Jobs we dismiss are often the ones that shape us

We grow up imagining who we’ll become: a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, a writer. We picture a straight line from school to career, as if life moves neatly from one stage to the next. Spoiler: it doesn’t. Developmental psychologists have been saying for years that human growth is nonlinear, messy, and occasionally chaotic. In other words, life behaves exactly like a teenager’s bedroom.

It takes us down unexpected paths, through jobs we never planned, roles we never imagined, and experiences we didn’t think mattered. And yet those are the very things that shape us.

I remember sitting in my English class in high school. My teacher used to make us do hot seating after we finished reading Macbeth. Usually the confident students volunteered, the ones who practically lived with their hands in the air. I wasn’t weak or strong; I was somewhere in the middle, quietly hoping no one would notice me. But he did. He saw a spark I didn’t recognise in myself.

He didn’t start me off as Macbeth. He gave me the shorter side characters first, the ones who appear, say three lines, and vanish before anyone can judge them. Perfect. And then one day he said, “You’re Macbeth.” Just like that. Suddenly the class was firing questions at me, and I had to answer in character, not by remembering the “right” interpretation, but by giving my own. It was the first time I realised I could think, not just repeat. A very Bruner approved moment of constructivist learning though at the time I just thought, “Well… here goes nothing.”

Years later, I found myself doing the same thing with my own students.

One of them said to me recently, “Sir, I’m just a packer,” like the job meant nothing, and added no value to who he was becoming. So I asked him, “What did you learn?” He shrugged. “I just packed things.” I pushed: “What else?”

That’s when he paused. You could see the thinking begin, the slow realisation that even the jobs we dismiss teach us something. Time management. Accuracy. Stamina. Teamwork. Working under pressure. Adapting to change. Showing up even when you’re tired. Basically, half the skills employers beg for.

He has basic qualifications and is studying for a degree but still feels useless. But he was never useless. He was simply unseen, even by himself.

And as I watched him search for his own strengths, I recognised it was the same question I was once asked when someone challenged me to name the skills I’d gained from the detours in my own life. I didn’t see them at first either. I thought my path was broken, delayed, off track. But that question, ‘What have you learnt?’, is the one that turns experience into value, and detours into direction. Kolb would call this experiential learning. I call it ‘finally realising your life wasn’t a waste after all’.

We live in a world that treats success like a spreadsheet, assets, income, job titles, things you can point at and say, “Look, I’m doing well.” But what about the things you can’t photograph, that are achieved internally? The resilience we build, the confidence we grow into, the courage to speak, the ability to think for ourselves. Those don’t show up on bank statements, but they’re the real indicators of who we’re becoming. Yet we rarely celebrate them because you can’t post them on Instagram or list them on a mortgage application.

Teaching doesn’t just happen through PowerPoints, whiteboards or homework apps on tablets. Real teaching happens in the moments where you ask a question that forces a student to reflect, not to hunt for the “right” answer, but to actually think. Anyone can memorise. Anyone can click through tasks. But when you ask a question that makes them stop, look inward, and name what they’ve learnt, that’s where education actually begins. Mezirow calls this transformative learning. I call it “the moment the room goes quiet and you know something real is happening.”

This is what education should be about. Not everybody on the same page, producing the same answer at the same time. Real education isn’t “Can you remember what I told you?” It’s “What can you do, see and make sense of?” It’s helping students recognise the value in their own experiences, not forcing them into a single mould. If everyone learned the same way, we’d all be walking around like photocopies.

We set out to become one thing, and life quietly trains us for something else. The jobs we think are “nothing” are often the ones that build the resilience, discipline, emotional intelligence and grit that shape who we become.

Careers aren’t chosen at sixteen. They’re carved, slowly, unevenly, through every job, every challenge, every moment that teaches you who you are and what you can handle.

And sometimes the path you never planned becomes the life that finally makes sense.