jobs but repeat the pattern because the next role was chosen on the same surface markers as the first.

The benefits compound in the other direction when the work draws on your natural preferences. It allows you to build expertise faster. You recover from effort faster. Your reputation forms around something you genuinely enjoy doing rather than a performance, which makes progressing in that domain easier.

Margerison and McCann, the researchers behind the Team Management Profile, called this cycle the Four Ps: preference leads to practice, practice leads to proficiency, proficiency brings pleasure and that pleasure deepens preference further.

What self-awareness means

Self-awareness gets used loosely. In a career context, it has two layers. The first is internal: knowing what kind of work pulls you in and what kind drains you. The second is external: noticing how you work with others, what your default behaviours look like under pressure, what your strengths and blind spots are.

The Team Management Profile frames this around four ways we differ at work: how we relate to others, how we gather information, how we make decisions and how we organise our work. Those four scales map onto eight Types of Work that any team needs to function well: Advising, Innovating, Promoting, Developing, Organising, Producing, Inspecting and Maintaining.

Here is the short definition of each work:

• Advising is gathering information so the right decisions can be made.
• Innovating is creating ideas and exploring new approaches.
• Promoting is championing those ideas and bringing people on board.
• Developing is taking promising ideas and turning them into workable plans.
• Organising is structuring how the work gets done and who does what.
• Producing is doing the work itself and finishing it to standard.
• Inspecting is checking, auditing and making sure quality holds up.
• Maintaining is keeping the standards in place over time so the work does not erode and employee remain satisfied.

Most people lean strongly into one, can stretch into two others quite easily, but the rest often takes effort. Knowing which is which allows you to make real choices.

Take an HR Coordinator role as an example. Here are two ad examples with the same job title but offering a very different experience leaning on different preferences.

Role A: “Coordinate end-to-end onboarding. Maintain accurate records in our HRIS. Process offer letters, manage compliance audits and own the monthly reporting pack for the leadership team. You will keep our HR rhythms running on time and to standard.”

Role B: “Build relationships across the business to bring our people strategy to life. Partner with hiring managers to attract talent. Run candidate experience events and champion our employer brand. You will be the visible face of HR for new starters and current employees alike.”

The first leans heavily on organising work, drawn to structure, deadlines and getting things done. The second depends on promoting work, and will fit someone drawn to relationship building, ideas and persuasion.

A graduate who picks Role A on title alone, when their preference sits closer to Promoting work, will often find themselves drained faster. While they will learn new skills and might evolve in their preferences, it might not be as motivating as the other role would have been nor lead to as much growth. In the worst cases, they might disengage.

How to develop self-awareness while you are still studying

Monitoring your energy and motivation level

Here are a couple of things you can do and test out before you graduate.

First, track your energy level when you do things. For two weeks, write down the tasks you do across study, part-time work and group projects. Be specific. For example:

• a problem you work through alone (Producing),
• drafting an essay outline (Developing),
• running a brainstorm with the group (Innovating or Promoting),
• proofreading the final document (Inspecting),
• running the group meeting and assigning roles (Organising),
• reading background cases and researching for context (Advising),
• keeping the group on top of deadlines week after week (Maintaining).

Mark each as energising, draining or neutral. You are looking for patterns, not single events. The tasks that consistently energise you are signal of preference. With a list written down in front of you, the patterns become easier to spot.

The impact of feedback

Asking for direct feedback after finishing group work can provide great insight as well. The two important questions you want answered are: what was easy about working with you, what was your best contribution.
In practice, asking for and giving feedback can be difficult. People can be reluctant to give it, be unsure what to say, and some answers might be unpleasant to hear. Usually, it’s best asking a pointed question leading to constructive answers. Here are examples of questions you can ask:

• If you were putting together a new team, what would you bring me in for?
• Where did you see me at my best?
• What do you think of as ‘my thing’ on this team?

You can also share your impressions and ask for validation.

What changes when you have a better idea of your preferences?

Self-awareness allows you to make better decisions for your future. You can choose the elective that develops a preference further. You can take an internship that lets you do work you enjoy.

It also changes how interviews go.  With self-awareness you can point at specific interests, tasks and processes rather than give generic abstract answers, such us where you think best, what kind of tasks energises you, where you are a strong team player. This grows your confidence and authority during an interview.

Preference and space for growth

You will not be a master of self-awareness coming out of university, nobody is, and more than that, you will continue growing and evolving throughout your life, which means your preferences will change along with each of your new roles and life stages. The point is to start the work now, while you have the structure of university to test things in low-stakes ways.
The graduates who arrive at their first role with a working theory of how they like to work do not avoid bad fits entirely, but they notice them sooner, learn from them faster and choose the next role with better clarity and knowledge about themselves. In the long run this helps you get towards roles you enjoy more and more.

The Team Management Profile is one of several tools used by organisations to make this kind of self-knowledge concrete but noticing what it is you do and think day-to-day goes a long way towards important self-awareness work.

References

Margerison, C. J. and McCann, D. Team Management Profile work preferences research and 8 Types of Work model. Team Management Systems.

Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Hakanen, J. J., Bakker, A. B. and Turunen, J. (2024). The relative importance of various job resources for work engagement: A concurrent and follow-up dominance analysis. SAGE journal article https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444211012419