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?

Article

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...

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

You don't need tech when you're being groomed for pod living.

ChatGPT will be your Mom, your Dad, and your employer.
The sooner you accept this fact, the sooner we can all have nice things.

 

[Un Platano]

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.

If anything, companies are too reliant on excel because it's all that anyone working there knows how to use. They'd be better served by a proper database, but since no one working there knows how to do that they instead use excel and record all of their important data in monstrously complicated spreadsheets. It's enough to get you by for most purposes, but it's inefficient, you have to know how to put the pieces together because there's a dozen of these things all being managed by different people, and if it's been in use long enough it's littered with paragraph-length formulas that no one knows the purpose of.

The problem here isn't that everyone is incompetent, it's that everyone is just barely competent.

 

[actually a cat]

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

nigger fuck you, nobody here is your mama or teacher.
and my boomer parents and teachers didn't teach me either.
i taught myself.

 

[Grub]

Quit whining. Gen X sucked at tech coming out of schools, too. A class of 2000 college graduate with his stupid MCSE and A+ certification was functionally worthless. The only difference is those trend-chasing knuckleheads still had entry level jobs available they could take, and learn some skills the hard way.

And don't get me started on the iPad-trained, "my Magnet school had a robotics class" tryhard millenials. We still haven't found a use for 95% of them.

School training will always lag behind in teaching useful tech skills, period. Stop copy/pasting this article every 5 years.

It's not just tech stuff. School training is pretty much useless for teaching anything that requires hands on experience. It's why you get trades school graduates who can't read a measuring tape or use a drill.

Tech skills are closer to trade work than the abstract theoretical stuff school is good for. The only real way to learn stuff like programming or managing it systems is to get experience doing it for real.

The problem with people who lack tech skills isn't a lack of education. It's a lack of just doing it. Computers have become just like 99% of things out there that we use on a daily basis. Most people will just use the thing without really understanding the thing, they don't care how the thing works, they actively don't want to learn how the thing works, they just want to use the thing and if any problems come up with the thing, they just want to pay someone else who spent the time learning about the thing to fix the thing for them so they can continue using the thing.

Companies understand this, so they pay people who understand the thing lots of money to make the thing as easily useable by the average retard as possible, usually at the expense of all the things that made the thing awesome to begin with, so they can sell even more of the things and make all the money from the things.

 

[seri0us]

So, back in the early and mid 2000s, public schools nationwide started to roll out their computer lab programs. The entire point was to get working PCs, whether they were Windows native PCs, or MAC OSX native, into these thousands of schools so that the very Gen Z demographic we're talking about here, could finally be tech literate like what the generations before us expected out of us.

I was one of those kids. Back when roblox was fairly new we convinced the teacher it was a game where you "collect numbers" or some obvious lie like that. We got away with it for a couple of days.

 

[Kheapathic]

They keep talking about a "skills gap" without ever detailing what those missing skills are. Is it simple things like using the Table of Contents option in Word, advanced formulas in Excel, graphs and charts in Power Point? Personality/behavioral skills like wanting to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair? Or hard skills like logic programming and the like? Because I'm willing to bet a majority of it, would be what I call personality/behavioral, where they just don't know, but don't want to ask for help for whatever reason.

As for this part;

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.

I call bullshit, unless every company is looking to buy you a license to the full Adobe Suite. Unless you're learning programming or the like, most tech related issues can be solved with some hands on work and a little bit of brain power. Aside from doing password resets; a majority of my early tech support job duties were helping people get acquainted with the Office Suite; and when I wasn't doing it, their supervisor/co-workers were, because somehow, despite not having "proper training," they knew how shit worked and could help each other out. Funny how that is.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

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.

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

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.

Excel fucking sucks - but hang on, here's why:

Spoiler: Excel rant and beg

I have to spend a ton of time in it...but 99% of what I do is WORDS. And Excel sucks for words. Word is SO much better to work with, but it won't work for massive tables of information that would be 12 feet across and down if you printed them. If Excel just some basic Word-like features, like the ability to use bullets inside cells, hanging indents, word searches that actually land on the word and not just the cell, etc., my life would be so much better. I understand that backbones of the two programs are different, and maybe it is "impossible" to have Excel cells behave like the basic bitches I want them to be, but I also think maybe Microsoft just doesn't want to bother...wouldn't be the first time the persisted with some completely annoying feature/lack for no good reason.

But since you love Excel, tell me how the fuck to get attachments to line up nicely and stay in place or align to a cell row/column. Same with the damn comment boxes; I need them to stick to the cell, but all these objects sit layered over the cell rows do if you change anything you have to go back and manually rearrange every damn thing. I'd have my secretary do it, but we mostly don't have those anymore (and tbh even back when we did I was teaching them how to work Word, so probably Excel would have been impossible, but at least it wouldn't be me wasting my time with stupid stuff that should just...work)

Rant done, totally agree about Zers. I own a couple of them, and know a lot more, and at least through high school they knew less than nothing about tech anything. These kids are given iPads in kindergarten and every year through school. That plus peer pressure pushes them into the fucking Apple ecosystem that makes every decision for you and removes every responsibility from you, like it or not. I got my first laptop back in the early 90s (still have it; it's a brick), in my very early 20s. You had to learn at least a tiny bit about the organization of the guts of the file system (which is perfectly sensible nested files, all in one place and logical) and to know some basic utilities and troubleshooting. Updating things and setting up new things required your time and participation. Now, it just happens when you're not looking, requires nothing of you,

Spoiler: Side sperg

and even if you want to find the non-self-created or non-end-product stuff, you can't half the time, because it's no longer intuitively housed and accessible (have you tried to find your personal Microsoft templates lately? Cannot figure out why they decided to make that obscure...and it's a fairly recent change, wtf; don't even get me started about how cloud drives, especially those godforsaken photos in Apple's ecosystem - I have no idea wtf my photos really are and it's a big problem; I also don't know which music is real and which is a licensed rental).

In sum, despite growing up on tech, these kids don't know what to do or where a problem likely is when something goes wrong - but a lot of it is driven by the makers.

Same with the hardware. It's offensive to me that a company makes devices that can't be upgraded, you can't really open up and swap things out - can't even self-service replace a freaking battery. It's useful to learn a bit about what's inside, but Apple doesn't want you to. They want passive, unknowledgeable idiots bc duh, it's their business model. (And it's prominently but not only Apple - I had a Lenovo laptop replaced twice under warranty bc there was some issue with the motherboard (maybe the video controller?, which was integrated/couldn't be replaced, I've forgotten now) so they just gave me a whole new laptop instead...apparently this is the general direction things are going.). I'm not someone who's going to be building a computer from scratch, but I like to troubleshoot and do some DIY stuff and am fairly competent at it, and I'd rather waste an afternoon doing that than make an appointment at some store to take it in, drive there, leave the thing for who knows how long, only to be told finally they can't fix it* so here's who you call for your replacement one, which you might need to come back again to pick up. But that's the model - buy an expensive thing, know nothing and be unable to help yourself, if it malfunctions or you (bc you know nothing) screw something up, you're a hostage

* or God forbid it's an apple device, in which case they absolutely will find evidence of water having been inside even though it damn well never was, thus making it both impossible to fix and not covered under the standard warranty, but would you like to look around the store at the new generation devices for a replacement?

 

[neverendingmidi]

I'm not a computer person. Yet I was stunned that a new guy we hired was completely baffled by the idea of CRTL+C and CTRL+V to move stuff. Or just using the shift key and mouse to select multiple items.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

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.

When I thought about it some more, I think the other purpose-- if they're not dead set on hiring from overseas, or they're in a sub-industry that can't use H1-Bs-- is to discourage negotiations for higher pay if they "deign" to hire someone who doesn't neatly fit the qualifications.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I'm not a computer person. Yet I was stunned that a new guy we hired was completely baffled by the idea of CRTL+C and CTRL+V to move stuff. Or just using the shift key and mouse to select multiple items.

When I was in my writing phase growing up, CTRL+C CTRL+V was a necessity. I am scared for the younger zoomers.

 

[MadStan]

I tried to show a fellow once how to do a job but alas, he was busy being on FB and some dating app all the time on his phone. Yes indeed, they are ill-prepared, not through a lack of warning however.

 

[Kheapathic]

In sum, despite growing up on tech, these kids don't know what to do or where a problem likely is when something goes wrong - but a lot of it is driven by the makers.

This is a complaint I've had for a couple of decades now; tech is replacing what used to be a bit of a life skill (and I hate to say it like that). I grew up in the golden spot to where I had to learn to do things the old way, but was young enough for the tech boom to be with it and competent when it happened. I can still use a library card catalogue, I still know what the white and yellow pages are (and how to use them), I can read a map, I can do long math, and an assortment of other things. And I don't want to go all end of the world scenario; but a lot of modern people would be borderline fucking useless if you took their magic Google box away. Kids get taught math with calculators now (we had them, just couldn't use them in my day), and I don't think anyone under the age of 35 knows about the Index part of a book or what it's for.

Don't get me wrong, there are good things on the internet for the uninformed; like videos on how to tie a tie, good luck fatherless boys, but it's also replaced a lot of shit that was learned and reinforced so much, that doing it without the internet doesn't feel like a learned skill, but just something built into me. Meanwhile you take away everyone's favorite search engine, and their life would freeze, because they don't know how to do simple shit.

As for tech related skills; have them learn to do shit the hard way; get good with the command line and doing shit through there. Then when you're deemed competent enough, we'll give you a GUI.

 

[TracdacianTortoise]

Odd. Admittedly, I’m an early zoomer, and quite autistic, but all my mates in high school were reasonably tech savvy. At some point one of the students used Command Prompt to put all the library computers into an infinite loop of opening and closing the disc drive. Dunno about the younger crowd of Gen Z, but I imagine a lot of it is how much you’re forced to use a PC. We had to make PowerPoints for assignments and do shit in word documents for classes, so you didn’t really have the choice of not engaging with computers at some level.

 

[Spicey McHaggis]

The smart kids will figure it out. They’ll just google it or find a video tutorial on YouTube. If they’re incapable of that.. I have no idea how to help them.

Yeah, it's really not that difficult. I got my children(both under 10) laptops with a few basic MS office type apps on them. I explained some of it to them, but they've managed to figure out a very good chunk of it on their own with minimal direction. This shit isn't calculus ffs.

 

[CuzinEd]

It doesn't really matter. Most Zoomers will never encounter any of this tech just like most Millennials never had to use any kind of new tech at work. I know I sure as hell didn't. You don't really need tech skills to stock shelves load a delivery truck or deliver packages. This where most of the Gen Z that are old enough to work are going to end up. The same way it was for millennials and the Gen X people before us. College enrollments are in decline. Even most people with college degrees end up in jobs they didn't go to school for.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If I was a Zoomer I would start looking at ways I can survive without having to work as hard. Corporate America will work you into an early grave and they don't care. When you are all used up, they will throw you aside. You will also have to compete with shit skins which lowers the wages of jobs that already pay like shit.

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

edit: irresponsible old people mad at words

No one taught me how to use a computer. Well, that's not entirely true. When I was in my early teens and late teens, I had a friend whose father worked on PC's to make money. So they always had computers around. He explained some stuff to me. He is the one who taught me how to use DOS well sort of. Other than that I taught myself and read books. My parents were Boomers, and my family was lower middle class. I didn't get my first PC till 2000. Even then it was an old 486 that my dad got from work when they were giving away the old PC's that were in storage. Being a Boomer and not knowing about computers he didn't get the best stuff. I used it a while and my friends dad did some upgrades for it and helped me out. I used this PC till the power supply went up. After that I didn't have a PC for a while. If it was up to my Boomer parents, I would have never had a PC. As far as they were concerned if it wasn't for work, or you were using it to make money it was a waste of time and money. I had to get my own computers anyway I could. Being a poor high school student in the early 2000's it wasn't easy. I went to the local library and took a bunch of books out on computers. I went around looking for old computers people were giving away or throwing away. Having to hear my mother bitch about how I wasn't going turn her basement into a computer garage. That my father wasn't allowed to collect junk down there and neither could I. If I had a little money I might be able to find a decent computer at a Good Will or thrift store. Working with old motherboards CPU's and other hardware. Some it from the mid and late 90's.

But I managed and I learned how to use a computer. I learned sort of how they work and how to use file systems. In 2016 I built my first PC myself and in 2020 I did a CPU and motherboard upgrade with an Arctic Freezer 34 Esports Duo cooler. I watched videos on how to build computer on YouTube. I am going to take it that since you're a Zoomer you have access to a phone and YouTube. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that will teach you how to build and use a computer. Probably other stuff as well. You can learn anything on YouTube.

You lazy Zoomer shits have no excuse though. When I was the age of the youngest Zoomers there was no YouTube or smartphones. We had to read books or be taught by actual people.

 

[Nointey]

To me this just proves that the Internet has become large to the point its now on-par with television, meaning that its saturated. Zoomers not knowing shit about tech just proves this further, as overtime the people who truly develop the tech itself become more of a niche overtime.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

I dunno, zoomers around me seem at least basically competent at Word, Excel and Powerpoint but that's also because in my cuntry they made it so that computer science is a required class even from the first grade of primary school. Back in my day it was only an elective in primary school and when we were not busy playing Deus Ex or Call of Duty United Offensive we drew, sorry, "programmed" basic geometric shapes into some archaic program from the late 80s, kids nowadays learn the entire MSOffice suite and from the 5th grade onward they have a big project to do for that year, I don't know what it is in 5th and 6th grade but in 7th it's building their own PC with a set budget and in the 8th it's coding their own page in html. They basically learn in primary school what I learned in high school.

That being said, despite this there are still a lot of fucking retards who can barely operate a computer, primary school is mandatory so teachers don't want to fail kids who severely underperform. When I told an underperforming kid that he doesn't have to press caps lock to write a single letter in caps and can just hold down shift instead to save a bit of time he looked at me like I was the Greek god of computers or some shit. But at the same time for every retard like that you at least get one kid who retains some basic competency in operating a computer.

 

[The Foxtrot]

It's not just tech stuff. School training is pretty much useless for teaching anything that requires hands on experience. It's why you get trades school graduates who can't read a measuring tape or use a drill.

Tech skills are closer to trade work than the abstract theoretical stuff school is good for. The only real way to learn stuff like programming or managing it systems is to get experience doing it for real.

The problem with people who lack tech skills isn't a lack of education. It's a lack of just doing it. Computers have become just like 99% of things out there that we use on a daily basis. Most people will just use the thing without really understanding the thing, they don't care how the thing works, they actively don't want to learn how the thing works, they just want to use the thing and if any problems come up with the thing, they just want to pay someone else who spent the time learning about the thing to fix the thing for them so they can continue using the thing.

Companies understand this, so they pay people who understand the thing lots of money to make the thing as easily useable by the average retard as possible, usually at the expense of all the things that made the thing awesome to begin with, so they can sell even more of the things and make all the money from the things.

You are correct, not only on this subject, but on a LOT of things nowadays too. People learn best by doing. Teachers loved to tell us "Math is the most important subject!", but I promise you, I have used only the 4 most basic types of math for my day-to-day life outside of school. All those complicated formulas, I have completely and utterly forgotten, and why wouldn't I? Where in my daily life would I use the Pythagorean Theorem?

You know, I think this leads into another major problem with schooling nowadays: We are not taught practical skills with real-world applications, and given examples of these applications in class. Like a meme I've heard many times across the internet goes: "School didn't teach me how to change my oil or file my taxes, but I know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!".

Well, computer use in the modern day does count as a practical skill with real-world applications. And Zoomers don't even know why or how a computer works, just that it does, and they use a VERY dumbed-down and streamlined version of an operating system with very few buttons to fiddle with at all. That's how I learned to use a computer, I fiddled with the different programs and settings, used Google (or dad) when I was in doubt, and messed around until I figured things out. I even kept a little notebook on what I was doing, and why, for reference.
Even if the average Zoomer did have the desire to do that, most programs and devices nowadays are made for, as EmperorLemon once called them, "Slack-jawed idiots with an internet connection"!

 

[Aidan]

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'm an open source enjoyer but I concede that Microsoft Excel is one of the best things Microsoft has made. If you can do "fancy" stuff in Excel then it is worth putting on a resume in many cases because you will be perceived as a wizard who gets stuff done.
I don't even pretend to be good at Excel but being above average, a low bar, has helped me out professionally by making me seem smarter than I am.

I'm leaving a situation where I had livein tech support and after 20 years I have to figure out how to use computers and my solution of looking sad until someone else fixes the problem is too slow.

Can people on this thread direct me to basic computer education please?

https://kiwifarms.st/forums/internet-technology.101/

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As for the article, this is a case where I think there's a mix of framing the current situation in the usual propaganda light while also being observably true. Plenty of personal anecdotes backing it up in this thread and I have plenty of my own. Zoomers are often as tech illiterate as boomers I interact with, just in different ways. My expectation for awhile has been that the US is going to experience that science fiction trope of a society built atop technology it no longer understands.

One thing I don't get is that in my shitty school district we had a few times where we had to take some form of computer literacy courses. Once in middle school, once in junior high, and then at least one at some point in high school. The junor high and high school ones were effectively the same - do Microsoft basics. We were a relatively poor school district and most people just did the bare minimum in the courses but the resources were 100% there for me. I would be surprised if these courses aren't offered more now as it's cheaper and more accessible.
I was blown away when I learned that big city kids could take programming, video editing, animation, etc. courses.

My point is that I think it's not a lack of resources but a cultural phenomenon as well as how traditional computer usage is waning. A kid will learn how to use mom's smartphone before they ever touch a keyboard. By the time they are using a computer they're going to be behind the curve compared to people who grew up on them as they learn the interface, hotkeys, workarounds, and whatever else we take for granted.
"Old" computers are straight up not cool anymore unless they're for gaming or streaming, at least as far as I can tell.

 

[CuzinEd]

To me this just proves that the Internet has become large to the point its now on-par with television, meaning that its saturated. Zoomers not knowing shit about tech just proves this further, as overtime the people who truly develop the tech itself become more of a niche overtime.

The inventor of the television wanted it to be a tool for education. We all know how it ended up. The same thing for the internet. While it still can be a tool for education it's also become kind of a normie shit show with all kinds of distractions and idiot tier entertainment. Just look at TikTok. Unfortunately, people would rather engage with the spectacle side of the internet than the educational side.