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Useless at anything math-oriented, can never remember names, but I can recognise people I last saw thirty-forty years ago, and I never went to Uni, or college, except as part of my job on day-release; however, I’ve managed to get through my entire working life quite well, doing a whole bunch of different things fairly successfully, and I’ve worked with people who had expensive educations, University, the whole works, and couldn’t be expected to find their own arse with a map and a full set of instructions.
I'd recommend the book "The body keeps the score" to the OP as it goes over the way trauma affects memory formation, concentration etc (the title makes it sound like it's a "woo" book. It is very much not!).
Retired recently but I developed a habit of writing down working notes all the time - the company's intranet had some sort of "blog" facility so I used that - best thing I did because as long as I could remember the meta-info (e.g. I'd used an interesting method for this type of problem, rather than what the method was!) or even if not I could just search it all - I could find stuff I'd long forgotten.
I got very good at saying, "that does sound familiar, I'll check my notes and get back to you after this" in meetings!
Obviously the people who have all the facts and understanding at their fingertips as well as how to apply the material do very well, but luckily for the rest of us they are few & far between and constantly overworked 😉
I think it depends on your field of expertise: if you're a doctor (for example) you'll need to remember lots and your ability to either be naturally good at memory or be able to develop it will determine your success ; some jobs like research physics less so, I seem to remember an article about how one trait of successful physicists was that they were good at forgetting because you don't need memory you need computing brainpower.
If there are any cognition specialists on here please tear down my theories 🙂
I like to think my memory is decent but I'm also aware that 44yo me isn't absorbing new stuff but hanging onto what's already been absorbed !