What Are the Skills That Make You a Great Performer in College and Work?

What do college and corporate recruiters look for?

Imagine briefly that you are an employer at an elite company—McKinsey, Hermes, Google, SpaceX, Goldman, Patagonia: What are you looking for among your many candidates that will set apart the best? How do you know who you want to hire?

Though many candidates seem to believe the process is some fairly mysterious black box, all of these companies are looking for the same things in their employees. The best recruiters closely follow organizational psychology and management theory—developed since the early 20th century—and what makes for the best performers, regardless of role¹. In my own roles as project lead in elite management consulting firms and as founder/C-suite in venture-backed startups, these are the skills I hired for, and our teams always massively outperformed our industries for that reason. 

There are twelve cognitive and psychological skills that matter more than any others when your goal is to perform. Great recruiters test for these in their hiring process. Those with these skills are shown to perform far better in college, get better performance reviews, get promoted faster, and make more money. They can all be developed, yet conventional schooling does not focus on them, leaving pioneering students to develop these in themselves. 

Here are the skills:

Psychological Skills (in order of importance):

1. Grit (or resilience)
2. Personal Integrity
3. Autonomous Motivation
4. Conscientiousness (or industriousness)
5. Adaptability
6. Emotional Intelligence

Cognitive Skills (not in order of importance):

1. Critical Thinking
2. Execution
3. Innovation
4. Problem Solving
5. Self-Management
6. Team Activation

You can learn more about these skills and why they matter at Futures Forge’s science page.

Why these skills are the game-changers

Being great at math is a prerequisite to being a great engineer; do not ignore math if you want to be a great engineer. But the difference between a merely good engineer and a great engineer is not a 5% or even 25% gap in mathematics skills. 

A great engineer, if stuck on a math problem, can get help from a ubiquitous well of resources to solve the problem. What makes an engineer great is that they:

• Can work well with others, plan, execute, and collaborate to solve problems
• Can think critically about the data they’re facing
• Know how to develop new ideas when needed
• Bounce back from failure and adapt quickly as situations change
• Ask for, and incorporate, coaching and critical feedback to be always learning

The knowledge that you learn in high school and college has an ever-shrinking shelf-life. When I was at MIT, we literally learned LISP in the intro to computer science class. The robots we built in college are now being built in middle schools. We certainly didn’t have rapidly evolving AI toolsets to help us find insights into complex datasets. Biological sciences are on pace to revolutionize themselves every 5 years; AI is probably going to kill the legal profession outright. When you enter the workforce, the working world will be radically different from what you are currently being prepared for. Your ability to think and grow will persist as a critical foundation as your college knowledge expires.

For many people, this is frightening. For those who teach themselves to be motivated, hungry, lifelong learners, a constantly changing future means an incredibly interesting career, free of boredom or stagnation. 

Develop yourself rather than game the application process

Most students, candidates, and even founders that I work with make a truly crippling mistake in their entire approach to their career—whether it’s applying to college, applying to a job, or seeking funding. 

They invest a great deal of time trying to “game” the external markers of being a high performer, rather than spending the time to improve their performance!

High school students burn themselves out stuffing their resumes with ultimately trivial external markers such as trying to become the fourth vice president of a five-person high school club. They do not invest in becoming more emotionally intelligent, adaptable, and resilient. Applicants to McKinsey have often put little thought into becoming a great problem solver or critical thinker; they instead cram cases, hoping pure rote repetition will let them “sneak through” the interview process (and, hopefully, “figure it out” when they get there).

Focusing on these external markers of performance ability has, at best, a marginal return on investment. If your fundamentals are not strong, you will perform poorly in interviews and projects, even with practice: if you are a poor problem-solver or lack sufficient emotional intelligence, McKinsey, Google, and SpaceX will find out, and they will not hire you. Perhaps as importantly: if you are trying to stuff your resume or cram cases, you’re doing what everyone else is already doing. You cannot create a comparative advantage. 

Alternately, because these core cognitive and psychological skills are so underdeveloped in conventional schooling, even small investments in improving these fundamental skills will yield massive performance improvements, and thus how far you can go in college and your career.

How do you begin improving these skills?

I and my cofounder Nat created a school called Futures Forge, devoted to developing these skills. We use the methods used at elite employers (including our own companies) and validated by scientific research, to help students still in school to develop these skills. Our pedagogy is complex to replicate on your own, but these are the general elements that you want to use to drive these skills:

1. Join a team of talented, motivated peers
2. Take on challenges that are beyond your current capacity to comfortably succeed in, and outside your scope of knowledge
3. Create a simulated goal in that challenge that you and your team have responsibility to achieve
4. Find facilitators and coaches who have experience solving hard problems and being responsible for getting results in their work
5. Commit to welcoming clear and blunt feedback from the facilitators and coaches
6. Find and use whatever resources you need to win—learn how others approached similar challenges, use generative AI to help you—focus on solving the problem efficiently
7. Present your results and your thinking to your facilitators and coaches to get their feedback
8. Take risks, try stuff you’re not good at, and welcome others pointing out where you struggled
9. Don’t record performance on these challenges in a transcript, because this discourages risk-taking
10. Reflect on your feedback with your peers to better understand it
11. Journal to integrate what you’ve learned
12. Quickly take on another similar challenge, using what you’ve learned to perform better
13. Continue to repeat

Our pedagogy calls this “catalytic learning;” students of all ages (from high school to those well into their careers) find that, after perhaps one dozen reps of this pedagogy, they begin to recognize that they can take on just about any challenge on earth, whether or not they have any prior knowledge about the nature of the challenge. Fundamentally, intelligent people with these skills are capable of far more than most of the world will dare give them responsibility for. At our Summer Program, our own high school students helped us improve our own marketing and operations: we quite literally run our company differently based on the insights they generated by analyzing our business from the lens of a management consultant. 

Unfortunately, it is largely absent from conventional schooling, despite having a long track record of success in the world’s most successful organizations. For those not able to attend programs similar to Futures Forge, we recommend finding successful businesspeople in your network and creating clubs with your high school that will allow you to begin running some of these challenges.

We will be discussing more about how to develop these cognitive and psychological skills in a webinar on November 11, 2024. Register here!

¹Both employee performance and their strength in these key skills is highly measurable. Peer-reviewed research—most notably led by Hunter and Schmidt (1983, 2005, 2016)—demonstrates with high confidence that these skills drive higher performance, especially in high-complexity work such as engineering, law, medicine, and management.