A quick read on 3 major differences I found between work in school and work in adult life, specifically in my context of working agile.
It recently struck me how different school was from adult life work situations. While school is supposed to educate and prepare for adult life, these are the major issues I found which are taught in school but are useless later.
Definition of done
In school, if I had even one sentence written for the homework assignment, I would see that as somewhat of an achievement and call it as “done”.
In the adult working world this would not go. Today, to call something as done is actually connected to a lot more meaning, achievement and contribution. Today I work meticulously towards fulfilling the discussed list of acceptance criteria, knowing fair well it can be rejected on review.
The way how assignments were defined leads me to my next point.
Planning assignments
Homework assignments used to be thrown on the board quickly before the end of the hour. Sometimes even when people had already left. It was neither discussed why this homework was important for us in a bigger context, nor was there an overview of total homework assignments available.
Teachers would therefor not be able to “load-balance” tasks between students or classes, recognizing when a student would have too much on his plate.
At work using agile methodologies this is way different. Tasks are recognized for their higher complexity for coworkers who are new to a certain technology. These details are discussed during planning in the group. Also it is discussed why these issues are important and different approaches are evaluated.
Milestones
Milestones at work are clear and communicated. You may even have a say in what makes it on the road-map and what not. It is clear why each milestone is important and the progress towards it is constantly updated.
In school it was not clear what we would be able to do at the end of the year and why that skill would be attainable in a greater context, maybe later in life.
The school curriculum was not made clear and topics came up more or less randomly. Sometimes topics like the french revolution even came up repeatedly which led to a lot of frustration. Guessing the curriculum by reading ahead in the school books was not really working, since teachers would often jump between chapters in the book, except maybe for language classes.
Rounding up
Whether or not schools should follow agile principles I cant say. What I do notice though is that I had to re-learn a whole lot of standard practices going into agile.
In my opinion letting people participate in a long-term road-map planning would have definitely encouraged me personally, as I love to see the bigger picture.
With the German school system being outdated for a long time, I’m curious to see if agile practices are going to be implemented in future systems.