The day after graduation: where our story truly begins

What happens after graduation? It is a simple, almost trivial question, yet it carries all the intensity of a moment of transition. Graduation is a milestone — yes, of course it is — and yet the real chapter, the one that decides how the years to come will be written, begins the very next day. That is the moment when the skills accumulated at the desks and the connections built in the corridors stop being a theoretical asset and become the raw material with which to build a career, a venture, a professional identity.

This is the reflection that opens the message of Daniela Pavan, coordinator of the Alumni community at the Venice School of Management, in a video where she invites former students, current students and soon-to-be graduates to look beyond the graduation ceremony itself. Because there is a piece of data worth taking seriously: according to LinkedIn, the generation entering the job market today will change employers and professional trajectories twice as often as the previous one.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, coined a thought-provoking metaphor to describe this intensified pace of change: the jungle gym. No more linear ladder, no more career with a single vertical direction. Today’s career looks much more like a climb that starts on a clear trajectory, then moves sideways, then pauses — to catch breath, to reflect, to choose where to truly go next.

In such a mobile landscape, what makes the difference is not just the degree itself, but also the network of relationships and the quality of the skills that travel with us along the journey. This is where community comes in: VSM Alumni is much more than a list of former students. It is a living, active community that consciously chooses to put to work the ambitions, ideas and connections born inside the Management classrooms to generate new value. Out of those bonds, projects, collaborations and sometimes full-fledged ventures take shape. Encounters happen that shift trajectories and open doors we could never have imagined opening on our own.

Daniela Pavan tells this story with the voice of someone who sat at those very desks. “I studied here too”, she recalls, and in that sentence lies the most authentic meaning of the Alumni project: giving back, a bridge between those who have already walked the path and those who are about to set out. A promise that the bond with the business school and with the university does not end with the handing over of the diploma, but becomes the very foundation on which to build one’s future.

And the future of VSM Alumni is being written today on this very vision: the day after graduation is the beginning of an open-air gym, where we all climb better together.