The ICS Bangkok Class Already Teaching What New Hires Lack

At the end of 2024, Intelligent.com surveyed 1,000 U.S. hiring managers about the newest crop of college graduates on their payrolls. A third said those hires lacked basic work ethic. Nearly a quarter called them unprepared for the job. More than half, 55 percent, said they'd been part of the decision to fire a recent grad within the year. None of those managers had ever sat in on the marketing classroom at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), where a group of teenagers just wrapped their third year of running something that looks, on paper, exactly like the entry-level job those same employers keep complaining nobody can handle.

The class is called Students Incorporated. It produces a weekly podcast, 32 episodes a season, split across two semesters of 16 each. But the podcast itself is almost beside the point. What the season 3 finale actually captured, in a round of reflections from the outgoing production and marketing teams, was a group of high schoolers describing, without a hint of self-consciousness, the exact muscles that surveys like Intelligent.com's say American new hires don't have.

The structure behind that is deliberate, not incidental. Students don't get assigned a role; they pick one. "We put people together depending on what they have self-selected of what kind of job they'd like to do," Mr. Jason explained, "producer or co-host or marketing director or whatever." Then those self-picked teams have to hit a number that, by his own account, rattles every new group on day one: 32 episodes, on a real publishing schedule, on top of the AP classes and honors courses most of these students are also carrying. "I get to see them on day one kind of freak out a little bit," he said, describing the reaction that's greeted every one of his three seasons running the class so far.

A Company With Departments, Not Just a Show

The season's producer, who goes by Highlight, described the favorite part of the year as the "cross-department partnerships" between production and marketing: proofreading and event logistics on one side, sponsor outreach and social content on the other, constantly handing work back and forth. The team's marketing coordinator framed the same year in terms of growth rather than output: "seeing everyone progress from being a beginner to becoming specialists in their areas of work," they said, adding that the season had also meant learning "how to be a contemplative, communicative, and mature leader." Somewhere in the middle of that, the crew took an actual field trip, dodging Bangkok traffic on the way back to the bus, which several students separately named as a highlight of the season, a reminder that the office camaraderie point wasn't lost on any of them either.

A Real Budget, Real Sponsors, Real Rejection

The clearest evidence sits in the show's most mundane complaints. Asked about his biggest challenge of the season, Maddie, on the marketing side of the team, didn't mention a guest who canceled or a mic that failed. He talked about being ignored. "I felt like the clubs in our school didn't respond to my messages," he said of his attempts to line up sponsors, "so we decided to find sponsors outside of school instead." That's a cold outreach problem, the kind any small business owner recognizes, being solved by a 17-year-old with a homework deadline attached.

Another teammate's struggle was budget math: knowing how much the show could spend in each category before triggering a harder conversation about the plan being "atypical." A third had spent the season learning to format sponsor-facing graphics so they didn't "look awful." None of this is podcast trivia. It's the actual daily texture of running a small media operation (sales, finance, design) compressed into a single class period, with a teacher present but mostly out of the way. "The students learn a lot by just figuring it out as well," host Mr. Jason said of his approach, reflecting on his third year guiding a new set of students through the same 32-episode target. "The teamwork is a huge factor. And what they can learn from this class... will take them into university and into their first jobs."

The Skills the Surveys Say Are Missing

Line up the season's self-reported lessons against what hiring managers actually complain about, and the overlap is almost uncomfortable. Intelligent.com's report found recent grads most often criticized for poor communication (20 percent of managers), needing micromanagement (20 percent), and struggling to respond well to feedback (25 percent). Compare that to what the ICS Bangkok team said about their own season: senior co-host Mia described learning "to be very flexible" and to cover for absent teammates without being asked, because "you don't know what your guest is about to say back to you" and improvising is the job. Another named communication directly as the season's biggest lesson, "not just with your sponsors or your partners but also with your team," so that everyone stays "on the same page."

A third teammate put it in blunter terms, contrasting the class with every other period in the school day: "This class is different from other classes because instead of a more traditional class, we're actually running a podcast together... I have to give weekly analysis reports. I also have to turn things in and communicate with everyone like a real work setting." Nobody had asked that student to reflect on career readiness specifically. The comparison came up unprompted, because the class had apparently made it impossible not to notice.

You have to work with people no matter where you go.

That's Mr. Jason's summary of the point of the whole exercise, and it's a smaller claim than it sounds. He isn't arguing the show teaches podcasting. He's arguing it teaches the thing employers say is missing before the stakes are a paycheck.

An AI Co-Worker, Not Just a Study Tool

One detail in the reflections points to something newer. Premi, one of the season's veteran team members, named the proudest collaboration of the year not as an interview or a viral clip, but as a workflow: proofreading "hyper-personalized" outreach emails with two teammates, and brainstorming interview questions with an internal tool the crew nicknamed Smarty Pants, "our AI or bot," as Premi described it. "That was actually so memorable for me," Premi said.

That casual mention lines up with a broader, well-documented shift. A College Board research brief published in December 2025, drawing on more than 10,000 high school student, parent, and teacher surveys collected between mid-2024 and mid-2025, found that nearly 60 percent of high schoolers now use generative AI tools "often" or "sometimes" for schoolwork, and that brainstorming is one of the four most common uses, alongside essay revision, research, and explaining complex topics. The same report found that seniors and high-achieving students are nearly twice as likely as ninth-graders to use AI across all four of those tasks. Premi, a graduating senior, fits that pattern exactly. What's different here is the context: the brainstorming wasn't for an essay a teacher would grade. It was prep for a real conversation with an outside professional guest, the kind of low-stakes-but-real deployment of an AI assistant that looks a lot more like how a marketing coordinator might actually use one at a job than how most classrooms currently frame the tool.

Where the Seniors Go Next

The season closed with two graduating co-hosts, Mia and Frank, handing off a show they'd helped run for three years. Elsewhere in the same episode, Rebecca, one of the show's longer-tenured members, shared different news: an F1 student visa had just come through, clearing the way to enroll at Wheaton College in the fall. Premi is headed to a U.S. university to study English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a major with no obvious overlap with sponsorship spreadsheets or Canva templates. That mismatch is arguably the more interesting data point than any of it lining up neatly. The skills this class is producing, adaptability, direct communication, comfort improvising under a real deadline, aren't packaged as job training for a media career. They're general-purpose, which is exactly what the workplace-readiness surveys say is scarce.

Whether that transfer actually holds up in an entry-level job five years from now isn't something one season's exit interviews can prove. But the students describing it don't sound like they're reciting a lesson a teacher wants to hear. They sound like people who spent a year finding out, the hard way, what an ignored email and an over-budget invoice actually feel like, and who'd rather learn that at 17, with a teacher in the room, than at 22, with a manager deciding whether to fire them over it.

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