Is School Preparing Children for the Wrong World? By Gigi Badine, Founder, Invicta Vita

I spent fourteen years in banking before I became a coach, and one thing has stayed with me from those years, and from the young people I have worked with since: school teaches children how to pass exams, and almost nothing about how to actually get a job, keep it, and thrive in it. That gap used to be smaller and it’s not anymore.

Modern working life runs on skills nobody formally teaches. Networking, for one. Most adults still find the word uncomfortable, let alone a seventeen-year-old who has never had to walk into a room and start a conversation with a stranger on purpose. Handling conflict is another. School teaches children to defer to authority and follow rules, which is not the same as learning how to disagree with a manager, or push back on an unreasonable deadline, without either losing the argument or losing the relationship. Financial literacy barely features at all, so young people leave education able to analyse a poem in detail and completely unable to read a payslip or negotiate a starting salary.

None of this is a criticism of teachers, who are already stretched thin delivering a curriculum built around a very different economy than the one their students are about to enter. It is a structural problem. School was built to prepare children for an era of stable, linear careers, one job, one employer, one clear ladder. That world has largely gone. What has replaced it is far more fluid, and far less forgiving of people who were never taught how to navigate it.

There are a handful of things I think matter far more than schools suggest, and I see the gap in every young person I work with. Knowing your own strengths matters more than a list of qualifications, because two people with identical CVs will be judged very differently depending on how clearly they can explain what they are actually good at and why. Being able to walk into a room of strangers and hold a real conversation matters more than most people admit, because so much of how careers actually move still happens through relationships built in ordinary moments, not formal applications. Furthermore, the quiet, internal belief that you are allowed to be in the room in the first place matters more than almost anything else, because I have watched enormously capable young people talk themselves out of opportunities before anyone else even had the chance to say no.

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and the Readiness Gap

I saw all of this come together with one client I worked with for just over a year. He was academically capable, had a good degree, and by every measure of school and university success should have walked into a job. He didn't, not because he lacked what employers wanted, but because nobody had ever taught him how to show it, or how to believe in himself. We worked on the practical layer first, sharpening how he told his own story on paper and online, then moved into interview technique through real, repeated rehearsal rather than generic tips. Alongside that, I brought him into some of my own networking events, and watched him shift, over months, from standing at the edge of the room to being the person other guests sought out.

None of it moved quickly, and underneath the practical skills sat something more stubborn, a persistent sense that he did not quite belong in the rooms he was trying to get into. We worked on that directly, because confidence built on top of unexamined self-doubt tends to collapse the first time something goes wrong. A little over a year after we started, he got the job. What had changed was never his qualifications. They were always good enough. What changed was everything sitting underneath them, the parts nobody had ever formally taught him.

I share his story because I think most parents assume the school and university system will eventually produce this kind of readiness on its own, given enough time and enough good grades. It often does not, and by the time that becomes obvious, the young person involved has usually absorbed a painful and unfair lesson: that something is wrong with them, rather than something is missing from what they were taught.

What Parents and Schools Can Do Differently

So what can parents and schools actually do? For parents, the most useful shift is small and practical. Treat networking, confidence, and financial basics as skills to build deliberately, the same way you would encourage a child to practise an instrument or a sport, rather than assuming they will simply absorb them by adulthood. Encourage genuine conversations with adults outside the immediate family, not for the sake of appearances, but because that is exactly the skill so many young people are missing. For schools, even a small, consistent investment in this area, a termly session on interview technique, a structured introduction to networking, a basic course in managing money, would close a gap that currently gets left entirely to chance, or to families who can afford to pay for it privately.

Grades still matter, however, they were never the whole story, and for a growing number of capable young people, they are increasingly not even the part of the story that determines whether they actually get the job.