Business America is failing to prepare Gen Z to enter the workforce due to a ‘glaring’ gap in tech skills - GenZ's face when a job is more than taking selfies and attending mid morning pilates?

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Computer classes for Gen Z aren't cutting it anymore.

Many new digital tools entered the workforce recently, and while there is yet to be something as futuristic as flying cars or self-lacing shoes (as predicted in Back to the Future's depiction of 2015), there are still some new-fangled inventions that have been implemented. As remote work took the nation by storm during the early pandemic, digital tools like Zoom and Teams were used more frequently. And with investments pouring into artificial intelligence, the world of A.I. is also seeping into the workforce as automated programs like ChatGPT take off.

Less invested in than weird A.I. portraits or automated messaging systems that tell you everything is subjective: Gen Zers. While companies are rapidly changing to become more digitized and automated, the youngest working generation isn’t being trained adequately to deal with this new reality.


More than a third (37%) of Gen Zers feel their school education didn't prepare them with the digital skills they need to propel their career, according to Dell Technologies' international survey of more than 15,000 adults ages 18 to 26 across 15 countries. A majority (56%) of this generation added that they had very basic to no digital skills education.

It’s all led to some warranted skepticism regarding the future of work: Many Gen Zers are unsure what the digital economy will look like, and 33% have little to no confidence that the government’s investments in a digital future will be successful in 10 years. Forty-four percent think that schools and businesses should work together to address the digital skills gap.

Gen Z's skills gap could be why they feel 'tech shame' at work​

The findings back up past research that found nearly half of the Class of 2022 felt the top skill they were underprepared for was technical skills.

It may all come as a surprise considering that Gen Z are digital natives. That means they’re often assumed to be the most technologically proficient in the workplace and assigned the work of explaining new tools to their colleagues, which stresses Gen Z out. As many as 1 in 5 young workers feel judged for having tech issues, whereas only 1 in 25 of their older peers report feeling similarly, according to a survey from HP. These tech snafus have created feelings of “tech shame” among the generation, which sometimes stops them from participating in meetings.

What little training that’s being provided is not being distributed equitably. “There’s a glaring gap in accessibility and application of tech education resources between lower-income and affluent students—a gap that was widened by the pandemic,” Rose Stuckey Kirk, chief corporate social responsibility officer, wrote for Fortune. “And we know this gap is more than an academic or social justice issue.”

It’s evidence of the broader skills gap prevalent in the workforce right now. The problem for Gen Z is that digital communication skills are most high in-demand. But a large portion of them are taking it upon themselves to learn more; 36% plan on acquiring digital skills in order to get a new job or keep their job, Dell finds.

Considering that many companies aren’t equipped with the resources to handle the skills gap, the Gen Zers who do teach themselves digital skills will likely have a leg up in the job search over those who don’t.

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From personal interaction with young folks (early 20s) in my job it's less about lack of education but simply about "don't care" when it isn't a smartphone with TikTok on it...

 

[God of Nothing]

Excel is fucking over-rated. If you know how to use it on the most basic level (i.e. create tables, format cells, get everything to fit on one page, etc...) then you're fine because most office jobs just use it as an organizer for their inventory shit (physical, digital, human count, etc.). The only time you need to know the ins and outs of it is if you're in some sort of department that deals heavily with numbers (like accounting or payroll) because they use formulas and all that other fancy shit.

It's similar to how questionares/assesments about Microsoft Word when applying for a job force you to learn how to use macros when 90% of companies never use them on Word in the first fucking place. If something is on word, chances are it's getting converted into an un-editable PDF anyway before it gets sent out.

I remember learning all those formulas in school but the only time I saw them used was in fucking gaming skill sheets I downloaded for minmaxing. That took me out for a moment.

 

[The Foxtrot]

PL but by the time I got out of school in the mid-2000s, at least in my armpit of Burgerland, "computer classes" were not only just an optional elective, but one hardly pushed in favor of shops or more academically oriented courses (focused history studies, higher mathematics, higher sciences, etc).

Sperging to follow for those who give a shit.

But back in those days, computer courses taught like 1970s and 1980s levels of computer shit; stuff like how they operated (lightly) and how to navigate the operating systems, including the full suite of Microsoft Office programs (as they were called in those days, before the fucking term "app" took over), including not just the obvious Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but dabbling in Publisher and Access as well.

Nowadays, kids don't learn anything about how the computer runs, they just assume it does and cry when it crashes or look at a KB/M combo like it's the devil. But most also don't put in the effort to learn computers, nor do I feel parents try to help them along by pushing computer use when they're in secondary at the very least. Instead of bending to your child's cries for the latest iPhone, get them a fucking cheap PC or laptop and let them learn how to use it.

Also PL in my case: I took a MS Office class in high school, and there was one week where we "learned to code" using one of those shitty "drag the boxes to make a game!" things.

Me, being the exceptional individual, decided to fire up QB64 and start coding a basic text adventure game. Teacher noticed I was not doing the "learn to code" thing, asked me what I was doing, I answered "Actually coding in QB64.", and she called the entire fucking class over to watch me.

Mind you, I was literally doing something you can learn to do over an afternoon or weekend, it is literally the most basic (no pun intended) ground level of coding you can do in QB64, and my classmates looked at me like I was carrying out some secret black magic rituals. Zoomers have no idea how a computer actually functions, it might as well be a mysterious alien artifact whose inner workings are magic.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

But there also seems to be a fundamental lack of curiosity and ability to learn/ discover by just messing around for a bit

Well yes, that's a direct consequence of what I said right before that, the streamlining and dumbing down of the web. Old social media and blogs and other stuff let you use custom HTML and CSS to decorate your personal page, which for a lot of people was their first foray into web tech, and they jumped at the opportunity because it was fun and interesting and allowed you to make some really creative stuff. That kind of shit is long dead now, and the reason is because your mom on her phone would find it confusing and seeing <angled brackets/> scares her. That's just one example of many.

 

[Alligator Alcatraz]

Excel is fucking over-rated. If you know how to use it on the most basic level (i.e. create tables, format cells, get everything to fit on one page, etc...) then you're fine because most office jobs just use it as an organizer for their inventory shit (physical, digital, human count, etc.). The only time you need to know the ins and outs of it is if you're in some sort of department that deals heavily with numbers (like accounting or payroll) because they use formulas and all that other fancy shit.

It's similar to how questionares/assesments about Microsoft Word when applying for a job force you to learn how to use macros when 90% of companies never use them on Word in the first fucking place. If something is on word, chances are it's getting converted into an un-editable PDF anyway before it gets sent out.

Ehh kinda disagree. Excel was always the rough one people seemed to be intimidated by, looking back to when I growing up. The thing is, Excel is a great tool for charts and this alone makes it powerful as humans are monkeys who like pictures.

I use Libre Office Calc (excel equivalent) to make rental ledgers for my mom. I also use Calc to make automatic calendars of my work hours. You can print out pdfs of calendars, some printers will even automatically generate them as a convenience, but nothing beats the intuitiveness and automatic algebra of a sheet program configuring things for you on the fly. More and more, I've seen autists in online video game communities make spreadsheets of game information. Those niggas in Final Fantasy XIV make whole workbooks for content. You can even use spreadsheets for budgeting, with Microsoft providing them for free on their website. Even Google's free office suite offers great templates for shit an average person could need. I just don't think the legacy of excel and spreadsheet programs can be limited to business.

Computers have become so advanced, people can't comprehend how useful they are and it is never taught in schools how useful they can be. It really is heartbreaking to see the extent of normie tech literacy SMASHING that motherfucking like button, subscribing, and leaving a comment while they hold octocore 2.8ghz-assed supercomputers in their hands.

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

sorry we were never properly taught how to use tech by confused boomers or jobless millenials

Is this how you feel faggot?

 

[Criticallacitirc]

Excel is fucking over-rated. If you know how to use it on the most basic level (i.e. create tables, format cells, get everything to fit on one page, etc...) then you're fine because most office jobs just use it as an organizer for their inventory shit (physical, digital, human count, etc.). The only time you need to know the ins and outs of it is if you're in some sort of department that deals heavily with numbers (like accounting or payroll) because they use formulas and all that other fancy shit.

It's similar to how questionares/assesments about Microsoft Word when applying for a job force you to learn how to use macros when 90% of companies never use them on Word in the first fucking place. If something is on word, chances are it's getting converted into an un-editable PDF anyway before it gets sent out.

Not really. Excel is like the back bone of modern offices. Maybe that's true for a local company, but big corporations everyone is using Excel for all kinds of tasks. Whatever department you work , youll be doing some sort of analysis and its all being done in excel .

Gen Z learn a vlookup & iferror and you'll be fine.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

But do they know that white people are horrible oppressors and brown people are inherently inferior? That is what really counts.

 

[Stoneheart]

You know who you are.

We had a whole age of empires league in our class--

Evidently, I took a computer literacy course last summer since they also provided free resume assistance, and I was aghast at what they were saying about computers. I'll never forget the instructor pointing at an image of a desktop saying "nobody uses these anymore" then points towards a laptop and says "this is what computers look like now". Even the instructor struggled with basic topics like the Microsoft Office ribbons. Nothing has changed in the past 10-20 years.

God i hate windows office... everytme i learn how somethign works they change it again...

 

[quaawaa]

This article is propaganda promoting a lie that we have a tech skills shortage. The implication is that we need to import millions of Indians to address the "skills gap", even though their technical skills are so poor that a TikTok-addicted zoomer looks like Linus Torvalds in comparison.

Technical skills are more common than ever: computer science is one of the most popular university majors and everyone has a base level of computer skills that is higher than the average member of the pre-computer generations. The kid who thinks swiping memes is the pinnacle of tech wouldn't have magically been a programmer if only they'd been born in 1970-90.

 

[Spicey McHaggis]

Yeah, it has absolutely nothing to do with them being fucking lazy. I work in manufacturing, so the tech literacy isn't that big of an issue. Most of the zoomers hired are just awful for attendance. We just had an 18 year old quit within 2 weeks because "he couldn't handle 40 hours a week". This is not an isolated incident, and he had one of the easiest jobs in the building.

 

[Vince McMahon]

And here I thought that my Linux skills with command line are below average and you're telling me that there are people in the YOUNGER generation who don't know what "drag and drop" is? Really?

 

[KiwiFuzz]

I assume this is because iirc zoomers had "influencer" as their most desired "job" or something

This is what you get when you aspire to become a z-lister with no marketable skills living off donations from other people

To go slightly off topic, I am surprised by how talentless Zoomers like the Jennings family and Desmond is Amazing are.

Not to go too deep into Kids These Days but quite a few of them seem incapable of the kind of creative effort where you fail at doing something, try again, and on attempt #5 come out with something really cool.

We need a Chink-style program to find kids when they're little and give them strong tech education. The Chinese and Indians are doing it and that's why they're going to steamroller us. Silicon Valley is going to be a smoking crater in 16 years and I am so here for it.

 

[Kane Lives]

Well, as you say. There's Excel that is entering numbers into colored spaces with the rest being already in place because it's a template from corporate and there's actual Excel with building formulas and macros and shit.

I know my way around Excel a fair bit but far from everything or being an expert. But luckily I still learnt how to google shit I don't remember how to do or don't know.

I personally had the displeasure of discovering entire departments in big corporations where it all hinges on some black box Excel file that was stuffed to the gills with macros and formulaes which inevitably break the moment you stray even one inch out of whatever use case the creator had at the time. The surprising thing is that aside from that, "it just werks". (I won't list the obvious downsides like nobody fucking knows how it works, and at some point, nobody even knows if the output is correct).

It's quite amazing what people managed to milk out of Excel, to be honest.

 

[DamnWolves!]

Sorry that tech skills involve more than dinking around on smartphone apps. It has been assumed that people younger than us are tech savvy but smartphones have put a stop to that. Gen Z struggles with Microsoft Office more than the boomers do.

True. They're missing basics, like how to make a graph in Excel (how to make a good graph is another question, but these kids don't understand what Excel does in the first place), or how to position a picture in Word where you actually want it. They need to do a course in high school on just MS Office or something, because that's going to be the basis of any white collar job. While they're at it, they need to be taught that corporate slideshows don't have transitions or animations, unless they actually add to the value of what you're presenting.

They also can't touch-type, for whatever reason; I've seen more hunt and pecking amongst our interns than our HR department, which is a scary thought.

sorry we were never properly taught how to use tech by confused boomers or jobless millenials

Apology accepted... I'm still not hiring you.

Excel is fucking over-rated. If you know how to use it on the most basic level (i.e. create tables, format cells, get everything to fit on one page, etc...) then you're fine because most office jobs just use it as an organizer for their inventory shit (physical, digital, human count, etc.). The only time you need to know the ins and outs of it is if you're in some sort of department that deals heavily with numbers (like accounting or payroll) because they use formulas and all that other fancy shit.

You take that shit back; Excel is the best. It does graphs, it does modeling, it does pivot tables, you can put as many nested IF statements as you want in it to in it, it's got data validation to prevent people from fucking your shit up, it has our lord and savior, XLOOKUP. There is a massive difference between a tracker or a productivity tool that is function-enabled vs one that is just pretending it's a big table that can't do anything else. Finance and analytics benefit the most from these features, but if you're a marketing strategist or a product manager, you should really know how to make a revenue bridge or a cost-benefit analysis for your proposal.

Never talk about me or my son Excel again.

 

[Kit Marz]

I've recently gone back to college and one of the required classes is an Excel class. Everything they're teaching is something I learned in my BCIS classes in middle and high school, but the younger students are having an incredibly difficult time with the class. It's interesting, but sad to watch. It would make me mad that I have to pay for such a class, but my job is paying for my school so I don't mind taking the easiest class in the world.

 

[SilentDuck]

"Computer Skills" used to be Win3.1/Netware, Netscape Navigator and Lotus 1-2-3. Have those, and a firm handshake acceptable to a WW2 vet and their pet boomer retards of the upper floor and "the job is yours, kid". Middle income job + a degree of legitimate job security.

In terms of GenZ raw CS aptitude I see glaring problems with basics, fundamentals but also specialization. That is a clear failure of the system (and it so happens boomers rule that system, which produces results that mirrors boomers and their relationship with technology).

There is a consistent GenZ attitude to declare anything complex or even Boolean thinking itself as something that should be eradicated, ignored or strenuously avoided. Why understand anything when you don't have to. But they are right, possibly for the wrong reasons. Look at any specious list of job demands, degree + skills that take 10-15 years of experience into entry level salary and then add in all the new trend-de-jouer and HR buzzwords? Oh well, another boat load of H1Bs it is. Not all of those HR postings are fake either I'm sorry to say.

There's a clear difference at the root of the thinking that I cannot define. Also communication. With boomers we know they are retarded from TV, environmental lead and a lifetime of unabated hedonism and sin. GenX the root is bitterness and nihilism. Millennials, some kind of self-obsession and unwarranted esteem, all of which I see waning a bit with age. To me, GenZ is out there, outside of these groups. Like avatars and ideas from the internet come to life, and their internal thought processes, cognition, attitudes and behaviors are not merely different, but alien.

I anticipate GenZ will be the most ageist motherfuckers ever created and will deal it all back someday. So while I have nothing but sympathy, even when they act retarded and mouthy I still bear in mind one day they'll be stuffing everyone into ovens or turning everyone not them into solyent.

 

[Slav Power]

This seems to be more about late Gen Z's near the brink of the Alpha generation, when smartphones became very much widespread and both those late zoomers and Alpha gens no longer grew up using a PC and having to figure shit out on their own.

As a Y2K baby I've been dealing with Windows computers ever since I was a child, on my parent's Win98 laptop, and I really liked to dig around Windows and still do to this day. I even got into Minecraft modding way back when it was in Beta, where it was notoriously difficult, and that also gave me a challenge to overcome and learn general file management. I never had a console and I was piss poor so when I wanted to play a game I had to figure shit out on my own, and I only really got a smartphone when I was a teenager, by which time I was already pretty well versed in using a PC.

However now that most of young people probably don't even own a shitty laptop but instead rely on a smartphone, this results in a paradox where they have no idea how to use a PC because they grew up using the most retard proof device in history, so they were never challenged to deal with actual tech problems and learn how to overcome them. Everything they need is served to them on a silver platter and they don't have to deal with any tech problems. And if they want to play a game, they have consoles which are also as easy as it gets.

 

[seri0us]

Also PL in my case: I took a MS Office class in high school, and there was one week where we "learned to code" using one of those shitty "drag the boxes to make a game!" things.

Ah yeah, the good ol Tonka truck of "programming".

 

[Otterly]

I have what I consider quite basic excel skills. I can sort out a spreadsheet that’ll do stuff like v lookup, countifs, and so you can import .csv from our data capture programs and stick them in tabs and it’ll make pretty tables and stuff on another tab (why yes, we should have these multi million pound data programs able to do that but you’d be horrified to see how basic programs used for anything in my industry are.) VBA is beyond me. So basic level.
The people around me speak in hushed tones of me being a whiz. Which is ridiculous. But the older ones actually are boomers (genuinely and not perjoratively) and the younger ones can’t use a filing system or spell or use grammar. They literally can’t file. Several of them have told me they don’t read and are proud of that
I think there was a real explosion of exploration and fun when computers came out to the general public. We had a little acorn electron and had loads of fun programming little games with it - it actually came with a book showing you how. I never had any computer classes, but I can use the basics and the terminal on my Mac.
Everything feels locked down these days - you get a system and it’s a black box. You can’t play with it or tinker with it. Nobody builds their own lab kit of little solutions any more, and so peoples thinking ability isn’t excercised and we get dumber

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

This article is propaganda promoting a lie that we have a tech skills shortage. The implication is that we need to import millions of Indians to address the "skills gap", even though their technical skills are so poor that a TikTok-addicted zoomer looks like Linus Torvalds in comparison.

There is some truth to this. It's a very well known con in tech.
In order to get your cheap, exploitable H1-B hires you have to demostrate that you can't find "qualified applicants" locally. So what they do is they post their jobs to Indeed or whatever asking for Bachelor's degree or higher and 10+ years of experience for a position that makes $15-$18 an hour. They know nobody's gonna take that deal except for the most incompetent of the bunch so they can cry to the government saying they need immigrant labor.

That said: I don't have any stats in front of me and can't be assed to check on this, but I do have to question the ratio of computer science majors (which, mind you, is but one of many arms in the Tech industry) to the growth rate in demand.