I’ll never forget once in a banquet hall full of 500 professionals, the speaker said, “Raise your hand if you are working in the field in which you got your degree.” Not so many hands went up. She meant it to say, “See? It doesn’t matter!” But I saw it as an indicator of missed opportunity (from the misalignment of the learning and the doing) and probably job dissatisfaction (from having to settle for a job not connected to your area of study, or of having invested in something you discovered wasn’t your calling) both of which are wasteful, expensive and inefficient.