Bosses say Gen Zers aren't ready for work. Whose fault is that?
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My first internship gave me a simple task: Email a press release to a large list of reporters. I followed the meticulous formatting instructions from a binder, and hit send.
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Minutes later, a supervisor let me know that I had botched this most basic responsibility. I needed to BCC the list of recipients, something I had neglected to do because in my time in a college classroom, I hadn't learned what BCC meant. It was the kind of rookie mistake I couldn't anticipate and learn only by bumbling through my first office job. For today's young workers, navigating first jobs may become even more complicated.
Bosses say Gen Z isn't really workplace ready. Glenn Fogel, CEO of Priceline's parent company Bookings Holdings, has said young workers need more guidance on the norms of the office. Former Whole Foods CEO John Mackey said that young people "don't seem like they want to work." In 2024, a poll of nearly 1,000 business leaders from Intelligent.com found that 75% of companies said some or all of recent grads they hired were "unsatisfactory," and another survey of 800 HR leaders sponsored by Hult International Business School, found that 37% of HR leaders said would prefer to have a robot or AI do a job than hire a recent new grad, while another 30% said they would rather leave the job vacant.
"Workplace ready" is a slippery designation that shifts shape by industry or office. Employers hungry for workers who know how to get an ROI on AI have tied their hopes to an ever-growing cohort of AI native Gen Zers entering the workforce. After emphasizing technical skills during the 2010s, they're finding AI can automate some of that work. Communication has become more valuable, just as a generation who had their adolescence marred by COVID and grew up on screens enters the workforce. "What I think colleges need to do — and companies — is first integrate people into what is work: how do you socialize, what is expected of you, and then how can you help me with AI, using AI to help enhance our processes that we have today," says Jason Desentz, chief human resources officer at Toshiba, who sees training young people as a "shared responsibility" between schools and colleges.
Desentz also thinks schools should emphasize skills over what many think of as traditional academia. "Can we focus on the stuff that actually matters, and get rid of the fluff?" he says
"The question isn't whether colleges should prepare students for careers. They absolutely must," says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. "It's whether we prepare students for the job that exists today, or give them the kinds of knowledge, skills, competencies, and judgments to navigate a lifetime of work in an economy that's going to continue to change, especially with the rapid proliferation of AI."
New grads may never have stepped into the office workplace ready. But today's young workers have a maze with even more twists and turns to navigate.
Each generation unlocks a new stigma upon entering the workforce. Gen X bosses saw Millennials as soft and spoiled, Boomer bosses saw Gen Xers as apathetic slackers, and Silent Generation bosses saw Boomers as hippies determined to disrupt the society's morals and norms. The allegations against Gen Z, who embraced Lazy Girl jobs and Quiet Quitting, are just the latest packaging.
"Every age group gets that complaint because the transition from school to work is different," says Peter Cappelli, a professor in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. That transition smooths, and young people grow into jobs just as their parents did. But the professors I spoke to for this story agreed that these new grads are different — they're coming to college without the communication skills typical freshman had in the past.
COVID-19 shutdowns disrupted their high school experience. Gen Z has spent more time on screens and less time dating than their predecessors, and just over a third of those ages 16 to 19 worked a summer job this year, a rite of passage that reached a historic high of 58% in 1978, according to the Pew Research Center. They have grown up with parents increasingly involved in school and extracurriculars who have constant connection to their kids, some of which they have maintained throughout college and the early years of their children's careers.
A growing number of Americans are questioning the value of a college degree. A 2024 Gallup poll found that just 36% of respondents had a "great deal" of confidence in the higher education system, compared to 57% in 2015. Palantir has offered a pipeline for people to skip college and intern at the company. Stanford dropout Sam Altman recently said he thought four years was too long for college, and that the experience could be dramatically compressed.
The professors I spoke to said that if anything, today's college students need more time to develop. Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University who a piece for The Wall Street Journal earlier this year titled "A New Lost Generation: Why Gen Z Is Unprepared for the Workplace," says she has noticed freshman have arrived on campus less able to communicate, and with less experience in romantic relationships, debating, or confronting professors. In some ways, college professors now have to build the skills previous students had mastered upon arriving at campus into their coursework. "It falls on us to fix it," West says. "Anyone can learn the technical skills. It's the relational skills."
Now add that college students have been handed the keys to Gen AI tools that are altering how people communicate with one another and make it easier to cheat their way to a degree and enter the workforce with neutered critical thinking skills. Headlines about Gen Z in the workforce have sounded alarm bells. The Financial Times reported this spring about a finance firm that pivoted away from STEM graduates toward those with humanities degrees, after finding the 2025 intern class to have "shallow" ideas for which their AI native skills couldn't compensate.
The real office situation isn't so dire, but new grads have room to improve. Fifty-five percent of employers said new college graduates' skills at least partially aligned with hiring needs, and 42% said their skills "very closely aligned," in a survey of hiring managers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Seventy-one percent said recent grads were "somewhat prepared" for the workforce, and only 22% were very well prepared.
NACE also asked employers what the most important skills were: professionalism, teamwork, communication, and critical thinking landed at the top. But only about half said they found new grads proficient in communication, critical thinking, and professionalism, while about 75% said the new grads were proficient in teamwork. In 2024, 66% of employers told NACE new grads had a high proficiency in critical thinking.
NACE didn't have data about these same questions going further back, but in 2014, the AAC&U surveyed top business leaders and found they were down on Millennials: Just a quarter said new grads at the time were well prepared to do critical thinking, communicating, and solving complex problems at work. A 2007 survey by the AAC&U found 63% of employers thought too many recent graduates did not have the necessary skills to thrive at work.
A vast majority of employers told NACE that recent grads were somewhat or very prepared to use AI at work. "Students are better at using AI than people in my workforce," says Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at EdTech software company Turnitin. She says that today's students may sometimes struggle with resilience and may not have done the hard work — particularly if they become overreliant on AI, but she plans to keep hiring young people. "They're more creative thinkers. I think that they have a different perspective of the world that's more applicable."
Seeking a target for their dissatisfaction, employers are pressuring colleges to emphasize career readiness and prepare students for the AI era, all while colleges fend off a culture war in which they must combat funding losses and defend their value to parents and prospective students who increasingly question if college is worth its skyrocketing cost.
The conversation about a lack of work readiness often skips over the employer's responsibility. Companies hiring young workers have traditionally made an implicit concession to take on the fresh faced employees who need some polishing, in exchange paying them less and assigning them tedious tasks. But many companies have slacked on training workers. Training hours for entry-level workers has been falling since the 2000s, as more training has been geared toward upskilling mid- and senior-level talent. By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor, according to the Pew Research Center.
The rush to skill a tech workforce for lucrative jobs may have hit a turning point. From 2007 to 2022, humanities degrees dropped by 25% in most disciplines, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, the Obama administration set a goal of boosting STEM graduates by 1 million over the next decade, a goal that was exceeded as 4.6 million STEM graduates earned degrees by 2022. AI has lowered the bar for performing technical work, and employers have increasing interest in hiring people with liberal arts degrees. This shift over the past decade shows how hard pivots by schools and groups of young people to meet employers' expectations can create an overcorrection.
By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor.
Colleges are taking the heat for a generational issue, scrambling to reinvest in career centers and align their classrooms with AI skill expectations, all while trying to draw the line between a smart use of AI and cheating. "I don't think they're responsible for it, but if you're thinking who could do anything about it, that's the easiest place to push," Cappelli says of colleges.
Last year, Dartmouth College rechristened its Center for Professional Development as the Center for Career Design, shifting its focus to helping students find their areas of passion rather than a direct focus on one profession, sometimes using an AI tool to narrow down options that fit their interests, a sort of aptitude test befitting for 2026. The center has set out to raise $94 million to add more career coaches, internships funded by the college, and future-proof students to a changing interview process and shifts in demand for AI skills. "We wanted students to be equipped to navigate the future of work," says Joe Catrino, the center's executive director. "It's ambiguous, it's tumultuous, it is all over the place right now."
To navigate those unknowns, Catrino says the center needs to bridge the gaps in how employers and schools talk about career readiness and skills. That includes conversations with employers about how Dartmouth students have performed in internships and first jobs, and what skills employers are seeking, while shifting how students talk about themselves and their abilities to also focus on skills rather than a quick name drop of companies and schools.
This fall, colleges welcome another class of students whose educations and childhoods have been marked by screens, AI, and anxious parents. The schools must educate them for jobs that may not yet exist in a workforce that's become chilly to new grads. The concept of what makes someone workplace ready in four years could wildly shift, but the idea that there's always some stumbling and learning to be done on the job won't.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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