Why Being Good at School is Making Us Bad at Work
Over the past few years of hiring young people, something has become increasingly troubling and obvious to me: the school-to-work pipeline isn’t working.
Ask anyone who hires recent grads, and they’ll have some version of this story: bright-eyed candidates roll in with impressive credentials, high polish, and decent interviewing skills. You hire them. Things are great! Until they demonstrate a stunning inability to autonomously solve problems.
Across the labor market, employers are souring on some of our country’s best-educated students, managers are declaring that Gen Z is underprepared for the workforce, and even young employees are turning to each other to try to figure out why they’re struggling so much when, just years ago, they were navigating and succeeding in the most competitive academic landscape we’ve ever had in the U.S.
Some of their dysfunction is definitely courtesy of anxiety, entitlement, social media addiction, ennui, and idealism cocktail that afflicts our current batch of twenty-four-year-olds. But I also think there’s something broken beyond the wrinkles in the social fabric. The system that is supposed to prepare us for our launch into adulthood is leaving young people insecure and shockingly incompetent.
I don’t think it’s just that the school-to-work journey isn’t working for everyone; I struggle to find evidence of it working for anyone. Alarmingly, modern schooling is making young people actively bad at work.
School is not like work.
If I could reduce the many differences between school and work to one critical distinction, it would be this: at work, your job is to serve a customer, but at school, you are the customer.
Whether you enjoy the experience or not, school is engineered around you and your growth. It feels like work because it's challenging, and we use terms like “academic career" to liken it to employment since school is also a progressive journey where knowledge compounds into expertise. But whether you're paying for your education through tuition or taxes, you are, in fact, the paying consumer.
In contrast, the entire premise of work is that you’re part of a system designed to create value for someone else. Your job is to be useful and create value, regardless of how much value you personally derive in the process. I know that’s the capitalism speaking, but it’s also important for young people to understand: focusing on what you get out of your job instead of what it gets out of you is a surefire way to underdeliver.
The elision of school and work does a wild disservice to young professionals, causing them to burn out, check out, or simply fail. They’ve built a misplaced orientation toward hard work and bought into myths about success that felt true for seventeen years, but aren’t true outside of a classroom.
There are three of those school-implanted myths that I think it’s most important for young people to unlearn:
Myth #1: Being Smart Is Important
In school, intellect is both the currency and the goal. We test for it, sort by it, and reward students for it. Education is essentially a prolonged intelligence pageant where the kids who can best convince people they're the smartest reap the prize money. Smart is the whole point.
At work, being smart is table stakes. It makes your job easier and will make your coworkers take you seriously, but trying to constantly prove how smart you are will lead you down a path of wasting leaders’ time and confusing others.
I see this so often. I did this so often. When you’ve been told that the most important thing about you is how smart you are, you get conditioned to showcase your smarts in subtle (but annoying) and ultimately unproductive ways.
Smartness-obsessed employees overexplain simple concepts, produce overcooked but unusable deliverables, and spend hours dressing up decisions instead of making them. They hyperfocus on presenting work so that it shows off their intricate mindscape instead of keeping things quick, easy, and clear.
When I entered the workforce, I wish someone had told me that work projects are not like problem sets. You don’t get more points for showing your work if it means others have to spend more time absorbing details they don’t need. The output matters, but your winding, thoughtful journey to get there rarely does.
Instead of trying to prove that you’re smart (you already did… that’s how you got hired), know that people will be able to tell and focus instead on learning what’s most valuable where you are now. You might just find that in a sea of alleged geniuses, the most “important” person is the one who is willing to do the elbow-grease tasks that everyone else feels too smart for.
Myth #2: Failure is Fatal
Another misplaced belief that schools instill in young people is that failure is to be avoided at all costs. The increasingly hypercompetitive landscape of American education has exacerbated this myth, but it’s also built into the system. In school, a bad test at age eighteen is memorialized in the GPA you graduate with at twenty-one. When one bad class can be the difference between being eligible for certain jobs and graduate programs, why would someone risk taking a class they struggle with when all mistakes are archived and averaged?
In the workplace, that mindset is lethal. Most real jobs require making decisions with incomplete information, shipping before you’re ready, and earning wisdom from mistakes your peers aren’t willing to risk. Different industries and jobs certainly have different tolerance levels for failure (surgeons, this newsletter is, as always, definitely not about you), but in most jobs, getting ahead mandates taking risks that others won’t and failing at least a few times.
The young people I see at work today are terrified of this prospect. They’re hesitant to jump into unstructured projects, uninterested in solving problems that they aren’t certain they’ll be rewarded for, and desperate to be told they’re “good.” That’s all fine and well if you want to have a perfectly middling career, but these attitudes invariably cap people’s growth and keep them trapped in solving problems that most other people could also solve. The only way to be exceptional at work is to do something that other people either can’t or won’t. You have to be the exception. And the number one thing that will stop you from doing so is fear of failure.
You have to keep moving and keep reaching, even when you don’t feel bulletproof. And while school might keep the score of all the times it didn’t work out, at work, failures get converted into helpful learnings that aren’t stacked up against you.
Myth #3: Progress Always Looks Like Moving Forward
In school, progress looks an awful lot like a ladder: each year you advance, climb higher, take more challenging classes, solve more complex problems, cross classes off your requirements list, accumulate more accolades, and keep it moving.
Work is way messier. The rungs on the metaphorical ladder are often unevenly spaced. While school loops through annual cycles of moving forward, careers often involve many consecutive years of moving sideways, stepping backward to make a switch, or just staying still in one job or on one project without an annual graduation to say “you’re doing great.” Progress is won in small moments and lessons, in better relationships and microscopic battles, and yes, eventually, in promotions and pay raises, but just as often in redirection toward more suitable paths.
One of the hardest things for high-achieving students-turned-employees is adjusting to a world where there’s no guaranteed promotion or “great job!” waiting at the end of every year. Promotions, pay increases… they don’t work like moving from 8th grade to 9th. I’ve watched the passing of promotion cycles devastate students who feel like they’re supposed to be constantly graduating from the moment they’re in, leaving them trapped in the cycle of over-fixating on titles, jobs, and salaries.
Somewhere along the way, we “personal OKR-ed” our way into confusing measurable progress with meaningful growth. Young employees need to learn to navigate the unmarked, winding path that starts where schools stops.
Today, the kids who played the game exactly right all the way through their final graduation are struggling to play the work game with its ever-so-different rules and scorekeeping. Personally, I don’t know how to fix the education system to better prepare young people for the workforce. If you do, I highly suggest you get on that.
But a little bit of deprogramming and re-learning can go a long way in the absence of broader change. For now, I think we can all help by admitting to young people that the map to their academic success will not be the one that guides them through their careers.
Thanks,always, for reading. Talk soon.