When Natalie landed a 1400 on her SAT and later graduated from an Ivy League school in 2010, she assumed it was the golden ticket to a corner office and shares in a Hampton house.
“I was the ultimate high achiever,” says the 28-year-old former National Honor Society member, who asked that her last name not be used for professional reasons. “What I didn’t know is that I was going to get fired from my first job out of college.”
After graduating cum laude from Brown University, Natalie landed a sales job downtown. She found it difficult to socialize with her colleagues and to wine and dine clients — part of the job requirement — and started falling short of her monthly sales quotas. She was canned 13 months after taking the job.
‘Our education system hasn’t caught up with the professional world today.’
- Author Dave Kerpen
While she was devastated — this was her first “F,” after all — Natalie bounced back and landed an analytical role in human resources.
But looking back, the Chelsea resident wishes people skills were part of the curriculum at Brown — or that she’d at least taken classes outside of her major that allowed her to learn new skills and interact with a more diverse group of students. “In hindsight, I would have done things differently and given myself room to socialize,” she says.
Natalie isn’t alone. According to a new report, high-achieving students are at risk of becoming terrible employees.
“In K-12, students are taught based on a system from the industrial era, where they were expected to graduate and get a job on the assembly line,” explains Dave Kerpen, author of “The Art of People.”
“Our education system hasn’t caught up with the professional world today,” he adds.
Qualities that land students on the honor roll — such as careful preparation, pleasing others and conceding to authority — don’t translate to skills necessary for succeeding in the workplace, such as trusting your instincts, learning to improvise and influencing superiors.
“When students are microfocused on grades and achievements, there can be an imbalance with interpersonal development,” says Lynn Taylor, leadership coach and author of “Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant.” “A good balance of business skills and emotional intelligence is the Holy Grail of the workplace today.”
While the results don’t imply an all-or-nothing approach — a valedictorian can certainly become a CEO — Taylor suggests students socialize to gain team-oriented skills.
“There are school clubs, volunteer activities, sports, part-time jobs, tutoring of children and many other ways to complement academia,” she notes.
Meanwhile, the students with high social acumen — even if they never aced a test or won a geography bee — are quickly rising in the ranks in the workplace. Brittany Stone, senior account executive at the Moxie Communications Group in the Flatiron District, was a less-than-stellar student who got suspended several times in high school.
“I went through a punk-rock phase and asked teachers why things mattered. Everything seemed so abstract,” she recalls. Anatomy, in particular, was a subject she saw no point in memorizing. “It was too complex.”
An epiphany occurred before graduating in 2011 from the University of North Texas after a six-year matriculation. “My classes started becoming more specialized and I immediately understood the value. I got it.”
Upon moving to Astoria, Queens, after graduation, the publicist developed a new philosophy: “You need to care. Put in time and effort. In school, so much [influences] your grades, but there’s so much riding [on your career] — [you] could lose [your] job, lose the client, lose faith from your employer and colleagues. Every day is humbling; it’s about holding yourself to a certain level of standards.” Stone’s mindset is effective — she landed on PRNewser’s 30 Under 30 list for 2015.
Employees can follow Stone’s example by looking inward for solutions instead of falling back on their past academic success.
Says Kerpen: “You must first make an honest attempt to understand yourself on a deeper level before you understand others.”
While new grads might have legitimate concerns about their job prospects, some of what they complain about during college is downright ridiculous: