Very intelligent but failure in the workplace?

[dublinruth]

I was a very clever child. Scholarships, MENSA, etc. Everyone thought I had an exceptionally bright future.

Except.. my intelligence doesn't really mean anything in the workplace. It hasn't translated to career success. I'm now ten years into my career, doing specialised admin work that bores me silly but pays OK.

Has anyone else found that being intelligent just doesn't translate into being good at work. I feel such a failure and see people I went to school with having great careers and can't help but to feel a huge amount of jealousy.

Has anyone else found this?

cookie - easy to say. Harder to do!

I haven't had a Brilliant Career despite a lot of academic promise (and achievement). I definitely haven't fulfilled my potential, whatever that is. But I do a very specialised and in my particular specialism rare job (working for myself) very well. I've never wanted to lead, or to rise up a hypothetical career ladder; never fancied the stress and aggro of a management position, or public exposure; it's always been about being excellent in what I do, for me. I might have felt differently about some of the above had I grown up with more confidence, but as it is, I'm happy with my solid standing with the relatively small circle of people I work for.

I did extremely well at school and have an Oxbridge degree. I didn't come from the background that would imply so didn't have much of an idea about various exciting career paths I could pursue, and my personality type is quite passive

This is me too! I've had various nmw jobs and have been a SAHM for 7 years. Not unhappy though as I get my intellectual stimulation from reading and my own creative projects. I feel like I've let my parents down a lot though.

Very interesting thread, and it’s making me think hard about what I teach my children. The «very intelligent, didn’t amount to much» label applied to me and to a greater extent my sister. She was dux at school, double first at uni (after turning down Oxbridge), PhD and post-doc. Yet despite many interviews she never landed a lectureship or solidified the academic career she wanted. She eventually did teacher training, had a breakdown during that year and spent a fair time in recovery. She now works in admin, is bored by it, and studies for another degree in the side.

My story is similar- though I didn’t fly so high or fall so low. Other things just got in the way for me - travel, children, living overseas, lack of ambition (though I’m aware that latter may be a cop out).

If I had to say why she didn’t nail the jobs... she’s emotionally fragile and it shows. A massive perfectionist, very hard on herself and others. At the same time very compassionate, kind and considerate of others feelings - she hates the thought of ever upsetting anyone or making them feel bad.

Cookie doughs list is spot on. Intelligence in itself is not enough. My parents were typically lower - middle class, they were overjoyed that my sis and I were clever enough for uni and post grad etc. But they knew nothing about succeeding in the business or even the public sector management worlds and didn’t focus on teaching us any of these other skills. I can schmooze pretty well these days, and I love office politics. Those two things bring me more success in the workplace than any number of postgrad degrees.

It seems like the people who didn't do well didn't particularly focus on any career.
If bright people had gone into day law or accounting, then it would be hard not to do quite well in those types of careers (okay it may not be something you enjoy). But those careers are full of people who are bright and have done well with it.

I have found my people. For me it's a combination of undiagnosed ASD (DD being assessed and it's all coming clear), poor degree choice (literature instead of law) and family who didn't do o levels never mind uni, so no contacts or experience. Or maybe (which I suspect) I'm just crap.

Nobody is "just crap" crayola .

The other thing about success, the early bird gets the worm. Never be late.

To be fair almost everyone around me who is in a senior position, now and in the past, has been top uni and high performing in school. So it is a good thing to encourage one's dc towards. They just need all the stuff so well set out by cookiedough too.

Do you have appraisals at work, and if so have you used them to talk about developing your role to make it more interesting? It sounds like you could easily take on more challenging work.

Alternatively in your position I'd look carefully at getting something like a professional qualification. There are jobs in areas like accountancy, law and IT where you can simply get your head down and do what best fits your talents, and which sound as if they would be much more interesting than your current job.

I’m intelligent, found school a breeze, often told I had the potential to do anything.
Have only ever managed menial minimum wage jobs, currently doing an admin job at just above NMW. I suspect I have aspergers and therefore the social skills of a carrot . I doubt I’ll amount to much more, however I’d love to find a way to use my intelligence just to keep me from getting too bored.

I'm reasonably intelligent and did fairly well at school, but was not as clever as my siblings. I was equally, if not more successful in the world of work. I worked for many years in a corporate environment and, assuming basic competence in the job, I would say the following are important

• be flexible in your attitude and open to change, whether it means doing things differently or change in the organisational structure.

• have a positive attitude. Be the person that people want to work with.

• be reliable. Do what you say you will do.

• focus on value. Eg Think about the task, project, whatever you are doing and assess the importance of time vs 100% delivery. Eg. Sometimes it's better to spend 1 hour on getting something to 98% - good enough - than 6 hours to deliver 100%. It depends on what's required, but in my experience a lot of people lack commercial awareness. This is really important in most companies.

Hope this helps and good luck. You know you are good, make sure others recognise it.

TakenForSlanted I just wanted to say that you sound like such a fab supportive family. You mention that you hope she doesn't feel like a failure and you respect her for who she is. I wish I could have had a sister like you.

My family were the complete opposite. I have social anxiety and after my degree I went into a mental freeze. I have very low self esteem too and I just couldn't bare to go into the vocation of my degree. I said I wanted to give up.

My father went into a rage and constantly berated me and cursed me telling me how I had massively failed him. My siblings mocked me and put me down. My dsis once said she would never employ someone like me. My DM was the only supportive one but it was just her on my side and it wasn't enough. I felt so so low. It was horrific. I was suicidal. I wanted to die. I felt like a failure and still do. It wasn't until years later I realised how horrible my family were. I always blamed myself for how they treated me because I felt that I deserved it. Its what I get for giving up my degree.

Having a family like yours could have been so different for me. Your sister is very lucky to have you.

CookieDoughKid how do you actually teach children these things??

Yes, this has been my experience. I always came top at school and then on my course at university. I'm now a qualified lawyer, so I guess failure is all relative, but I'm very much paddling in the shallows, wasting time, whilst colleagues who qualified after me have been promoted far ahead. I'm good at the technical aspects of the job (I've been told by managers than I'm better in that respect than many colleagues who outrank me) but I have no resilience, struggle with stress and don't communicate about workload or problems well because I'm afraid of people shouting, so I'm frankly an embarrassingly shit lawyer. I could probably improve things through intensive therapy but, to be honest, I've grown to enjoy being in the slow lane and I've known too many people in Law who functioned for a while thanks to therapy and medication, only to crash badly in the end.

I don't know how much of all this is my personality and how much comes down to the way I was raised. My parents have always been very much of the school of thought that you build resilience in children by telling them to be quiet and stop being pathetic (our parents were in the War, young people today are wimps etc). When I was distressed as a child, I was generally told that I was making things difficult for my mother. I caught my mother sneering at my DD for being a "wimp" for crying when DD was eight fucking months old. At the same time, I was never allowed any independence as a child (I don't think I went on public transport by myself until university) so never really learned how to fail or how to fix my own mistakes. As a parent, I'm now far more worried about DD learning genuine resilience than her potential academics.

One thing that comes across from many, though not all posters, is a lack of passion for, or real interest in, anything in particular. There's a general sense of wanting 'a career' but not of wanting to 'be an X', 'do Y' or 'make a real difference to Z'.

That sort of vocational drive, to make a particular difference in the world, or more generally to apply your talents to optimal societal benefit - to achieve something that is outside of and separate from yourself - is what carries a lot of people through the difficult early years of internships, short contracts, mutiple rejected applications. It drives people to find some way, any way, to do what they want to do. (Rather than just going through the motions and 'giving an adequate performance of looking for a job', in a way that is passive, reliant on a benevolent employer to recognise and 'save' you).

Whether they carry on doing that thing or end up where they'd hoped is another question but passion, interest and drive carry them off the starting blocks and over the early hurdles.

I think it's generally true in life that having a focus outside of yourself helps massively. Being too introspective is stagnating and exhausting.

CookieDoughKid how do you actually teach children these things??

Personally, I don't know how possible it is to teach children some of these things. Children absorb so much from their environment - from what they see, hear, experience every day, that setting out to deliberately teach them these skills / give them these beliefs is really hard. Success breeds success.

From my experience, the 'wrong' messages I absorbed from my childhood were:

Work hard and get high marks because that is the most important thing.

Anything "business" related is a bit spivvy and people who do well in business are wide boys, chancers, use their gift of the gab to cover up for not being very clever. In my rural, lower middle-class upbringing I was surrounded by public sector workers (teachers, nurses etc) and farmers (a different category entirely!) / mechanics. The few relatives / parent's of friends that worked for big companies / banks / insurance companies OR had businesses of their own etc were considered (by my parents) to be frankly a bit common. I didn't know anyone at Uni who aspired to business or management. So I didn't even consider applying for any graduate training schemes etc when I graduated. The thought of working for a multi-national company was so far out of my experience I couldn't even contemplate it.

At the same time... don't aspire to "just" be a teacher / nurse or anything vocational / trades etc - which is what my parents were, as that's way below your potential: you are far too clever for this and it would be a waste of your intelligence.

I'm trying not to pass these ideas on to my children, but I worry that having seen DH (teacher) and me (admin) I'm repeating the circle. Schools are terrible at teaching most of the things that Cookie mentions.

However, what I am trying to teach / show my children is:

Confidence. I am a confident public speaker, I'm sociable and I enjoy networking, whether it's sociable or work-related. I didn't work for 10 years while my children were small, but during that time I took on a lot of voluntary work and became president of the (very small) charity for 5 years, running it in a very hands-on way. This meant that my children regularly saw me chairing meetings, organising and running big events, hosting meetings and planning sessions at home, and basically being out there in the public eye, getting involved, networking, multi-tasking etc.

Exposure to different ways of making a living, not just "worthy" ones. And that working in business is normal - not just for spivs! We deliberately chose to move abroad, so our children are growing up bilingual and bicultural: that's already a massive difference to my and DH's upbringing. They have friends from all over the world, and their parents mostly work in business / science / are entrepreneurs. We talk often about work - what different people do every day, and what they earn, and what skills are useful. Yes we encourage them to stick in at school, but we talk about how that's only the first step, it's only one box to tick, it gives you more choices about your future but it isn't the be all and end.

Public speaking / debating. If there was one thing I think would really help all children, it's learning to put together an argument and debate it in public. So many important skills and resilience can be learned there. There's a reason why the best independent schools put such a huge emphasis on this.

The other thing I would add is that, growing up, I didn't know any women who worked full-time - except for my mum (teacher) and she regretted it as it meant she had to put my sister in childcare quite young. And she got grief from our farming relatives for neglecting her family by going out to work - they all thought she was looking down on them and thought herself too clever to work on the farm.

Every other woman I knew either worked part-time in a "wee job" (travel agent, bank teller, secretary, etc) or didn't work at all (husband a high earner). So while we are all beating ourselves up about not achieving highly in the workplace, remember that it's only quite recently that there have been a lot more female role models around - that wasn't the case when I was growing up.

I did well at school, typically Bs and some As back when Bs were still a good thing. I enjoyed school, it was varied and interesting (apart from PE which I had zero aptitude for and therefore no interest in). I'd sit in the classroom doodling away in a notepad while listening, or reading the textbook in a random order. Writing my ideas down was harder and homework always a battle against myself.

I went off the boil a bit with the reduced structure at university. Frustrating as with hindsight, seeking out my tutors more instead of procrastinating would have made enough percentage difference to bump up the classification of my degree.

The PGCE was really tough to get organised sufficiently on. I did crack it in the end and developed systems that I used through my teaching "career" but I started with dented confidence and never fully recovered. I'm not political, and teaching has got increasingly political. I'd have been a great pupil friendly maverick teacher of the 80s and a few years ago I stepped out of the vile culture and data based workload to "spend more time with my family"

I'm great with young people. I do seem to struggle with colleagues. Some departments were much better than others. But I'm marmite and too individual and a lot of conformists seem to struggle with that, particularly my self-depricating streak which actually comes from knowing myself well and being comfortable about being me.

Getting to know my paternal family in adulthood, most of my cousins are diagnosed with dyslexia/ dyspraxia. DF certainly isn't NT but the wrong age group for any diagnosis. I do wonder about dyspraxia or ADD for myself. I'm brilliantly focused if interested. When revising interesting things for exams with a target and pressure, I could knuckle down for hours at a time. But would still break away for things like swimming, not in an obsessive way. The 45 minute rule would be hopeless for me as it would break the flow and let procrastination in.

In some ways being a SAHM demands all my weaknesses off me. I have to be self motivated at driving myself to get things done. It's too open ended and I end up wallowing in a sea of procrastination. Mundane, repetitive tasks bore the hell out of me. Teaching was the right mix between structure and creativity with external deadlines until the workload got stupid and I resented classes getting in the way of the essential admin.

As I'm currently demonstrating, I'm prone to tangents. I also have auditory processing issues so put a lot of effort into following group conversation and battling background noise. Not an advantage in the workplace!

In the real world, academics is overrated as a foundation. It's become harder and harder for young people to get soft skills for employment in the drive for academia and loss of opportunities such as teenagers doing Saturday work due to social administrative changes making it too difficult to employ a 15yo for some hours on a Saturday. School life has become increasingly spoon fed as teachers need the results to survive. The curriculum is too exam focused and not a broard general knowledge for starting life.

You also need to find out what motivates you. I am very shy and found being at work in a busy corporate environment difficult but pushed myself because I wanted to earn good money. I didn't have anyone to fall back on (no family) and was motivated by earning enough to keep a roof over my head as I was terrified of having nowhere to live. That was my motivator. For others it might be bring in a job you love, having flexible working etc. Finding the right motivator will give you the drive you need to succeed.

Now I'm in a better financial position I'm motivated by having more time and flexibility so am in a different job where I earn less but have these things. So motivators can change. If you can identify yours you may be more successful.

One thing to add is that I don't think social class has much to do with social confidence and people skills. That can come from anywhere. Networking and social capital are a different thing entirely.

This has some links and advice on how to develop executive function in children and adults: developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/executive-function/

DS is definitely showing early signs of difficulty with attention in school, so will be working on some of this with him. For myself, I think anxiety was also major factor - so far he doesn't seem to have this, fingers crossed.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet: regardless of how much intelligence, social skills, drive, executive function etc you have going in, being a member of a marginalised group in a workplace set up for the benefit of the majority group is a constant fucking battle and can induce some of the difficulties people mention through gaslighting, undermining people's self-confidence, etc.

Some very resilient individuals will survive, but plenty of others who would have soared in a kinder environment will drop out blaming themselves. So sometimes, picking a profession where it's easier for "outsiders" to make a mark can help. (Thinking of media as a particular one where nepotism is rife and some areas are almost totally white, middle class, all knew each other at (private) school etc. Think "Fruit of the Lemon" type experience.)

@BogstandardBelle my parents also discouraged my sibling and I from doing anything vocational/trade based and instead encouraged us to study "academic" subjects at uni. This was done because they wanted us to have "better" jobs than they had (vocational/trade) but none of us had any clue how to translate say, an English BA, into a good job. So my sibling and I have had succession of nmw jobs and are actually worse off than our parents despite our degrees (well, we both have spouses who earn more so we're not very badly off, but we'd be better off if we'd learnt trades).

I agree it's more than IQ that is needed to have a successful career. You need confidence, a good work ethic, often need to be good socially, a good team worker. Simply being intelligent isn't enough to get promoted.

trainsong About 'claiming your theatre'. This is about walking into a meeting room with people in there that you may or may not know, and owning your presence. A sense of entitlement that you deserve to be there. And then managing the different stakeholders. I imagine them as puppets in my head. This is learned behaviour.

I can tell you, we have turned down well qualified job applicants based on their soft skills. If we think they can't own the theatre (sorry this term is used at my company a lot and is probably not a general known term), we won't hire them.

Up until I was 18 I was a nervous child. I was very scared of answering the door and the telephone and to people I didn't know. I didn't know how to communicate. I was nervous about people's reaction. That changed when I had the opportunity to observe more successful people in the work place and 'copy' their traits. I am very introvert and struggle with self confidence but you wouldn't know it. As a woman, it's harder as we don't innately feel we deserve to be there.

People in this thread has asked me how do you teach these things. The good news is that it is teachable! I taught myself for starters and I coach my friends.

For example, good interviews. The hiring manager will have made their mind up if you are going to the next interview stage within 180seconds of meeting you, if not less. We all know the standard tips but did you know, that the majority of roles (I'm not talking about high knowledge roles here like doctors or lawyers) are hired based on cultural fit and your soft skills? Typically where we've not hired a candidat it's because, the candidate shows weak soft skills, not because they are not experienced or qualified enough.

It's about building a rapport with the interviewer, putting them at ease and being bloody prepared. You can download top 50 most popular interview questions and prepare your answers in advance and rehearse them. Provide concrete examples and learn to sell yourself.

I think schools, colleges, 6th form colleges and Uni need more mentoring programs in place with business coaches. There simply isn't enough outreach, especially to minority and female groups. And teachers typically won't have the experience or the time rather to know what corporate programs/sponshorships/internships/coaches are available. Last summer, one state school I approached recently to offer my support (paid corporate summer internship (!!)) said they were too busy and weren't resourced enough to promote this to their sixthformers. A state school in a deprived area of Berkshire. So if your students are not hearing about such opportunities. This is why.