Suzy Welch worries that Gen Z is ‘unemployable’—and some leaders are intervening to teach them basic life skills

Wadsh, a professor at New York University and business journalist, posted an article that has been widely discussed in Wall Street Magazine Emphasizing that the main values ​​that employment managers obtain – achievement, learning and strong desire to work – are priorities of only about 2 % of the polls surveyed. Instead, most young people focus on self -care, originality and helping others. This inconsistency, Wilsh and supporters argue, leaves many General Zires seen as not ready or unwilling to adapt to traditional professional expectations, a feeling supported by business leaders who were included in the survey in 2024: one out of six expressed new graduates, with three quarters of signs of “non -common” rental. It is difficult criticism from Welsh, who established the most popular business college course at New York University ever, and meets the values ​​of the values ​​that are with a dedicated chapter around the “purpose”.

luck The Gen Z’s plight of different angles was covered throughout 2025, which is the year -dominated by anxiety on artificial intelligence, and early indicators of the labor market shrinking at the entry level and the labor market that is characterized by Jerome Powell, the “low -use, low -fire” mentality. Several leaders Fortune told that through the emotional tasks exposed to automation by artificial intelligence, “human skills” are more important than ever, yet it seems that General Z has exactly a deficit of these. The “Gen Z Stare” phenomenon has become viral as the older generations have fallen into frustrating the embarrassing reactions in the service or professional contexts, even with the appearance of evidence that young workers are not poorer or unemployed than working in greater numbers, but they hold a quarter of an unusual and emerging and high crisis in “despair”.

Some leaders take measures to arrest what they see as a failure to communicate. one Rebeca AdamsSenior cohesion officers, AI’s starting $ 1.5 billion. Adams decided to send Adams or two of General Zires herself to send all managers of her employee company, which amounts to 6000 people, to a specific training on how to successfully interact with Gen Z. Liz FieldThe CEO of Radical Hope, a non -profit institution devoted to preparing young people on the campus with better communication, and personal and emotional intelligence skills. Noting “high anxiety, stress and depression over the past few years,” radical hope as a pilot at New York University began in 2020 and grew in that. 75 University University.

In an interview with luckAdams described learning things from her children, which gave her sympathy for the novice workers in her company, while opening her eyes to the need for additional training on how to act at work. Field described something similar to the corresponding angle: “Their fathers have made many decisions for them to the point that when they reach the campus, they are not fully prepared to do the simplest things for themselves.”

Gap in the market: Etiquette of the workplace

Adams described the positions in which the trainees and new appointments are struggling with simple professional decor: missing meetings of personal obligations or failure to understand the basic evaluation tools. These experiments have prompted cohesion to provide clear instructions on the initial things that appear from the Calendar management to the etiquette of meetings. Adams looks at these interventions that are not a handicraft, but as an essential adaptation of a new culture in the workplace, where transparency and continuous comments and the search for meaning are essential.

“They want to know why, how they want continuous reactions,” Adams said about her employees at Gen Z. At the same time, she said: “It is also amazing to see how different the youth who deal with him.

Adams said that the cohesion had to teach managers how to drive this generation of workers, while apparently teaching some “basic things” for younger workers, such as “How can I manage my calendar? You really have to accept the meeting request. You cannot get out of the meeting that you have because you have another one while you are still ongoing.”

A story quoted the director of the director/trainee’s lunch, where a senior leader treats a trainee for lunch. In this case, she said that the director was waiting for a very successful trainee who was to turn into a full -time job, but this trainee did not get the memo that the work meeting was more important than this lunch. “Sorry, I was late, I just had to walk, I was just at a meeting,” the trainee explained. When the director offered a reslu off, the trainee said that he was “going a lot” anyway, so they thought it was good to leave the meeting early for lunch.

Or think about the 20 -year -old Ibn Adams and the topic he will choose. His position was something like “I really needed to love the job and I need to love the company.” Adams Fortune told she was puzzling about this: “What do you mean? I was a waitress for many years.”

Adams also shed light on transparency, walking alongside what could be agreed. “I think some of them are difficult to satisfy. There was one person, amazing, doing a great job during his training period … He went further. When we went to present the job, he said:” You know what? I think I just want to take a year and travel to go out. ”I was like, stand.” “You are taking this job. You can travel later,” Adams said. But this generation is wired differently, and both sides need some new training to work effectively.

Deep fear of failure

Feld, which has been developed through discussions with thousands of students, focuses on the skills that “we all grew up on the kitchen table” – Empathy, connecting, setting priorities and resolving the basic conflict. Instead of group therapy, its program is presented as a “experienced” “experience”, which depends on the activity. The sessions may include playing roles, stress management, time management, and even sharing operating lists for emotional support. Above all, there are basic guidelines to communicate face to face, where Field says many Gen Zers “are afraid” of a small conversation. “They are threatened with it, and they will tell us that they see a refusal in a conversation as a personal failure.”

Field said that thousands of students with whom they interacted had problems with the simplest things. “They will not ask someone, do you want to go to the dining hall and have dinner, you want to go to the beer, and you want to go on foot, and want to get coffee?” She said they simply did not learn how, and technology has enabled them to avoid many basic steps in their development.

As she continued to describe what she watched in her work, Field and confused became angry. When asked about reporting some functional candidates at Gen Z who brought their parents to work interviews, Feld confirmed that they were very real. “We are talking about that, and this is due to parents who actually believe it is appropriate to go to Bank of America for an interview with their child, who are in Dartmouth, by the way … There are many strange ingredients that do not add.”

Field said sometimes that she hears that parents tell their young adults, “I am coming with you, you cannot do this alone, and that’s … Why do you say that to a 22 -year -old child?” She said the pressure is enormous. “These young people feel that they should perform their parents all the time.”

Adams described separately the huge pressures that young people see put on themselves, describing it “frightening and wonderful”. She saw that General Z, the trainees and his colleagues, focus extensively on the future, noting the thesis of Jonathan, which was guided on Gen Z as. “Anxiety generation“He grew up on smartphones. Adams described an anxiety similar to what Feld has set, a position on:” I want to close everything so that I can determine if I want to marry, if I want to have children, so I want to deal with my job as much as possible before that, but I also want to travel and have a lot of balance between the life of work. ”

Adams said: “When I met them, the pressure they put on themselves scares me,” Adams said. She said there is a lot of thinking about choosing the right specialization, which improves the best profession, and performance at the higher level at every moment, it was completely different for her. “My specialty was not equal to work for me. It was something I was interested in and the experience of going to college,” was more important.

Neither Adams nor Field was aware of many viral fishing phrases attributed to General Z. Adams used the phrase “closed” to describe the position of her colleagues in General Z, but she made it clear that she did not see Tiktok and never heard of “The Great Lock-in”, so its use of this phrase was simultaneous. Field never heard herself “Gen Z Staq” but realized her description.

“I see this when young adults via mobile phone, they go to Starbucks, Dunkin ‘, or Chipotle, and they will not even say thanks to you, or they will not look at the person who gives them the bag. They are on their phones, or pretend to be on the phone, so they do not even have to get an interaction.” She said that she spoke to one of the parents who sent his son to a therapeutic internal school, and this adult young man was so afraid of interacting that she was in fact, learn to actively how to do so. “One of the exercises she had to do in school was to go to Dunkin ‘Donuts or MCDONALD’s and giving someone money (and getting change), such as, when he was 20 years old.”

Field said that the most famous thing is that these young people “want to be a personal call, they do not know how. It was in reality that in reality it is a skill that they did not learn, which they want to learn.”