What Running a Weekly Podcast Taught Four Teens About Work

When Students Incorporated closed out its second season, host Mr. Jason didn't bring in an outside guest. He turned the microphone on his own production crew, four students who had just finished a year of writing, recording, and publishing a new episode every week, and who spent their finale being honest about what that actually took. What they described, without ever using the phrase themselves, reads like a checklist of the exact soft skills national employer surveys keep flagging as missing from new graduates.

Four Students, 32 Episodes, Three and a Half Hours a Week

The season two team was small: Premi handled writing and editing, Chania built the graphics, Yan Hao ran audio and co-hosted, and Rebecca wrote segments and edited recaps. Mr. Jason told listeners the arithmetic behind their year outright: the group met for roughly three and a half hours a week and, across two semesters, turned that into 32 published episodes. The team had started the year with five students; when it dropped to four partway through, one teammate said plainly that the remaining workload "started to become a bit more" for everyone left standing, since nobody's list of duties got any shorter.

Asked for their favorite memories, several of them landed on the same one: a chapel recording with guest Asa Watson that turned into an impromptu celebration afterward, coffee runs included. Another cited an interview with a teacher, Mrs. Merrily, and two younger student writers whose growth as poets stuck with her enough that she hoped to check back in on them the following year. Both moments share a theme: the part of the job that felt most like a real newsroom was sitting across from someone outside their own four walls and having to actually listen.

The challenges were more instructive than the highlights. Chania named the unglamorous grind of resizing text boxes and hunting for the right graphic when a headline changed at the last minute, sometimes after the artwork was already finished. Yan Hao owned up to missing an early-season recording because he'd simply forgotten and gone home instead, a lapse he fixed by setting phone reminders and, notably, buying a physical calendar for the first time. Rebecca's challenge was subtler: knowing the show's stories well enough, at any given moment, to write an accurate recap of them. None of these are podcast skills specifically. They're the ordinary friction of holding down any job with a recurring deadline.

One teammate put a name to what all of that added up to: a preview of professional life inside a school building. They described learning how to interact with the working professionals who came in as guests, plus a different kind of correspondence entirely: emailing the school's principals and heads of school to get something approved or scheduled for the show. "I'm learning that there's ways that you should communicate," they said, "there's ways for you to act or speak and behave in the professional world," all while navigating a stranger version of the same relationships outside the studio: teammates who doubled as best friends, a teacher who doubled as the show's host. That kind of double life, coworker by class period, friend by lunch, is its own quiet rehearsal for a workplace where the same tension never fully goes away.

The Gap the Crew Didn't Know They Were Closing

That friction happens to be exactly what employers say is missing from new hires. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2025 New Hire Readiness Report, based on a survey of 500 hiring managers, found 84% believe most high school students aren't prepared to enter the workforce, and 80% think today's graduates are less prepared than previous generations. The same survey found hiring managers overwhelmingly rewarding the traits this crew stumbled into by necessity: 90% said they're more likely to hire an entry-level candidate who shows strong communication skills, 94% pointed to critical thinking and problem-solving, and 89% said real experience outweighs formal education when they're deciding who to bring on. Only 46% of those managers pointed to internships specifically as the leading way students build those skills, leaving plenty of room for other kinds of hands-on work, a weekly production schedule among them, to count for just as much.

Communication is the piece that keeps surfacing in workplace research generally, and it's the piece one of Premi's teammates leaned into hardest while giving advice for next year's team: coordinate, don't isolate. "If you don't know something, if you're frustrated, stressed, don't carry the burden all to yourself," the teammate said, pointing newcomers toward each other and toward Mr. Jason rather than toward struggling silently alone. Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found Gen Z and millennial workers now rank soft skills like communication among the abilities they most want to develop, ahead of many technical skills, an acknowledgment, from the inside, that the gap is real. A Kahoot survey of 2,000 UK office workers ages 21 to 25, published in December 2025, found nine in ten Gen Z employees report social discomfort on the job, more than half of them at least half the time. The instinct this crew practiced weekly, say it out loud before it becomes a bigger problem, is precisely the instinct research suggests a lot of their peers haven't built yet.

"We come into the podcast as four individuals and then we go out as a family."

A Small Show Doing What Bigger Programs Can't Always Offer

There's a broader current here too. Student journalism has become one of the more visible answers to the readiness gap the Chamber's data points to, and the numbers on how unevenly that access is distributed are stark. Columbia Journalism Review reported in April 2025 that only 27% of New York City high schools have a student newspaper, in print or online, with the share falling to just 7% at the city's highest-poverty schools, a gap nonprofits like Press Pass NYC are now working, one school at a time, to close. The same reporting cited research showing that high schoolers involved in journalism earn higher GPAs and ACT scores than their peers, and perform better specifically in college-level English coursework, outcomes tied to the discipline of writing on deadline for a real audience rather than for a grade alone.

Set against that backdrop, a four-person crew at the International Community School of Bangkok publishing weekly, on a tight schedule, with real turnover and real scheduling failures along the way, looks less like a class project and more like a scrappy answer to a problem plenty of better-resourced American schools haven't solved. Nobody on the crew called what they were doing "career readiness." They called it staying on top of the script, finding the right emoji for a graphic, remembering to show up. But those are the mechanics underneath the abstraction, the specific, unglamorous habits that surveys measuring "workforce preparedness" are actually trying to describe.

What Season Three Inherits

The crew's own suggestions for next year read like a list of process fixes any small team would recognize: split roles instead of stacking three jobs on one person, build a posting schedule for social content instead of improvising it week to week, and check in on how the season is going at the midpoint rather than waiting until the finale to say so out loud. One teammate wanted to take the show's marketing beyond its own feed entirely, floating the idea of a live showcase in one of the school's event spaces to pull in students who don't already think of themselves as podcast listeners, the same instinct, at a much smaller scale, that pushes professional outlets toward live tapings and public events to reach people search and social feeds don't. Premi and Rebecca both said they planned to stay on for season three, giving the incoming team at least two people who already know where the friction points are.

Mr. Jason confirmed Students Incorporated would return with a new production team and new content in August 2024, continuing a run that, by this point, had already quietly doubled as an unscripted lesson in the difference between doing a job and being ready for one.

← Back to all posts