On academic rankings, professional identity, organisational behaviour, human capital, and the transition from structured education to an increasingly ambiguous world of work.
By Sahil Tayal | October 21, 2026
The student who came first in school eventually enters the workforce
Imagine a school in Delhi with three sections of Class X, each containing fifty students. Every year, academic results identify the highest performers, teachers celebrate their achievements, and parents take understandable pride in their children's progress. Among these 150 students, some will eventually enter highly selective universities, pursue competitive professional qualifications, or begin careers in prestigious organisations.
For the sake of illustration, imagine three students entering an especially selective college. This is a hypothetical scenario, not an admissions statistic.
The student who once ranked first in a class of fifty now finds themselves surrounded by people who were also exceptional performers in their previous institutions. After graduation, they might join a management consulting firm, a technology company, a financial institution, or another competitive professional environment. Their reference group changes once again.
Something psychologically interesting can happen during these transitions. The same person may become objectively more capable, more knowledgeable, and more professionally accomplished while simultaneously feeling less exceptional.
This observation raises a question that I find relevant not only to educators but also to business leaders, HR professionals, and anyone interested in developing human potential:
Are we preparing young people to succeed within clearly defined systems, while giving comparatively less attention to their ability to define success when the rules become ambiguous?
I do not believe academic excellence is the problem. Formal education has contributed enormously to my own development, and I remain grateful for the opportunities it created. My curiosity concerns the relationship between achievement, identity, external validation, and the capabilities required to navigate professional life.
1. The psychology of moving from topper to average performer
Educational psychology offers a useful starting point.
Psychologist Herbert Marsh and colleagues have extensively studied the big-fish–little-pond effect, which describes how students' academic self-concept is influenced by the achievement levels of the peers surrounding them.
In a cross-cultural study involving more than 100,000 students across 26 countries, Marsh and Kit-Tai Hau found that students attending higher-achieving schools tended to report lower academic self-concept than equally achieving students in lower-achieving schools, after accounting for individual performance.
The finding does not imply that selective institutions are harmful or that ambitious students should avoid high-performing peers. It suggests something more nuanced: the comparison environment can influence how individuals evaluate their own capabilities.
Research: Marsh & Hau (2003), Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect on Academic Self-Concept: A Cross-Cultural Test.
This has an interesting parallel in professional life.
A university gold medallist may enter an organisation filled with other high achievers. A young professional who received exceptional performance ratings at their first employer may move to a more competitive firm and discover that their previous achievements are now considered baseline expectations.
The individual's competence may have increased. Their subjective sense of distinction may not have followed the same trajectory.
For talent-development professionals, this raises a useful question: when employees experience a transition into a more demanding environment, are we observing a capability gap, an adjustment in their reference group, or some combination of both?
These possibilities should not be conflated. A person's perception of competence is not the same thing as their actual competence.
2. Schools offer a syllabus. Careers increasingly require judgment.
Formal education usually provides a relatively explicit framework for achievement. Students know which subjects they are studying, when examinations will occur, what material they are expected to learn, and how their performance will be evaluated.
This structure serves important purposes. It creates accountability, supports progression, provides feedback, and enables institutions to evaluate learning at scale.
Professional life often introduces a different category of challenge.
A new employee might receive a clear job description, but their actual work can involve competing stakeholder expectations, changing organisational priorities, uncertain outcomes, interpersonal dynamics, and problems that have never been formally assigned to anyone.
The individual may need to decide which problems deserve attention before determining how to solve them.
Consider a professional who excels at delivering tasks against defined expectations. They may be highly effective when a manager provides clear instructions and measurable targets. Yet a promotion into leadership may require them to establish priorities, interpret incomplete information, negotiate trade-offs, and make decisions for which no universally correct answer exists.
These are different capabilities.
The distinction is not absolute. Many schools cultivate independent thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving, while many workplaces operate through detailed procedures and clearly defined performance systems. Nevertheless, the transition from student to professional can involve a meaningful shift in the nature of responsibility.
A useful question for organisations is whether their development systems prepare employees only to execute defined objectives, or also to exercise judgment when the objectives themselves are uncertain.
This is particularly relevant to leadership development, management education, organisational learning, and career adaptability.
3. Achievement and identity are not the same thing
Feedback is essential to learning. A student benefits from understanding where they have succeeded and where improvement is needed. An employee benefits from knowing whether their work meets expectations.
The difficulty begins when performance feedback becomes psychologically indistinguishable from a judgment about personal worth.
Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, provides a useful framework for examining motivation. It emphasises the psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and distinguishes between more autonomous and more controlled forms of motivation.
An individual may pursue academic or professional excellence because they enjoy mastery, value the work, or find meaning in contributing to an organisation. They may also pursue achievement because they fear disapproval, loss of status, or rejection.
These motivations can coexist, but they are not psychologically identical.
Research: Deci & Ryan (1994), Promoting Self-determined Education.
This distinction becomes relevant when organisations design recognition programmes, performance management systems, promotion processes, and leadership-development initiatives.
A performance culture can encourage excellence without requiring individuals to experience every setback as a threat to their identity. Recognition can reinforce meaningful contribution without making external approval the sole source of motivation.
I am not suggesting that organisations should abandon rankings, performance differentiation, or merit-based rewards. These mechanisms can support accountability and fairer allocation of opportunities when thoughtfully designed.
I am asking whether organisations can distinguish between developing high-performing employees and developing people whose entire sense of worth depends on continuously being high-performing employees.
The difference may be important for sustainable motivation, professional identity, and long-term development.
4. What happens when the next achievement stops providing direction?
Many professional pathways are organised around recognisable milestones: admission to a selective college, a prestigious internship, a first job, a promotion, a salary increase, a management title, or a move into a more influential organisation.
These milestones can represent genuine progress. They may provide financial security, access to opportunities, intellectual stimulation, and the ability to support one's family.
But there is no universal sequence that guarantees a meaningful professional life.
A person may reach an impressive position and discover that they want to work on a different problem. Another may decide that entrepreneurship, teaching, research, public service, caregiving, or creative work better reflects their priorities.
A third may find deep satisfaction in continuing along a conventional corporate path.
None of these choices is inherently superior.
The challenge arises when individuals have become highly skilled at achieving externally supplied objectives but have had fewer opportunities to examine whether those objectives remain personally meaningful.
From an organisational behaviour perspective, this invites reflection on career development, person–organisation fit, motivation, and individual agency.
How do we help professionals develop the confidence to reconsider goals without interpreting every change of direction as failure?
How do we encourage ambition while recognising that ambition may take different forms across a person's life?
And how do we build organisations where people can contribute meaningfully without feeling compelled to compete for every available status marker?
These are not questions with simple answers. But they may be increasingly relevant as careers become less linear and professional identities evolve.
5. What the research says about performance pressure
The OECD's PISA 2022 findings offer additional context for understanding the relationship between academic performance and students' psychological experiences.
Across OECD countries, the report found that approximately 65 percent of students worried about receiving poor mathematics marks, while 55 percent reported anxiety about failing in mathematics. Mathematics anxiety was also negatively associated with performance and several measures of social-emotional functioning.
Research: OECD, PISA 2022 Results: Students' Predispositions to Learning.
These findings do not demonstrate that grades cause anxiety, nor do they establish that academically anxious students will become adults who depend on workplace validation.
Those would be stronger causal claims requiring different research designs.
What the findings do establish is that academic performance cannot be understood entirely independently of students' psychological experiences.
For HR and talent-development professionals, this raises an adjacent question worth investigating: how do early experiences of evaluation interact with the ways individuals respond to feedback, competition, recognition, and perceived failure later in life?
The evidence presented here supports an inquiry, not a definitive developmental theory.
6. Human capital is not only about technical capability
Economists and policymakers often discuss education in terms of human capital: the knowledge, skills, and capabilities that contribute to productivity, economic opportunity, and societal development.
This perspective is enormously valuable. Countries need competent professionals, productive organisations, scientific advancement, strong institutions, and accessible pathways to economic participation.
Yet I wonder whether conversations about human capital could give greater attention to the relationship between capability and agency.
Technical knowledge enables individuals to perform tasks. Agency involves the ability to form goals, evaluate alternatives, make decisions, and act meaningfully within constraints.
In the workplace, these capacities intersect.
An employee may possess the technical expertise required to solve a problem but hesitate to challenge an ineffective process. A manager may understand organisational strategy but struggle to navigate uncertainty. A highly qualified professional may excel within established structures yet find it difficult to choose a new direction when circumstances change.
None of these outcomes can be attributed solely to schooling. Family environments, personality, economic conditions, workplace cultures, and life experiences also matter.
Still, the transition from formal education to professional life provides a valuable opportunity to ask whether our institutions are developing a sufficiently broad range of human capabilities.
I have explored related questions in my work on education and human development and in my continuing inquiry into the relationship between identity, agency, and action.
7. The global picture complicates every proposed solution
It would be easy to frame this as a problem faced by graduates of elite institutions. That would also make the argument incomplete.
Educational experiences differ enormously across countries and within them.
A child growing up in a financially secure household in Delhi may have access to private schooling, tutoring, digital tools, and family guidance about higher education. Another child in the same city may face overcrowded classrooms, financial insecurity, or interruptions to learning.
A child growing up in New York may encounter a different curriculum, admissions system, and institutional culture, but their opportunities will also be shaped by household circumstances, neighbourhood resources, and access to supportive institutions.
India, the United States, Singapore, and Finland approach educational assessment and progression differently. These systems operate within distinct cultural, economic, and institutional contexts, making simple international comparisons difficult.
Research: OECD, Education at a Glance 2023: Assessments and Examinations.
There is also a more fundamental question of access.
UNESCO estimates that approximately 273 million children and young people were out of school in 2024. The World Bank and its partners estimated in 2022 that around 70 percent of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries could not read and understand a simple text.
Meanwhile, WHO and UNICEF estimated that 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water in 2024. This measure includes concerns about accessibility, availability, and contamination; it does not mean that all these people had no water at all.
Sources: UNESCO, World Bank, and WHO/UNICEF.
These realities remind us that the immediate developmental priorities of children differ substantially.
For some, the challenge is navigating the psychological consequences of intense academic competition. For others, it is gaining reliable access to schooling, literacy, nutrition, safety, and basic infrastructure.
Any serious discussion about educational improvement or human capital development must account for these differences.
8. What my own education taught me—and why I remain grateful
My interest in this subject is partly informed by my own educational and professional experiences.
Studying commerce at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, and later pursuing an MBA at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies gave me access to academic environments, professional networks, and intellectual frameworks that continue to influence my thinking.
My subsequent exposure to corporate environments and organisational behaviour encouraged me to think more deeply about motivation, performance, leadership, and the relationship between people and institutions.
I am grateful for these opportunities.
The purpose of this reflection is not to diminish the value of selective educational institutions or the achievements of the students who enter them. Academic discipline, intellectual rigour, and merit-based opportunities have played important roles in my life.
But gratitude does not require intellectual agreement with every assumption embedded in an institution.
Indeed, one of the most valuable outcomes of education may be the ability to question the very systems through which we were educated.
I have written more personally about these experiences in my broader collection of essays and reflections.
9. What might this mean for HR, leadership, and talent development?
I do not have a comprehensive model for reforming educational systems or organisational talent practices. I also do not believe that a single framework can capture the developmental needs of individuals across different countries, industries, and life stages.
However, the questions raised here suggest several areas that organisations and educators might investigate together.
Performance feedback and identity: Can evaluation systems communicate meaningful differences in performance without encouraging employees to equate their entire worth with their latest rating?
Leadership development and ambiguity: Are we helping high-potential employees move beyond executing clearly defined objectives toward exercising judgment, prioritising competing demands, and making decisions under uncertainty?
Career development and autonomy: Can employees explore changing professional interests without treating every deviation from a conventional promotion ladder as a setback?
Recognition and motivation: How do we design reward systems that acknowledge achievement while also supporting autonomy, competence, collaboration, and meaningful contribution?
Learning across life stages: What capabilities become important when individuals move from school to university, university to employment, individual contributor to manager, or one profession to another?
These questions are not an argument for abandoning academic standards or organisational accountability. They are an invitation to think more broadly about what it means to develop people.
10. An open question about education, work, and human flourishing
My current hypothesis is that some educational environments may encourage individuals to become highly effective at succeeding within externally defined structures without necessarily providing equivalent opportunities to practise defining their own objectives.
There is relevant research on academic self-concept, social comparison, motivation, and performance anxiety. But the broader relationship between school-based achievement cultures and adult professional identity remains an empirical question that I have not resolved.
I would welcome research, experiences, and arguments that challenge this interpretation.
Perhaps the issue lies less in academic rankings than in how families and societies interpret them. Perhaps professional organisations reinforce the same dynamics that schools introduce. Perhaps many educational institutions already do an excellent job of developing autonomy alongside academic competence.
These are all possibilities worth examining.
My central question remains:
Are we developing people who know how to succeed when the rules are clear, while doing enough to help them thrive when they must decide what the rules should be?
For educators, this is a question about learning and development. For HR professionals, it is a question about talent and motivation. For business leaders, it is a question about judgment, adaptability, and organisational capability.
For individuals, it may be a question about the relationship between achievement and identity.
And for me, it remains an unfinished inquiry.
Research and further reading
Marsh, H. W., & Hau, K.-T. (2003). Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect on Academic Self-Concept: A Cross-Cultural Test. American Psychologist.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1994). Promoting Self-determined Education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research.
OECD. PISA 2022 Results: Students' Predispositions to Learning.
OECD. Education at a Glance 2023: Assessments and Examinations.
UNESCO. Out-of-School Children and Youth.
World Bank. Global Learning Poverty Update.
WHO/UNICEF. Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.
Related writing and projects
These reflections connect to my broader interest in organisational behaviour, psychology, consciousness, and human development.
Education and Human Development — Exploring questions about learning, opportunity, and the purposes of education.
Identity, Agency, and Behaviour — My wider research interests, including the Identity–Action Gap and the relationship between intentions and actions.
Locus of Control — Reflections on responsibility, perceived control, and agency.
Main Character Energy — A personal inquiry into individual agency, self-narratives, and the importance of recognising other people's perspectives.
Essays by Sahil Tayal — Writing on human behaviour, education, technology, and society.
Personal Website — The wider collection of my projects, writing, and experiments.
If you work in education, organisational development, human resources, leadership, psychology, or public policy, I would be interested in hearing your perspective.
In particular, what did formal education prepare you for exceptionally well, and what did you have to learn only after entering professional life?
I welcome disagreement, relevant research, and examples that challenge my current interpretation.
Contact: sahil@sahiltayal.com
This article is a personal, research-informed reflection. It is not a completed empirical study, an organisational intervention, or a proposed national education policy.
Preserved from the LinkedIn data export of 24 October 2026. Links and references reflect the original article; they are not independently re-verified here.