I'm one of the ones that got caught with a PIP. My supervisor, team leads, co-workers, and other colleagues all had great performance reviews for me. And then suddenly the PIP. I found out later that it was probably related to some medical issues I have, which explains why it came out of nowhere.
> But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's market.
Yep, still struggling with that. I'm the child of hippies that wasted all their time filling my head with religion, rather than survival skills, and so being prepared for "business language" is still challenging. Heck, I'm a Millennial, and I haven't had any career office talk to me about how key LinkedIn is in finding work and networking. I had to go find the research myself, and take action to get myself up to speed.
I can't really guess at all the factors keeping me and my cohort out of professional life, but it does happen, quite a lot. Maybe it's not visible to everyone because we're so absent in professional settings. For example, at my last job at a big company all of my colleagues were either 15 years older than me or 15 years younger than me, with only a single exception. That is a pretty clear pattern, and does explain why my experiences and those like me might be absent from the discourse surrounding professional work.
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Edit: Actually, that got me thinking. What if we're looking at some sort of evolutionary process? For example, consider a population of people, and assign the trait of "understanding business language" to some of them at random. Then at each time step prune out of some of them that lack that trait. Then, after n-time steps you're left with a population that is almost entirely made-up of people with that trait. And as the people left in the population all have the survival trait, the equilibrium state is a professional class of people that were lucky enough have the trait in the first place. And so, from the perspective of someone in that population with that trait, over time, they would see only others that had the "common knowledge" of that trait, and perhaps assume that the trait must be present in most people given the "False consensus effect" [1]:
> is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances".
Fascinating if true.
