Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
worklife.news
worklife.news
While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webpage even shows up in their browser, let alone how an app like TikTok works.
I think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.)
Millenials are more tech savvy not just because we grew up with computers, but also because computers & software when we grew up was much more complex and complicated to use than the software today's users are facing...,
And majority of computer task require that type of thinking.
I would venture to say that most people do not think like this. And the people who do and the people who don't usually have a hard time communicating or understanding one another.
Much of my success in my career has been acting as a liaison between technical and non-technical folks.
Our industry benefited a lot from new employees who had prior experience fighting against buggy Linux distributions or writing random hacks for fun [1]. One of the many consequences of the abatement of general purpose computing is making it harder for teenagers to accidentally discover this wonderful world.
Every single company I've worked for has had at least one meeting where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the conferencing setup.
Or the more hilarious one where the group of developers each take turns to try, and fail, to fix the setup only to proclaim "Can't you just use your phone" before passing the baton to the next hopeful subject.
* any one of them could diagnose the problem
* the problem may or may not have any fix within their control right now, may or may not even be diagnosable in a short time
* and that the most effective way to get the problem solved is to leave whoever is working on it alone until they declare victory or defeat or ask for something.
I mean that is why I would be sitting and waiting patiently rather than trying to "help" if there was already someone working on it.
maybe if I didn't think this problem was really something they would be good at hunting down I might make it known that I'm available but only in the least suggestive most casual way I could manage. Or I might quietly prepare some alternative to have ready in case plan A doesn't work.
Turns out you actually have to connect something via HDMI (or whatever) and it will automatically turn on the motor to emerge from the table.
The room is 007 and actually being dubbed the "James Bond room" by building management but due to working from home none of us had ever been to that room.
So yeah, sometimes even a group of usually tech-savvy people can't figure it out because it surely can't be "just connect it". Nothing ever just works.
Industry newcomers are embarrassed about everything, though, in my experience. They're stressed they're not working hard enough, or that they're not smart enough, or that they caused a serious issue in production.
When I've managed or mentored newcomers to tech it takes constant reassurance to make them feel like they belong. Or at least a number of people require this sort of reassurance.
I think it would be more interesting if these folks they interviewed felt like this only about tech-savvy and not about other aspects about the job they might feel judged.
I have come across a mountain of references talking about "digital natives" in the past, but I don't recall any of them talking about the fact that "tech" and "digital" is usually about the UI first. Nobody is going to feel comfortable on a UI they haven't experienced. The more non-standard a UI feels, the more there will be an uncomfortable learning curve. And of course, no comfort with the UI will help you with background fundamentals, such as troubleshooting your internet connection.
Well, the difference is that earlier newcomers in the work force did experience that UI. Because home computing back then was highly similar to what is found in the workplace. In that sense it's a new and unique problem to Gen Z.
Very broadly similar but still more similar to each other than anything from before y2k vs ios or even chromeos.
A mere lack of owning a pc yourself didn't teach you some other mental model.
If you didn't own a pc, you still encountered them in possibly several places, school, work, library, friends. And by work I mean even as a kid with a kids job, may still have involved a pc at work, so still in the learning time before later entering the work force for "real". And whatever that total level of exposure was, even if it wasn't much and even if it wasn't all the same platform, it was still all of a similar level of complexity and involved similar mental models to understand what is happening and how to interpret the interface.
None of them were an Android or IOS phone where it's not even clear when one app is native vs a pwa, or that even most native apps are still not really native, but merely local.
I remember learning so much about business just listening to people talk around me but now all of that knowledge is in private calls and you’ll only hear what you strictly need to hear.
I’d love to go back to the office at this point but unfortunately the local businesses just aren’t competitive with remote work and WFH is still preferable to moving state.
It doesn't happen much but itself anymore, which is why I find a lot of value in explicitly "just chatting" with people.
I think the dumbing down of devices will reduce the tinkering in younger generation.
I got into programming because I was gifted an old pentium 1 with DOS and QBasic installed - trying to figure out how to play games on it.
If someone just gave me a gaming console I'd just be glued to that.
One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.
Maybe a little. But:
Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that.
My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???
I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.)
This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer.
And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better.
David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did.
That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)
It's true that there's always generational tensions, and the funny thing is that people now young are going to do exactly the same thing when they get older. In that sense, it's cyclic.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss gaps or issues unique to a generation. In the interest of the new generation as well as the older ones.
I'd say smartphone-addiction is a serious and impactful one. One of my friends owns a wood processing company. These youngsters simply abandon their station (a massive machine) and go take a dump for 30 mins, playing on their phone. Multiple times per day. Simply shutting down production altogether.
Another friend owns a logistics company, order picking and such. He doesn't want to take away their phones, tried to solve it with warnings. Yet he keeps finding them hiding in shelves, on their phones. Like heroine addicts.
My sister-in-law works in a large grocery store, and reports that this generation calls in sick 4 times more than anybody else. They very regularly simply can't be bothered to show up at all.
Earlier young generations were not this broken, unproductive, disloyal, addicted and useless. It's a real and serious issue.
Another thing is that I disagree with the statement that Gen Z is broken. They are as much a product of their time as the generations preceding them. Individuals belonging to older generations need to remember that they had to grow into the person they are today.
There are no mysteries here about what to do or how to behave. When you work at a place, you do the work. You show up and do the work. That's it. It's not a skill problem, it's a behavioral problem.
Are there larger forces at work causing this? Yes. Overprotective and distant parenting. Pampering. Addictive tech. Zero effort convenience services. No hardships. No accountability. No social skills. Spending 18 years of your life on easy mode, and then being plunged into the real world.
It sounds like the argument you are pushing is that anyone but the business owner is at fault for what employees know and how they behave. While some of that is true, it’s disingenuous to demand that employees will come in knowing what a business owner expects out of them or have the context specific skills to do a job. Reflect on your own experiences here. Can you genuinely state that your personal work history shows a perfect employee who always knew what to do? C’mon. Be real.
We're talking about a job where you attend a machine, feed it things and push 3 buttons. We're talking about picking orders. Here's the order. Collect it. And do this for 8 hours per day.
I started doing simple jobs at the age of 11. Here's a car. Wash it. Here's bricks, bring them to the brick laying guy. I think I would have understood those concepts at the age of 6.
There's no unclarity about expectations. A job surely is not some alien concept where at the age of 18 the very idea of work is unheard of?
It's not a skill issue, it's work ethic, and behavior. You're paid to work, not to be on your phone.
me too.
But when I got in the tik tok of the time was called IRC and really cool people used Bitchx and double booted Linux and BeOS
tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.
I knew way more about computers back when I was that age than my kids do! And believe me, I've tried to offer to teach them more about programming and how things work under the hood, but they're just not interested.
I think the common assumptions around "young = tech-savvy" "old = luddite" has gone completely out the window in recent years, perhaps in the last decade. In fact, I now generally trust the opinions of technologists who are in their 30s+ way more than 20s and below. I think there's been a tragic lack of proper education around open source, open protocols, networking, ethics in computerized communications, and other vital issues in tech.
Perhaps it's somewhat analogous to how many people a few decades ago were pretty knowledgable about how automobiles work, the parts of an engine, etc., and some folks were amateur mechanics who liked tinkering with their cars. These days, I think it's safe to assume the vast majority of drivers know next to nothing about cars technically-speaking and aren't even interested in knowing.
The difference now though is that you don't need to know anything about cars to work most jobs, and arguably we need a less car-dependent society which prioritizes mass transit. On the other hand, a fair degree of computer & internet knowledge is useful for many jobs in the modern economy and even in terms of policy-making in general. Younger generations not having a handle on it is a real concern.
Like, they don't ever, ever, say file. They'll say googledoc. Where's your homework ? "Its a googledoc - here's the link". Or "its on google classroom". But not - "its a pdf file. or txt file. or jpg file.
Similarly, "I like this song." ok where's the song - can you email it to me ? I don't get an mp3 file - instead its a spotify link. Can you email me that video ? I don't get an mp4 file - instead its some youtube shorts link.
Like wtf happened to files ? Everything is a file. Atleast on Unix, even domain sockets are files. You open a socket, you get a file descriptor with inode, you can invoke fstat. I mean, I don't except middle-schoolers or even high-schoolers to know all that - but atleast you should know that on a computer, content is stored as a file. Know a bunch of common file formats. Like stop calling things pictures & sending me links - its a jpg file, send the file.
Sometimes they click on the download button - but they don't know that the content got downloaded as a file and its sitting in the Downloads folder! Instead, they'll click the same Download button on the browser several more times until it finally shows them some link where they can click & view the content - super-infuriating.
Even Professors have dropped the ball.In the 90s, they'd just email you the homework as a file. I have tons of calculus homeworks sitting as pdf files in a usb drive. But nowadays, its all "on Blackboard", or on some cms. No notion of file.
Think grandma's desktop
That's why Apple products (specifically the iPhone) have been shying away from files.
Personally, I like the convenience and ubiquity of urls. It can work with any messaging method, email notwithstanding
You can charge someone for access to a file that is pointed to by a link
Newer generations of devs had more exposure to technology, and so some of the fundamentals like not getting scared because stuff has a screen, or searching a bit for options. But no shit, Facebook and tiktok don't make you a tech wizard. With tech having evolved you don't need to do as much tinkering, and why would you develop a muscle for that then?
When I was a kid, the only way to play with the home computer was to spend 1/2h copying code from a magazine, so of course I learned a couple of things on the way, because I didn't have a choice. I will wager and say that installing a game by clicking on a button is a better thing. You can still play with code if you want to, and lots of people do, it's just not the only way, and so playing with the computer does not equate to knowing how it works in the way it used to because of necessity.
I do feel like a lot more devs than before can't solve a medium complexity non-code related problem, like restoring a broken dev environment or installing an OS. I think it has got less to do with age or any true generational aspect, and more with the increased size of the group. 1) dev used to be a geek job, and that's not true anymore, 2) if you started dev recently, whatever your age, the toolsuite is much better than it used to be, requires less of you, gives more attention to usability, with the downside that you don't exercise random tech skills as much as was needed in the old days. If everything you do is webdev on node, why would you need to know much about networking, OS and even compilers.
Those are skills that are less useful in proportion than they used to be for "dev" because "dev" is much more diverse than it used to be, and naturally people who don't need them will not acquire them.
That's my perspective, based on personal anecdotal evidence, so it's worth nothing. It's hard talking about that without sounding like an old fart.
GPT summary of the article:
- Gen Zers are not as comfortable with new technology as older generations would typically presume
- 1 in 5 18-29 year olds in the study felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to 1 in 25 for those aged 40+
- 25% of 18-29 year olds would avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, compared to 6% for those aged 40+
- Organizations should ramp up their technical training programs for their youngest workers
- Gen Zers may be accustomed to digital environments, but this doesn't always carry over to professional tools
- U.K. workers rate digital skills as the most crucial for the current and future workplace, but 27% do not feel confident in their digital capabilities
- Future workers lack awareness of the importance of digital skills
- The U.K. is facing a digital skills crisis and must educate parents and children on the importance of digital skills
- Gamification is a critical learning and development facilitator
I hadn't heard this elsewhere in the comments, and it landed surprisingly hard for me.
What would have to happen to make tech cool again? The old hook seems semi-dead: culturally, tech is no longer the hotbed of creativity & possibility that at least some of us once were so drawn to; it's much more settled/established, the advances originate in far less cool & human places/far bigger & more imposing attention-capitalism. There's a lot of talk about apps and the skinner-box worlds of especially mobile. So like, what hooks could tech have today? Where would youngsters get more involved with tech?
And what changes to the industry or our paradigms might be open to us to allow tech to re-exude cool & empowerment?
My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
I gave my nephew my old gaming PC. As soon as anything unexpected happens or there is a problem, he's helpless. Not only does he not know what to do, he can't be bothered to self-resolve it. Spoiled with tech that "just works".
There's other differences. For example, they don't do email. They may have it but never check it. My niece was warned that her admission to university would be handled via a form and email confirmation, which then needed her final confirmation, with a strict deadline. Everybody around her told her to check daily, it's of a life-changing importance, and still she didn't. They simply can't seem to imagine a world outside snapchat or whatever the hell they use.
And there's differences in etiquette. Meme-like poor writing skills. Different expectations of privacy (none), things not professional-proof.
Apart from these generation-specific issues, I'd still emphasize the more generic issue that affects all generations. Training on these tools is absent or poor. I work in a giant company and the typical employee has absolutely no idea how Teams or SharePoint works. They get by memorizing the 3 things they absolutely need, whilst not knowing about 90% of the tool's capabilities. And due to these tools rapidly changing, they simply stop bothering to learn it.
We VASTLY overestimate people's abilities to intuitively understand these tools.
> My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
This is it. Complexity and friction begats skill, but if everything you use is dumbed-down to be "easy," you won't develop many skills in that area.
What's good for regular old consumption is not good for utilizing tools in the workplace, at least for the most part. Apps such as TikTok and the like are very little more than Skinner boxes, and having to go through extra steps to get the reward when using an honest to goodness tool UI on the job immediately disrupts the reward pipeline in one's head and causes frustration.
Sure, phones have contributed to the one touch paradigm of such applications, but it comes down to usage context just as much. It's no wonder that kids are struggling with what millennials understand to be applications.
I'll also add that despite rumors of the age of the hacker's demise, it is very much alive and well. It's still the case that only a fraction of the population has that itch to take a look under the hood. Only the technological landscape has changed
Gen z may be plugged into their phone, but a phone is a far cry from the tech that is actually used on the office. And Tik Tok isn't like an Excel spreadsheet.
Further, prior generations had to write letters etc which transfers across to email in a professional setting more than YOLO lol .
The part about letters is not fair though, since most people also just learned it by having to write business letters.
I'd be more confident that my gran who doesn't use a computer could compose a company wide email, compared to someone who has never had to send such a one way conversation.
I think this comment parallels the same attitude that older generations take about tech issues in the linked article, where they don't feel shame for having 'poor' computer skills since they didn't grow up with it.
I had a pc at school and at home, and I didn't have IT support at home.
Not everyone had a pc then, but I would guess more had them than now. People now use tablets and phones, which aren't as good prep for the workplace.
The only reason younger generations in the past (millennials) had more skill with high technology than old folks is because the old folks didn’t grow up around tech or computers. This was a fluke. The bar for being considered tech savvy was much lower. Building a simple web page would make you seem like the Wizard of Oz. Nowadays it’s just cute.
But someday millennials will be very old, and after a lifetime of using computers they should still be more tech-savvy than some young kids that know nothing except tapping a screen; the result of a lifetime of exposure to ever changing tech.
There is a possibility though that we have made tech so easy to use and abstract to the user, that new generations might always see it more as “magic” than for what it really is, meaning millennials may be the only generation that on average possesses greater understanding for how technology works and how to fix things; vestiges from their early experiences with the analog era.
Previously, this was not as big of a difference as the personal computer of the past was typically a desktop computer. Now the personal computing device is likely to be a phone.
In addition, computers/phones/tablets are more appliance like, in that it is very easy to use and set up and not much reason for the average person to trouble shoot and fix issues. This is great, but can result in the average person treating it more like a black box. I think in the past, if you wanted to get anything done with your computer, you needed to be familiar with the system and troubleshooting (or else have someone in the household who was).
Big tanks to all the gray beards and gray ladies who taught me to hack Gibsons back when I was violating COPPA or whatever :-)
(Folks used to joke I looked like Abbie Hoffman when I had hair but you shouldn’t trust anything I say now according to him)
When I entered the workforce as an 16 year old, I used popular tools like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Trillian, xFire, mIRC, and more. The workforce was stuck using email and in-person meetings.
Now, the workforce is using similar concepts to those popular tools I would use all built into a single platform known as Slack/Teams/etc. I'm in the peak years of my career 30 y/o+ and thrive on these tools.
But maybe gen z is used to other tools like Discord, OBS, TikTok, etc. Slack/Teams doesn't exactly transfer over 1:1 to these tools. So they have to learn the lagging way until the leading way becomes the new way?
To say they are not tech-savvy seems very odd. They are especially tech-savvy, just not with the current tools.
Except that the longer I use Slack the less I hate it and it's the opposite for Discord.
Maybe parents should supply their children with a bluetooth keyboard from the get go and make a real effort to teach kid how much faster they can type on it?
I say this while I'm typing on my phone, so who knows ;)
Now I just have to deal with garbage tools where it takes maybe an hour to process an expense report in concur or find the right training module to be compliant
Consumer uses of software are 100:1 in favor of consumption which now teaches essentially no useful skills because we got good at UX and good UX means the user doesn’t have to think.
Couldn't part of the problem be that "how to work" is itself a skill that needs to be learned and at such young age nowadays no much work experience has been accumulated yet?
For people who graduated I believe the first real job is at > 24-25 years.
Step 1: People old enough that it's deliberate effort for them to learn new things, can't be arsed to learn something new
Step 2: Older people notice the younger people still in the "absorb as much about the world as possible" phase of their life are more skilled with the new thing
Step 3: Older people assume the younger group is uniquely skilled with the thing
Step 4: some time passes
Step 5: *surprised pikachu face* they're not