Likely, you've heard the phrase "learn by doing". Indeed this is often the most painless way to learn—we start by doing something relatively simple and gradually build/add to our responsibilities. Before long, with steady application of effort, we are able to do very complex things we probably couldn't have imagined ourselves doing (being unfamiliar with what goes on such-and-such domain).

As an example from my own background, we can look at tech work. Many of the most competent tech workers today got their start playing with equipment, setting up their own systems, sorting their media collections, and so on and so forth. Through these activities, they came to realize they needed certain tools (e.g. a text editor to modify configuration files) to efficiently get certain jobs done. Learning largely happens "on demand" as well in the relaxed environment of sharing tips and tricks with other people working on similar problems.

Why don't young people have "useful skills"?

A common complaint about millenials and zoomers is that they "don't know how to do anything". Often this is true, but we have to look at why. One reason I think that young adults of today don't know how to do a lot of "practical" stuff is that that were not given "practical" things to learn with—

For instance, many young people today do not drive. They do not have a garage they can work on cars in. Is it surprising that many young people today have little to no knowledge about mechanical car things?

On the other hand, as illustrated above with the IT worker example, many young people have spent countless hours dealing with computers, smart phones, and stuff like that. People come to know the tools that they are spending a lot of time with.

Schooling

What do people learn in school? Critics will often point out that schooling optimizes "test takers" or paper shufflers (maybe digital symbol shufflers in this era).

Indeed in school, you might learn how to be on time and how to follow orders, but in terms of taking personal responsibility, design new systems, and effectively take care of existing systems, schools are often some of the worst places to learn things.

I have experience working with and running numerous student organizations. Now, for these student organizations, there is always the hanging spectre of "end of term" or "graduation". Students' commitment and involvement in these organizations is (rightly) tempered by how long they will be involved in them. So it is no surprise that it is difficult to retain good "club members" for an organization that is pushed to the back-burner of ambitious students' priorities—the students that get the best grades, aspire for the highest paying careers, and so on and so forth know how to limit their commitment to student organizations and instead optimize their time for involvement in the areas that count the most. Oftentimes those organizations are ones in which students will not have much agency in choosing how stuff is done or even what goals/policies are set up; they are just integrating themselves into massive/existing things (e.g. unions, professional societies, ...secret societies).

The solution is to do stuff

People who come from a lot of school will not profit from just complaining about how hard stuff is. What I wrote above, I hope, doesn't read as a complaint—I'm just trying to state how stuff is and why people like me (who have been through a lot of school) face particular sorts of challenges.

How do we move beyond the handicaps that schooling has imposed on us?

I think that the main thing to do is to start doing stuff, even if for very cheap or free at first. Smart/practical students already know this—many people are born into this position as they work jobs to pay their way through school. For people that come from more privileged backgrounds though, this is often a new challenge. How do you operate outside of "the matrix" of the establishment?

Here, the humility of not being "above" any kind of work, the willingness to learn from "less educated" people, and a desire to actually do stuff rather than just being a grifter off of some perk of legislation or paper shuffling becomes essential. We must practice doing "good/honest work" to be able to do it steadily, for long periods of time. The sooner we are able to get a start at it, the more we can learn and build up skills and capital to move beyond the "risk-free, guaranteed return" myth of how the world works, pushed by the technocratic elites of our day and age.