I was talking with a friend recently who was finishing a master’s degree after six years of post-secondary schooling. She was just about to graduate and was describing the deep sense of uncertainty she felt about whether she had the skills needed to get a job and kick-start her career.

Our education system is teaching us something, but clearly not everything. I came across a speech that was given in 1991 by a teacher named John Taylor Gatto, recipient of New York State’s 1991 Teacher of the Year award. His response to this award was to tender his resignation, detailing six unintended lessons built into our system of education.

The hidden curriculum Gatto outlined resonated. It revealed the emotional and intellectual dependence many of us acquire in the classroom — feeling good only if we get a good grade, waiting for someone to tell us what to think about. It laid out lessons in “provisional self esteem” — how we weren?t just learning school subjects, but also a reliance on others? opinions of us.

Gatto’s message speaks to my friend’s sense of being unprepared. It is also the foundation of much of my own education. But it wasn’t the whole thing — and it’s not for a lot of Millennials today. There is another, more beneficial, hidden curriculum at play, with which I have had firsthand experience and observed through my work with young people.

For the last eight years, through DreamNow, I have worked with Millennials to help them take action — start community projects and get engaged. Today’s Millennials have been raised on social issues — on recycling programs, on climate change and on a clear and present understanding of what life is like around the world. The response has been an upswell of grassroots organizing, trips to volunteer abroad, and thousands and thousands of small organizations tackling local issues — amplifying their voices and passion.

All of these projects have actually been teaching another type of curriculum — a learning that is happening outside of school. Today’s job market is just beginning to shift to accept the realities of this new education. Here are three lessons Millennials are bringing to their workplaces: a curriculum learned not in the classroom, but through volunteer opportunities, nonprofit organizations, political activism and local engagement.

New answers can be more efficient

When you are starting your own grassroots project you have to learn to do a lot with a little bit of money. As a result, Millennials have been training themselves to question the way things have been done in the past. They look for more efficient ways to bring about change. Sometimes this means looking to technology and other times it means collaborating with those who may have traditionally been viewed as competitors.

Millennials aren’t going to settle for the way things have been done just “because they have always been done that way” in the office space. They are asking why, and have real ideas for making it better that are of the moment and grounded in today’s technology. As an employer this can be an asset if you embrace their skills and provide a path for them to identify, challenge and potentially transform your organization’s processes so that they are more efficient and create more change.

Purpose and money together

DreamNow spent a year talking to people in their twenties and thirties about what they wanted out of their careers and we heard that they wanted both purpose and financial security. They also believed that they weren’t mutually exclusive. The rise of social enterprise, the clean-tech industry and the social venture capital markets is testament to the fact that today having both is possible — they are just trying to find out how. Millennials have had some experiences in the nonprofit world and are coming into jobs today with a mindset of abundance. They want to work and build their careers in an environment that echoes this sentiment and stays clear of the scarcity mentality that can be present in the nonprofit world.

Context matters

The hidden curriculum of community projects has taught Millennials that context matters. Millennials have experienced what it means to be directly connected to the work they are doing — the people they nourished or the students they taught. These experiences leave an emotional imprint that is influencing workplaces as Millennials seek to continue to fill their desire for context.

To make jobs attractive to Millennials today it is up to employers to communicate and tell the story of the connection between the work and the cause and people their work supports. By telling this story and by articulating how a specific job has direct impact, employers will have a better chance attracting and retaining top Millennial talent.

Millennials are entering the workforce having learned equally in the field as in the classroom. The lessons they have learned and the careers they are developing are changing the job landscape and forward-thinking employers are adapting and changing with it. Today we have the opportunity to rethink, re-imagine and redesign our world and Millennials, having forged their careers in the social change space, will play a leading role.

For the full results of our year-long research study on Millennials who are seeking to make money and change the world you can download our free ebook at myoccupation.org.

Dev Aujla (@devaujla) is the Executive Director of DreamNow, a charitable organization that teaches young people to take action. He has worked with a countless number of young people to help them turn their community service ideas into reality. He is a blogger for Huffington Post and Good Magazine and is currently at work on his first book on today?s opportunity to make money and change the world, which will be published by Penguin/Rodale in 2012. He lives and works in Toronto.