School to work or is it the other way around

At the moment I am reading books that I never thought I would touch again in life. I believed that college education had got me to where I am and from this point forward I had newer battles to fight. I know people telling me on my first job that working is an entirely different ball game and what I learned in school would not help me much. To which I would argue that what they teach at school needs to be understood in a broder sense and would not have a point-to-point application.

But things were almost the opposite in my second job. First of all I have used my entire repertoire in statistics and have learned greater skills. It did not stop with that. I have used my previous experience and industrial engineering more than anytime before. I have also learned and used some programming skills.

The biggest difference I find in my two jobs is that at the first place they trained you and then you were left to figure out where you could apply that knowledge. So it was more of the individuals ingenuity to make the best of his skillsets. At the second place they first identify the application, identify the skills for that application and figure out what training would be required. Then the individual is picked and trained. So he has a short term target to atleast do one project and then comes the ingenuity part. I think this is the best way to go about it.