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There exists a peculiar category of employment advice which, when first received, appears almost ridiculous to most young minds and lingers, unresolved and unproven, awaiting the slow verdict of years.

I remember when I was once given such advice back in the early days of my career, back when I believed (as I still do), that compensation and contribution were meant to exist in fair proportion. My employer at that time, someone neither indulgent nor especially severe, remarked upon a habit he had observed among young employees in general: that they would perform only so much labour as was necessary for keeping their job, and only as much as they were being paid. So, their effort expanded or contracted in accordance with their remuneration, and when denied increments or advancement, they withheld their capacity.

But he had a different view. He suggested that when one finds oneself in a position where the organisation allows the young employee to engage with matters beyond their current role – then one should go ahead and take on those additional responsibilities, without immediate regard for whether the salary expands in proportion. That in this situation, one should consider that they are not being underpaid, but rather that they are being paid to learn more than their role allows.

However, he did not speak of permanence. He did not promote accepting unending undervaluation. He spoke instead of a period, measured in moths or even years, during which the disparity between contribution and compensation might be tolerated as a form of apprenticeship freely undertaken. The salary, he suggested, should be regarded as the price paid to remain present within the system long enough to observe its deeper workings.

At the time, this view resonated with me more than any other advice I had heard so far regarding early career stages and growth. And over the years, I routinely took on far more than my role strictly required.

I undertook responsibilities for which I was neither titled nor formally recognised. I concerned myself with decisions whose consequences extended beyond the narrow corridor of my assigned function.

It would be false to claim that these efforts, while rewarded at some points, were truly acknowledged in proportion to their actual extent and substance. But this did not matter because I was focused on completing every task that the projects required and spending extra hours on responsibilities of higher ranks than mine or even other departments.

And so it happened that wherever I worked, I did not depart from the place as the same person who had entered it, until the prescribed role itself seemed small to contain all that I had learned to do.

Over time, this led to developing a broader competence of comprehension. I began to perceive patterns where before I had seen only instructions. I understood not merely what was to be done, but why it was done, and what alternative forms it might take. I acquired, without formal grant, an integrated competence that did not depend upon any title to exist.

In this respect, that early approach proved correct. But correctness is rarely absolute.

For there exists another truth, less generously spoken of, which reveals itself over time as the reason why most people would never follow this advice. That there are too many oganisations which possess an inherent tendency to favour their own preservation. So, when an individual provides labour beyond the strict requirements of their compensation, the organisation adapts… not by correcting the workload imbalance, not by raising the compensation adequately – but by offloading every possible responsibility and making it the new base expectation.

Then, what begins as voluntary expansion becomes, over time, an obligation. The individual who once exceeded their role by initiative finds that initiative gradually reclassified as “just the baseline”. The absence of additional compensation, once tolerated as temporary, risks becoming permanent. The very competence one has cultivated becomes the justification for assigning further burdens with no corresponding role changes or increase in compensation.

There are too many organisations which start extracting a kind of Growth Tax from such individuals. Thus, this approach contains within it both a mechanism of growth and a mechanism of vulnerability to exploitation.

To undertake labour beyond compensation for acquiring skills is a deliberate investment. But like any investment, it must be governed by criteria for its conclusion. There must exist an internal threshold, a point at which any new understanding diminishes, and the uncompensated effort increases. Without such a threshold, the arrangement ceases to be educational and becomes merely exploitative.

One must therefore observe, with clear attention, the nature of one’s own progression. Are new domains still becoming accessible? Is one’s competence expanding into genuinely unfamiliar territory? Or has one’s expanded labour settled into routine maintenance of the organisation’s existing needs?

At the threshold point, departure becomes not an act of weakness, but an act of personal continuity. Because the acceptance of undercompensation is meant to be temporary, not indefinite. To remain indefinitely after personal transformation has already occurred is to… nullify its benefit.

Looking back, I do not regret having followed that early advice. It accelerated my development in ways that no rigidly defined role could have permitted. It granted me visibility into structures that would otherwise have remained concealed. It allowed me to become, in fact, what I had only nominally been before.

But the approach is not without its risks.

It demands from the individual, not only willingness to give more than is received, but also the discernment to recognise when that imbalance has ceased to serve its original purpose. It requires the courage not merely to endure inequity temporarily, but to refuse it permanently once its utility has been exhausted.

And maybe that’s the true meaning of being paid to learn.

In many corners of India, there’s an unspoken belief passed down with conviction: “Don’t start working yet, focus only on exams. Then you can start your career at a higher status later.”

And so, thousands of students postpone working to spend not just one or two, but several prime years preparing for government exams, entrance tests, certifications, or professional courses – all in the hope that one day, when they finally crack it, they’ll start higher, better, and more secure.

But there’s a quiet cost to consider.

In those years of preparation, while peers are testing the waters of real jobs – learning office dynamics, building practical skills, growing confident in the working world, discovering what they’re good at and even networking – the ones in “exam mode” stay cut off from it all. The world they’re preparing to enter moves on without them.

When the exam journey stretches too long or ends without the expected result, many are left emotionally and professionally stranded. It’s not just the delay in income but also a delay in self-trust, skill building, decision-making ability, social confidence, and clarity about what one really wants from a career.

And ironically, when they do start working, some of them may even end up at the same entry level they once thought they could skip, just with more years behind them and less experience in hand.

I went through this myself during my CA Final preparation. I remember wanting to take up a job, to feel like I was actually moving, using my skills and building a foundation for my career; to feel like I was at least starting somewhere – but I kept being told that I should wait, that working would distract me and reduce my chances of passing the exams. What followed was a slow slide into depression, regret, and stagnation (and even work withdrawal symptoms?). The pressure to succeed only grew with each attempt, but my mental state made it harder to study or perform, and soon it felt like being stuck in a loop with no momentum.

Later, when I began working in IT instead, I allowed myself to study alongside jobs – and I ended up completing two degrees that way. This time, I was working, learning, earning, growing and moving forward in the professional world at the same time. My mental health was better and my confidence only grew. I wasn’t waiting for life to start – I was already in it.

I understand it may not work for everyone and some careers do require full-time, focused preparation. But it’s worth asking if a job should always be seen as an obstacle to our academic goals? Or could it be something that complements our academics and even provides overall professional growth?

Because waiting for the perfect entry point sometimes means missing the doors that were already open.

I still remember walking out of the exam hall without finishing. Not because I had to rush or ran out of time – I just knew I was finally done. I went back home to gather all the books and remove them from the house.

CA had become like a prison. Not right from the start, but gradually… slowly enough, that I didn’t know when it was that I had crossed over to the point of no return.

At some point during the years of my efforts towards CA, I began to realise that while there were many things about the field that suited me academically, and many ways that the subjects felt interesting and practical – somewhere deep down, I wanted to do something better, something ‘more’. But by then, I had become almost trapped in the situation – where no one supported the idea of leaving it, where I often got only motivational speeches or negative comments about quitting, and where maybe I didn’t want to disappoint the people who were so sure I was going to make it.

Before all this, I was briefly a science student enrolled in IIT coaching. I was one of those kids people point to when they talk about “potential”. But I lasted barely one month there, before being consumed by all the competition, the lectures preparing us for what’s ahead, and the information overload of concepts which felt overwhelming at the time. While I did have a past record of high scores in maths & science, I didn’t feel like I could develop the required mastery of conceptual depth in these subjects in an environment full of anxiety, competition, urgency, pressure and limited time; especially when I didn’t even have any strong interest in those topics at the time. In that phase of life, I was more drawn to something quite different.

Switching to Commerce felt like a welcome change into something much more interesting, practical and lighter. I remember feeling actually excited to go to my classes everyday, being receptive and open to learning about the world of accounting, economics and business – and I had quite a different attitude here compared to how I viewed science earlier. Maybe I could have been happy to get a chemical reaction right in a lab, but the small joys in commerce (like finally getting a balance sheet to tally) were always more special to me than that.

When I found myself in Chartered Accountancy, it wasn’t a conscious choice based on an evaluation of the career field. It became more about societal views of how commerce students aren’t supposed to just drift around – especially when its the “high scorers with potential”. It turned out that going for a simple B.Com & MBA wasn’t “professional enough” for my family, given my potential in academics. And what’s more professional than CA, right?

One of the common things people often say about CA is that it’s too easy to get into and too hard to get out of (if ever). Sure enough, I got in easily and started to learn the vast depths of accounting, auditing, finance, taxes and laws. Learning those things broadened my perspective of how organisations or industries operate in the world, and why things have to be done the way they often are.

But of course, I was never the type of person to study everyday for 18 hours. When I passed Inter/IPCC, I wrote an article called “How to clear IPCC both groups in 19 days”, based on the kind of last minute stuff I often did for exams, which went viral like crazy. People thought I had cracked the code, but the truth is that passing exams sometimes has little to do with knowledge or understanding.

When I started the mandatory training in a CA firm, things slowly turned bleak – there was depression and a lot of struggle in those 3 years of articleship, where the real experience of the job showed me that not only did I have many conceptual gaps, but that there also seemed to be some misalignment between me and this field. While I liked its structure, practical knowledge, logic, meticulous documentation, precision and problem-solving aspects – there was another side to it where the repetitive procedural tasks, rote memorisation and lack of creativity or adaptability started to feel suffocating over time.

Then came a sense of stagnation after articleship, while trying to study full time for Finals without a job. Neither last minute preparations nor several months of effort made any difference anymore, and I kept failing each attempt. Maybe my experience of disillusionment during the articleship period had made it much harder for me to give it any real focus, or maybe the ever increasing pressure from people in my life had worsened the situation, or maybe those conceptual gaps were getting harder to bridge in the Final level, which is unforgiving of anything less than perfection.

I remember trying to care, trying to go on, trying to convince myself that it will all be worth it in the end – but deep down, no matter what people said to keep me on this path, I knew this wasn’t working.

At some point I decided that while I’ll always carry my experience and knowledge of the CA journey with me, I had reached a point where I knew that this wasn’t the life I wanted to live.

After that last Final exam walkout, and very strained relations with people who didn’t support it – I didn’t really know where I wanted to go from there. I did a few courses and certifications until a mentor recognised my skills and helped me find a career field which was the “right fit” – building systems that solved business problems, not as a technical programmer but as the bridge between the business and the development team.

I started over as a beginner, absorbing as much as I could about this new world, as I eventually became an IT Business Analyst working on international software projects, where I help design systems to solve problems for business organisations. While CA gave me discipline and taught me about the business world & structured systems, I.T. gave me a chance to build new systems and enable businesses to function better. It was here that all my ‘weaknesses’ in the CA field turned into great strengths, because here I could work on evolving systems and enable change in the functioning of businesses in several areas, rather than just audit them, verify compliance or provide consulting. And so it was here that I found long term growth, stability and alignment.

So yes, I didn’t start out knowing which field was right for me. I tried to study science, and then I tried to make it through CA, but the years kept passing with no real results or growth. But when I found the field where I could combine my business knowledge with my natural flair for technology, problem-solving and creativity, my efforts finally led to real results. As I worked hard to learn and build parallel skills in IT & Management, I went on to even complete MCA & MBA alongside work. Growing and contributing more every year, I reached almost at par with many peers who never transitioned.

And the stability & fulfilment I have now is enough to be able to move on from all the years of feeling lost before. When I think about CA now, I respect its legacy in my life and how that experience gives me a different perspective in I.T. today compared to if I had always been a computer/tech student.

The last exam became the first step into a more rewarding journey ahead. And so I believe that sometimes, taking the road less travelled can lead us to a different kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

Halfway into adulthood, most people realise how many things necessary to navigate a decent life were never taught in school or college. Important matters such as finances, debt & mortgage, mental health awareness, relationship/marriage, consent, criminal laws and much more is left to be discovered by the student several years after completing school or college, where the focus is on memorising textbook contents and reproducing the same in structured examinations. And one wonders at some point – why aren’t these life skills ever taught in school?

This is a result of a misunderstanding that school is meant to prepare us for life ahead, which is far from the truth, especially in the Indian academic system where outdated syllabus continues to be taught for decades; and the syllabus itself is based on theory, formulas and memorisation of definitions which most likely will never be used in real life. Schools and colleges are clearly not designed to encourage free thinking or assisting a student in becoming a good citizen.

The academic system was designed, instead, to produce workers. Education was designed to have sequential knowledge imparted on students which will enable them to be useful in the workforce – whether as engineers, doctors, accountants or other professions which the country requires. Schools can be considered as factories where skilled & obedient workers are the output.

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.

http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

Industrialism gave birth to the concept of human factories where independent thinking or talents are diminished, so that employers are able to find adequate workforce to fill in the vacancies in various professional fields. Whether one stays back in the home country or decides to move abroad, life skills are learned over time with experience or trial and error. There are no guidelines on how to be a parent, how to manage taxes, how to be a good citizen, how to crack an interview or how to honour one’s own inner voice. And the pattern continues generation over generation.

While we will still send our future children to school, we must also educate the new generation on things which they will never be taught in school. We have all had to struggle in various areas of life due to ignorance passed down from our own previous generations, but we can create a better generation which is equipped to excel not just in exams but in all areas of life.

We can hope that the education system is reformed someday, but instead of waiting for a miracle, we can take the first steps in educating ourselves and passing down real education to today’s children.