Learn Basic Office Skills

Jim Durbin is an employment blogger and former recruiter whose claim to expertise including once being a college student and graduate.
I hired over 20 fresh college graduates from 1999-2001 as a recruiter in Los Angeles. Their skills and aptitude varied, as did the pedigree of the institutions they attended, but a few things stick in my head to this day as a cautionary tale.
The following is only anecdotal, but the more distinguished the school attended, the less likely the graduate had mastered basic office skills.
One young lad from Berkeley is probably the best story. We hired him because he was smart, ambitious, negotiated well, and well, he went to Berkeley. There was a strategic (and wrong-headed) assumption that we could improve the quality of the office personnel by increasing the number of people who graduated from private and top-ranked colleges.
It was insulting to the number of highly successful state school graduates we had in the company, but it was a mistake many companies made (and still make). Anyway, our young graduate was a recuiter, and back in those days, we made paper copies of the resumes that people brought in.
The copier we had was relatively new, but pretty straightforward. It had a top-loading section for automatic copies and you could lift the lid for manual copies. It also had the occasional problem of jamming….

I’m on the phone and in my office looking out at my recruiter as he stood up and went to the copier with a sheet of paper in his hand.
He puts the paper on top of the copier, then jumps back like he’d been electrocuted. His abrupt action made ever head in the office turn, but no one said a word as it looked like he was alright.
The graduate, took a step forward and like a primeval caricature of man begins darting his head back and forth like he’s smelling the copier. He stops and scratches his head (truly, he did that). He goes back to his smelling, and then hits the side of the copier with his hand. I can hear him muttering, “Come on, Come on, Where is it?” and at this point walk hang up the phone and walk out of my office to observe closer.
The Berkeley-educated graduate begins to open up the machine, pulling on levers and pulling back trays and putting his hand into the gears, looking for his lost resume. After a pretty thorough job of dismantling the copier (which he did because he had seen me unjam the copier plenty of times), he finally shakes his head and turns around, only to see me standing behind him.
“What’s the problem,” I said cheerfully.
“Copier’s jammed,” he replied.
“Let me take a look at it,” I answered.
I stepped forward and looked at what he had accomplished. He really did a good job of breaking the copier down, and he was right – the paper was not inside the machine. Confused, I lifted the lid. There on top of the copier, ready to copy, was the paper.
The young genius had set the paper in the automatic feeder on top of the copier, and like, a good copier, it sucked the resume through the feeder onto the glass of the copier (That explained why he jumped back – he didn’t expect the copier to take his resume).
We all had a good chuckle over it, and I fixed the copier and pressed the start button. To this day, when working with college graduates for positions, I always walk them through the basics of the copier, the fax, and for the ones from really fancy schools, the coffee machine.
Basic office skills make a big difference in your career. Make sure you learn them before the copier monster embarasses you in front of the entire office.

-Jim Durbin