3 Things About Corporate Life That No Amount Of Education Could Have Prepared Me For
Although many of us would argue that school doesn’t prepare us very well for the real world, I would maintain that it still teaches us many valuable lessons and skills. Knowing how to consume information (English, history), criticize data (science), and solve problems (math, and most other subjects) are invaluable no matter your profession. However, each industry has its quirks and there are some things I’ve learned about working in corporate America that no amount of schooling could have prepared me for.
Email. You barely use email in school. In college, it exists to send assignments in, see school announcements, and hope for class cancellations. Eventually, its use expands to job applications but even then, it has only a couple purposes. Most of our communication happens in person or via phone/text. Corporate, however, relies almost exclusively on email. Productivity hacks often start with streamlining email because it really does dominate most office jobs. Learning to write a good email (or Slack message) is invaluable. Knowing how to say no, how to defer, how to communicate information, and how to adjust tone over email might just be the basis of your job and the majority of your tasks on a day-to-day basis.
The sheer amount of people it takes to get everything done. Picture this: You and three friends are working on a group project. You three are completely responsible for the project, but every time you communicate with each other, your whole class must be cc’d on the emails. Your class may respond to those emails asking you about the project or about why you’re doing something a certain way or why you’re not as far along as they thought you’d be. They must also be invited to all your meetings. They may or may not choose to attend. If they do attend, they may ask questions, bring up unrelated topics, or ask you to change direction entirely. You can go to your professor to help resolve conflicts but they are only available every other Thursday between 2 and 2:30pm. This would be insane and you’d never make any progress, right? That is exactly what working in an office is like. You need approvals for nearly everything, and everyone wants to be included on everything so they are not surprised when something changes or goes wrong. Your boss is rarely available to help mitigate these issues. And then because everyone signed up to be included in everything, they’re not able to pay detailed attention to everything, so they ask you stupid questions and are still surprised when something goes wrong. Group projects in school don’t even come close.
Self-promotion. School promotes the idea that hard work directly translates to a reward. You study hard = you get good grades. However, simply doing good work does not necessarily translate to promotions or any type of recognition. You could have a situation like mine where your manager has very little visibility to your work. Or your manager might be overstretched with many reports or simply not great at managing. Other than in the very best cases, you’ll need to master the art of self-promotion. This is one I’m still working on because I haven’t figured out a system to do this regularly without making myself cringe. I want my work to speak for itself but that simply isn’t the case. Not only do you have to do good work, but you also have to make it known.
I’m not arguing that school should start teaching any of this. It would be near impossible and mostly pointless in a school setting. But it is interesting to me that we live our entire childhoods with a specific set of rules, and then that completely changes as soon as we enter the workforce. I can’t think of one profession (other than possibly academia) that operates the same way school does. My experience is in corporate, and I feel its rules are simultaneously too vague and too specific. These three attributes cover the vast majority of lessons but there are a million other little quirks that I’ve picked up along the way. Perhaps the biggest adjustment I had to make is the fact that mastering these cultural attributes will have way more impact on your career than your actual work.
Corporate Chicago