Why the education system let me down
'Starting again' has been HARD, and my education didn't help
I ‘started’ again in my late 30’s, and I feel like the education system hasn’t helped me!
New career, new country, entrepreneur instead of employee. (I discussed this a little in a previous post).
“I started over” – It’s such a short and simple sentence that hides a volume of challenges, emotions, experience, change, frustrations, excitement, life lessons and character building.
It was a gradual shift for me, from employee to entrepreneur, from perfect student to rebel, from accountant to creative, and from fixed to growth mindset.
I feel that my education and what I was taught about how the world worked, got in the way of my journey as opposed to helping it.
Shifting my learning and beliefs about all this has been really tough, and fascinating.
Terrifying. Exciting. Really exciting. But really terrifying!
My anger at 'The System'
As I progressed along the path of entrepreneurship and moved further away from employment, I got angrier and angrier with everything I felt I had been taught. I increasingly felt like I was missing vital skills and thought processes that would’ve helped make this journey easier.
Instead, I felt like I had been given a bunch of skills and beliefs about the education system and success that seemed to be holding me back, and as time progressed, seemed more and more out-of-date for the world I was finding myself in. I was frustrated that I hadn’t been better prepared for all this. Worse, I feel I had been prepared and ‘programmed’ for a totally different world, a totally different career experience, and one that doesn’t seem to exist anymore, at least not in the way I believed it had.
I discussed this a little in a previous post ‘Is the social contract between employees and employers broken?’
What was I angry about?
Here’s a brief overview of some of the things I slowly realised I needed to reconsider, rethink, relearn, UNlearn, and change:
The Education System
The education system gave me a fixed mindset, taught me that mistakes are bad, and didn’t teach me the skill or awareness of the possibility of creating my own opportunities and career.
It taught me that I needed to remember a lot of detail, get answers RIGHT as fast as possible, and get good results.
Then I’d be more eligible for the next level of education, and eventually have a ‘good education’ which would mean I could ‘wait’ for / find companies to recognise my abilities and offer me opportunities.
Don't change your mind
Society pushes you to decide what you want to ‘do with your life’ as quickly as possible.
There are direct and indirect penalties for changing your mind, for exploring and changing. “Changing jobs or study fields looks bad on CV’s / makes you look flaky, like you lack direction”.
In reality, the only way we can truly find what excites us is by exposure to different things. We may WANT to be doctors when we’re in primary school, until we discover the joys of accounting in high school. That may seem exciting until somehow we’re exposed to the world of computer programming, which may also seem like heaven, until we’re exposed to something else we hadn’t known existed. Why would it be considered a bad thing to change your mind, based on new information and experiences?
However, we seem to be required to make these huge decisions with little more than school experience and the limited set of career options and possibilities that were presented. And then STICK to these decisions for fear of being considered ‘flaky’ or directionless, and especially for fear of what ‘future employers’ might think of your CV! (See below)
The CV Mindset
We’re taught to think about what all our decisions, results, and choices will look like on a CV. “What will someone else think of your life and choices?”
This is vastly different from the thinking of “What’s best for me and my future? What is it that I really want from life?”
The Employee Mindset
We’re taught to value and develop traits that are predominantly beneficial to employers.
Teamwork, loyalty, work ethic, ‘going the extra mile’, subservience… these are predominantly valuable for employers, but don’t further your own PERSONAL goals and development.
What I was never taught were skills and traits that would allow me to create my OWN opportunities.
We’re taught at school, university (the education system in general) and by society in general, to develop skills and traits that will make us good employees. This is slowly shifting with the massive explosion in the popularity of entrepreneurship, but fundamental education and societal infrastructure still pushes an ’employee mindset’.
Google ‘Employee Mindset‘ and browse some of the results. Makes for fascinating reading!
Emotional Intelligence
(This is a more controversial one, because we’re hearing more and more that emotional intelligence is more important than intellectual intelligence… so bear with my explanation here! To be clear, I DO believe that emotional intelligence is important, I’m referring here to how we’re expected to USE it)
A definition of Emotional Intelligence: The ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.
We’re basically taught that emotional intelligence in the workplace is about keeping our problems to ourselves, and to make sure that everything we do in the workplace is ‘professional’.
All the bits of the definition are great, but the fundamental purpose is to make things better for the company and clients, pretty much regardless of the impact it has on our own well-being. Leave your ‘personal life and issues’ at home. ‘Manage your stress (whether work-related or personal), communicate work-related issues effectively (but keep your own problems to yourself), empathise with the company’s staff, management and clients, without expecting empathy in return, and overcome challenges yourself. (asking for empathy and help is generally seen as an indication of incompetence. Not explicitly, of course, but few people are ‘rewarded’ for raising workplace issues that impact the well-being of employees)
All of this is so that the company never has to worry about you as a human being, and can focus only on what’s good for the company. The company wants to be confident that you will put the well-being of their clients and themselves ahead of your own, should a conflict ever arise.
Managing issues means the company doesn’t have to.
Compliance, Conformity and Competence
My absolute belief was that education would be the ‘thing’ that makes me successful. It will be the difference between ‘making something of myself or not’.
(Robert Kiyosaki calls it ‘Worshipping at the alter of education’)
Now I see the education system more as an institution that pushes the importance of these 3 c’s, again, for the benefit of employers, as opposed to individuals.
The value of the ‘piece of paper’ comes down to what EMPLOYERS believe that piece of paper says about you and your abilities. Sure, part of that is the technical work and content itself, but if you HAVE that technical knowledge from work experience or other verifiable means… why isn’t that recognised the same way? What ELSE does your piece of paper say to employers?
- Compliance – You’re able to follow instructions and do what you’re told on a long-term basis. Subjects, knowledge, exams, the hierarchy of the education system… you’re studying what you’re told to, how you’re told to, in a hierarchical environment
- Conformity – You’re able to conform to the system. What they expect of you, want from you, how they expect you to behave, the types of things you are and aren’t ‘allowed’ to challenge. You’re ‘the same’ as all the other people who studied the same thing… they ‘know what they’re getting’ when they hire someone with that particular piece of paper
- Competence – Someone else has measured and verified your competence in specific areas, and they’ve been formally assessed. This removes the responsibility from the employer to train you or make sure you’re able to do the job. That responsibility is handed over to the educator.
I seem a little 'bitter', right?!
If I had read this a few years ago, I’d have assumed that the person writing it was a bit of a failure in the education system and had some bad experiences that made them resent and hate the corporate world. It sounds negative and pessimistic.
This blog tells you more about me, my qualifications, what I do etc, so you can decide for yourself whether you feel I fall into that category or not! I personally don’t believe that I do, because I achieved all the classic ‘success’ milestones – Degree, Post-graduate Degree, Professional Qualification, Management levels, Executive Level, and self-sufficient entrepreneur working online, completely location-neutral, in coffee shops and beach bars in gorgeous Montenegro!
So, what caused this?
I slowly developed these feelings as I came up against different challenges in my journey that I realised I was unprepared for. As I struggled with and through them, I had to question WHY I was struggled, what I needed to do to get past it, and that made me compare what I was learning to what I had been taught in the past.
Example:
From age 7 – 28, I was focussed on my ‘career plan’. I spent most of that time with my eyes on the chartered accounting qualification, almost obsessively. This is generally praised as determined, showing maturity and a sense of direction.
In a way, it was as though once I got those letters behind my name, once I’d gone through the education system, it would all be easier, as though all the hard work was now done and I could enjoy the benefits of all those sacrifices. Spoiler Alert: Things get tougher… in different ways!
As I neared the end of my qualification process, I realised that I needed to decide what was next. The world was supposedly laid out at my feet… but I didn’t know which way to go. I couldn’t negotiate for my own benefit, didn’t know how to ‘sell’ myself, and was worried that although I may be qualified now, most jobs I’d move into would be doing stuff that I hadn’t actually done before! I’d spent so many years following the instructions of people who told me what to study, how to study, where to work, what to do… how was I now supposed to make these decisions on my own? What was the ‘right’ path for me? And of course, I was terrified of a path with no ‘clear’ end goal. All I knew was how to work towards a really specific goal!
I'm not bitter, I promise!
(Now that I’ve given a little more context to why and how I started feeling like this, let’s go back to the ‘stuff’ itself.)
Nothing I’ve said above is ‘negative’ in itself. It’s just that the focus is on COMPANY benefit, over PERSONAL benefit.
Read them again with that idea in mind. I don’t ‘hate’ companies or employers, or heaven forbid, education and learning! (Note that I talk about the education SYSTEM). I’m just pointing out that a lot of what I was taught to value and emulate was from the perspective of what’s important to a company. I find it interesting that these concepts are instinctively perceived as negative, as though anything we discuss that’s NOT in favour of companies, must be bad. You don’t like working in a team? The horror! You don’t really agree with the “go the extra mile” philosophy? Oooh, failure ahead!
What does this mean for you?
Working towards a qualification is a good thing. I’ve gotten a lot of value from mine, and I don’t regret getting it.
What I do regret is the almost ‘brainwashed’ perspective I had that it was ‘qualification or utter failure in life’. There are SO many options, SO many opportunities we can take advantage of, or create for ourselves, and the single-minded belief that you HAVE to get a qualification to have any value in the world cuts that thinking down.
I bought SO completely into the idea that the qualification would BE the core of my success, that I didn’t realise there were other skills, concepts and challenges that I’d need to face and work on.
Our career, success, life choices are OURS. No one can guarantee success, regardless of qualifications. Success isn’t final, failure isn’t final. There are always spikes and dips.
We’re still somewhat ‘brainwashed’ to make decisions that will benefit employers, in the belief that THEY will look after us. Sure, we KNOW they won’t, and on the surface, we’re mostly pretty cynical about this, but this belief is deeply built into our education, work-life and decision-making. Far more than we may originally realise!
Let’s be more objective and ‘personal’ about the decisions we make, the things we sacrifice for, and realise that we’re able to CREATE our futures far more than we may have been taught.
Exciting! Terrifying. But exciting!!!
