Infographic: Startup vs. Corporate Life

Everyone is asking themselves the same question – startup or corporation? Maybe this is the reason why lately, an apparent rivalry between these two working environments seems to have emerged. You might want to work in a corporation, but does that suit you? The same goes for startups!

How can you know what is the best choice for your career? The answer is that you can’t. You can’t really tell what is more beneficial for your professional life, especially if you have just landed in the working field.

What you can do, however, is to know what each of these two working places presumes and check your level of compatibility with them. From there on, you can only follow your intuition and see for yourself which is the environment you can thrive in.

If you are asking yourself whether  these two concepts are completely opposite to each other, allow me to interrupt you right from the start and tell you that they couldn’t be more different! How contrasting are they really? Let’s take a look!

#1 Proactivity

Since in startups all the work is produced through individual initiatives, it only makes sense that it is more demanding. So, if you are not an initiator, maybe a corporation would be a more suitable choice for your career.

In the corporate life everything is less demanding because the work is generated by clients or by the managers. The only thing the employee has to do is to solve them, while meeting some previously established objectives and targets.

#2 Your Impact As An Employee

Compared to a corporation, startups are small businesses. This is why they are very vulnerable and every employee has its own powerful impact. It only takes one employee’s failure to drag down the whole company, just like one successful employee is enough to lift it up.

In what corporations are concerned, things are totally different. Sometimes, performing your tasks in a clean and efficient manner or making mistakes might not even count. You can be easily substituted.

#3 Flexibility

Everyone knows that startups are all about flexibility. Being able to adapt to a series of unexpected situations and managing them successfully, especially at the beginning of a startup’s life. More specifically, one day you can be a salesperson and the next one a coder! How exciting is that?

Anyhow, as much adrenaline as you might feel right now, you might want to chill down because corporations are all about being quiet. You are given a certain area in the development of a product or service and you are in charge of it. You might be a part of a team or not. The point is that every task is repetitive and, therefore, much stable. You become an expert and you get rid of volatility and stress.

#4 Learning New Things

When working in a startup you end up learning a lot of things. On your own! You may handle multiple tasks at once and they all might change unexpectedly. The chances of receiving training are quite rare, so you are the only responsible for your professional upbringing.

Working in a corporation, on the other hand, will provide you with everything you need in order to grow. Unlike a startup where the learning curve will remain steep, in a corporation this curve will start steep and slowly, but surely become flat.

#5 Being A Part Of The Team

As mentioned earlier, in a startup every employee’s work has a powerful impact on the rest of the team. Shortly said, if you fail, so does your team. If you are successful, so will your team be.

In the corporate jungle your work and whether you reach the targets or not, don’t have almost any impact on your co-workers. The unpleasant part is that the competition is so high and fiercely, that some people might take credit for their colleagues’ work. That’s quite of a jungle, isn’t it?

#6 The Income

Due to the fact that startups are small businesses, they can be quite risky, especially in early stages. The amount of resources is limited, so you cannot expect a high income. Moreover, it is definitely going to be lower than the average income on the market, so you will probably need to make some adjustments in your lifestyle. It may sound a bit discouraging, but think about it this way: when the company succeeds, not only will your income rise, but so will your sense of achieving something really important to you!

As you might expect, the corporations have a standardized income that is brought to the average level of the market. It may vary according to the market’s value and it can also go through some minor changes as you advance. However, remember that hierarchies are very rigid, so your progress will be very slow.

#7 The Commitment

A corporation could easily give you a sense of order in life. You can leave work when the program ends and find your tasks the very next morning, just the way you left them.

The downside of a startup is that you get almost no breaks. If you really want to make it work, forget about vacation days, sick days or simply not being there. Things depend on you, as every employee’s work is intertwined with others’. So, if you decide not to do a task today, for instance, there is a high chance that your decision will interfere with a deadline your colleague has to meet until 4 PM that same day!

#8 The Benefits

The atmosphere in a startup is very relaxed. The employees enjoy a wide array of pleasant activities, free food or drinks. What they cannot enjoy, as opposed to larger companies, are transportation reimbursements, fees to attend a conference and so on.

Working in a corporation will ensure you some more significant perks. You will get life insurance, gym membership and many other benefits. As a matter of fact, these big organizations have the tendency to design their hiring positions around these advantages, since it gets harder and harder to find the right kind of talent.

#9 Office Administration

Startups are all about emphasizing the performance. Getting out the comfort zone, quickly adapting to any changes and being flexible, while handling a great deal of tasks are real performance indicators. Managing these successfully could get you promoted in almost no time.
Corporations are, once again, completely the opposite. They have well-established hierarchies and getting from one stage of the corporate ladder to the one above could take years.

#10 The Recognition

Working in a famous corporation could turn out to be very useful for your future career opportunities. Let’s face it! It looks good on a resume! Brand recognition has a heavy weight on anyone’s CV.

With startups it’s a bit harder to get this kind of recognition, but not impossible. Usually, when they hit an important milestone, they do not become recognized brands instantly. It might take years until people will get to acknowledge a startup and automatically identify its activity.

Working for a startup or for a corporation is a decision you need to make according to your personality traits and preferences. Maybe it’s better for you to try out both of these systems and see which one fits you best! Or, maybe you have it all figured it out by now and know exactly what to do! Either way, it’s up to you to make this call! So, what’s it gonna be?

Infographic via 99designs

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