Suzy Welch fears that generation Z will be “unemployed” – and some leaders intervene to teach them basic life skills

Welch, professor and commercial journalist of the NYU, published an editorial widely discussed in The Wall Street Journal To affirm that the main values ​​appreciated by hiring managers – realization, learning and a strong desire for work – are priorities for only around 2% of students of the Z generation interviewed. Instead, most young adults focus more on personal care, authenticity and to help others. This inadequacy, maintains Welch and the supporters, leaves many Zers perceived as poorly prepared or reluctant to adapt to conventional professional expectations, a feeling supported by business leaders interviewed in 2024: a reluctance expressed in six to hire recent graduates, with three points of mouths like “insatisory”. These are difficult criticisms from Welch, who created the most popular business school course at New York University, meeting the Z generation obsessed with the values ​​in which they are with a class dedicated to “goal”.

Fortune Covered the fate of generation Z from various angles throughout 2025, a year seized by anxiety compared to artificial intelligence, the first indications of an entry -level labor market in narrowing and a labor market marked by, in the words of Jerome Powell, a “low hiring, low” mentality. Several leaders have told fortune that with tasks by heart exposed to AI automation, “human skills” count more than ever, and yet workers of the Z generation seem to have a deficit exactly. The “Gen Z Stare” phenomenon has become viral while older generations have evacuated their frustration in the face of delicate interactions in service or in professional contexts, even if evidence emerged that young workers are not poorer or unemployed in greater numbers, but they are seized by an unusual and emerging crisis and an increasing feeling of “despair”.

Some leaders take action to stop what they consider a failure to communicate. One is Rebecca Adams, the head of the cohesive people, an AI startup of $ 1.5 billion. A mother of two kinds Zers herself, Adams decided to send all the managers of her company of 6,000 employees and more to a specific training on how to interact successfully with Gen Z. Another is Liz Feld, CEO of Radical Hope, non-profit information dedicated to the equipment of young adults on university campuses with better skills in interpersonal and emotional intelligence. Noting “a high anxiety, stress and depression in recent years”, Radical Hope has started as a pilot in Nyu in 2020 and went to 75 university campuses.

In an interview FortuneAdams described the learning of the things of his children who gave him empathy for entry -level workers in his business, while opening their eyes to the need for additional training on how to behave at work. Feld described something similar from the opposite angle: “Their parents have made so many decisions for them that when they arrive on the university campus, they are completely badly prepared to do the simplest things for themselves.”

A gap on the market: the work label

Adams has described situations where trainees and new hires fought with apparently simple professional decorum: missing meetings for personal commitments or not understand the basic calendar tools. Such experiences have pushed cohesity to provide explicit instructions on the apparently basic things to manage calendars at the meeting label. Adams considers these interventions not as a grip, but as essential adaptations to a new work culture, where transparency, constant feedback and the search for meaning are fundamental.

“They want to know why, how, they want constant comments,” said Adams about her generation Z employees. At the same time, she said: “It is also a mentality” to see how young people approach work differently.

Adams declared that cohesity had to teach managers how to direct this generation of workers, while teaching “basic things” apparently to young workers, as “how to manage my calendar?”

She relayed an anecdote on a manager of manager of manager / trainee where a senior manager treats a trainee for lunch. In this case, she said, a director awaited a trainee who was successful that they had to convert to a full-time job, but this trainee did not obtain the service note that a working meeting was more important than this lunch. “Sorry, I’m late, I just had to walk, I was just in a meeting,” said the trainee. When the director proposed to reprogram, the trainee said that he had “a lot to do” anyway, then they thought it was good to leave the meeting early to have lunch.

Or consider Adams 20 -year -old son and the subject of the internship he would choose to take. His attitude was something like “I really need to love work and I need to love the business.” Adams told Fortune that she was disconcerted by this: “What do you mean? I was a waitress for many years.”

Adams also highlighted transparency by going hand in hand with what could seem to be a dead end. “I think some of them are picky. There was a guy, incredible, did such a good job in his internship … He went beyond. And when we went to offer him the work, he said, “What do you know?” I think I just want to take a year of leave and travel because I graduated. And I was like, whoa. Adams said that if she was the trainee’s mother, she would have said “you take this job. You can travel later.” But this generation is wired differently, and both parties need a new training to work together.

Deep fear of failure

The FELD program, developed through discussions with thousands of students, focuses on the skills that “we have all grown up at the kitchen table” – empathy, communication, definition of priorities and basic conflict resolution. Rather than group therapy, its program is presented as an “experience” led by peers and activity focused. The sessions can involve role -playing, stress management, time management, even sharing reading lists for emotional support. Above all, there are fundamental advice to communicate face to face, because Feld says that many genres are “afraid” to make small conversations. “They are threatened, and they will tell us that they see a rejection in a conversation as a personal failure.”

Feld said the thousands of students with whom she interacted have problems with the simplest things. “They will not ask someone:” Do you want to go to the dining room and take dinner, you want to go to have a beer, you want to walk, do you want to have a coffee? “” If someone says no, she adds: “They internalize everything. Face -to -face rejection is what he is afraid.” She said they had simply never learned how, and technology allowed them to bypass many apparently basic steps in their development.

While she continued to describe what she saw in her work, the fury and the perplexity of Feld grew up in equal parts. Asked about the declaration of certain employment candidates of the Z generation bringing their parents to job interviews, Feld confirmed that it was very real. “We talk about it, and that goes back to parents who think it is appropriate to go to Bank of America for an interview with their child, who is in Dartmouth, passing … There are so many strange components that do not add up.”

Feld sometimes said that she hears that parents say to their young adult children: “I come with you, you can’t do this yourself, that is to say … Why would you say that to a 22-year-old child?” She said the pressure was immense. “These young people have the impression of having to play for their own parents all the time.”

Adams has described the enormous pressures she sees the young people separately, calling her “scary and fascinating”. She said that she sees interns and colleagues of generation Z being intensely focused on the future, recalling Jonathan Haidt’s thesis on the Z generation that the “anxious generation” raised on smartphones. Adams has described an anxiety of performance similar to what Feld has identified, an attitude of: “I want everything to be locked up so that I can then decide if I want to get married, if I want to have children, so I want to have a career as much as possible before that, but I also want to travel and have a lot of work-life-life balance.”

“When I met them,” said Adams, “the pressure they exerted scares me.” She said there was so much thought to choose the good major, optimizing the best career, occurring at the highest level at all times, it was completely different for her. “My major did not assimilate to work for me. It was something that interested me and it was the experience of going to university ”which was more important.

Neither Adams ni Feld were aware of many viral slogans attributed to the Z generation. Adams used the “locked” sentence to describe the attitude of her colleagues from the Z generation, but said that she does not watch Tiktok and has never heard of “great location”, therefore her use of expression was coincidence. Feld, herself, had never heard of “Gen Z Stare” but she recognized her description.

“I see it when the young adults command,” said Feld, “and they go to Starbucks, or Dunkin ‘Donuts, or Chipotle, and they will not even say thank you, or they don’t even look at the person who gives them the bag. They are on their phone, or claim to be on the phone, so they don’t even have to have an interaction.” She said that she had spoken to a parent who had sent their son to a therapeutic boarding school, and this young adult was so afraid of the interaction that she was actively learned to do so. “One of the exercises she had to train at school was to go to a Dunkin ‘Donuts or a McDonald’s and train to give money to someone (and to change), like a 20 -year -old man.”

Feld said that the most encouraging thing is that these young adults “wanted to have communication in person, they just don’t know how. A great revelation was that it was in fact a skill that they simply did not learn, that they want to learn. ”