Academics cannot replace practical skills. Many academically inclined people, that tend to have a Phd, have theoretical backgrounds but lack sufficient skills to convert it into practice for it to be of any use to business. Many academic courses at universities also discount certain key areas that almost always occur in practice or in the practical world would be defined as common sense. The following highlight four core areas that almost always are necessary in solving business problems in practice that are never sufficiently taught in academics:
- Rationalization of complexity:
- Understanding complexity of the world we live in and the fact something that can be done in academic theory may not be possible in practice, given the resources at the time. Understanding such aspects of computational cost, architectural constraints, input/output dependencies, third-party dependencies, scalability requirements, resilience, latency, load, bandwidth, performance, time constraints, funding limitations, management buy-in, cloud resources, access to data, licensing requirements, state management, copyright restrictions, regulatory requirements, skill availability, and other such complexity constraints.
- Rationalization of uncertainty:
- Understanding that in practice there are many uncertainty variables, that need to be taken into account, that often may get ignored in academic theory. Often this involves a certain degree of risk. Such risks could take on many forms of economic, geopolitical, social, environmental, government regulation, criminal, accidents, errors, event state outcomes, customer behavior, market demand/trends, failure to deliver, health and safety, loss of team resource, loss of funding, sudden eventual changes, and any such factors outside of immediate control.
- Rationalization of noisy data:
- Understanding that in practice data is almost always noisy and that someone will not provide you clean data on a silver spooned platter.
- Rationalization of context:
- Understanding that in practice everything has context, and it is in this context that things can be constructively applied within the bounds of rational pragmatic thinking. There is no silver bullet that can magically solve all problems of the world. Often context understanding comes with practice as it involves all the above key areas of complexity, uncertainty, and being able to handle noisy data. In most cases, a formula is not provided and the problem is not defined. One has to formulate the problem present in the data, and discover a formula to solve such a problem.
As a side note, it seems as the more academic one gets, the more inclined one becomes, at not using common sense. And, even the most simple tasks become difficult to accomplish or require additional help from others. So it seems, academics is a trajectory that promises a lot initially but quantifiably or qualitatively delivers little in return to the individual in society over the long-term.
