Companies do not hire you just because you made good grades in school. You are hired because you’ve demonstrated attributes which resulted in a good outcome (good grades). To get good grades, you managed your time, showed discipline to accomplish a purpose (yes, every student likes good grades!).
The assumption is this: if you can apply those attributes in a job, the outcome would be good. You must understand that the processes to get a good grade are more important than the actual grade. Most attributes to success are universal while grades are not. Staying on course with those attributes makes the future predictable even when the grades become irrelevant!
If you graduated with poor grades, your problem is not the poor grades but the processes that produced the grades. If your processes (activity prioritization, dedication, focus, time management, etc) were GREAT but you ended with poor grades, you will be fine, since the root issues could be ones of talent, environment, misalignment, etc. Yes, deploy those processes on something else, and success will come.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 17 (June 9 – Sept 6, 2025) today for early bird discounts. Do annual for access to Blucera.com.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register to become a better CEO or Director with Tekedia CEO & Director Program.
Why? The world is not a competition of grades but of processes! The grades of markets are different from the grades from your professor because the exams from the professor are different from the ones set by customers. That you made A+ in school does not mean you can pass with A+ before customers (both internal and external) at work.
So, what do we do? We must deploy the same tenacity, focus and hardwork which helped us to master the processes required by professors in school, to master what customers want, if we want to get an A+ from the market. Simply, grades go scale but processes do not: to thrive, you must keep improving your processes.
Win via better processes in all you do. Yes, improve your processes!
Commend on Feed
Comemnt: To hell with companies. We create our own jobs
My Response: When you create your own jobs, you will have a company. The irony of your comment is the illusion that an entrepreneur does not work in a company. And because it is yours, you do not need to have processes. That is wrong. Every entity in the world is built on the tripod of people, tools and processes, even if you are the person bringing that entity to life. The mindset you posit is the one which makes scaling a business harder: it is mine, I have a job and I do not need to improve my processes to grow that firm.
---
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (June 9 – Sept 6, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.
The only thing grades do is to validate that learning took place, and that you understood what you were taught. Those who made good grades will likely succeed in workplaces, because both are similar. Schools run on curriculums, if you follow them and do what is expected, you will make good grades. Companies have similar operating procedures for handling tasks, if you understand them and follow them, you will perform your job well.
The departure comes when you want to create a product, launch a business, or build a system; markets don’t run on curriculums. To succeed, it has no bearing on who made good grades or who didn’t finish school; instead, it’s your ability to understand the needs and then going ahead to deliver what gets the job done. You invent processes as you go, because there’s no reference or system to plug into. This is where legends and geniuses separate themselves from everyone else.
Getting things done will always win over talking about things. Just get things done.