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...

 

[TracdacianTortoise]

The math formula shit was the stupidest thing in the world. Look up what formula you need, take measurements of the object, and plug and chug. Simple as.

I'm glad I'm a welder and they're still relying on 60 year Olds that want to retire. If you got your certifications from trade school, relatively cheap compared to college, you're fucking set. When they're asking foe experience means you're working on some big shit.

Plugging things into an online calculator or whatever is ok if what you’re doing doesn’t affect others. But at the point you’re using it on work that could affect others, you’re basically using the calculator as a “holy oracle” of sorts, assuming that whatever it puts out must be correct. Often times, in engineering and other fields, there is no pre-made calculator for your specific issue, and if you attempt to use the formula without having at least some understanding of what is going on, there’s a pretty good likelihood you’ll fuck something up.
Stuff like machining and welding is a bit different, most things you’re doing have been done before, and some autist will have created a comprehensive table of parameters to use, like feed rates, RPM, depth of cut and whatnot that you can refer to, but one should exercise caution if you’re designing something. Even computer simulations should be distrusted, results can be way off if you fail to take into account even one aspect of the setup.

Regardless, for most people, basic arithmetic is all that’s necessary. Mathematics should be taken up as a curiosity or hobby, more so than as something viewed as “necessary”, because it’s an endlessly fascinating field, and many of the ideas and tools in it end up being applicable, albeit not necessary, to everyday life, with regards to planning and budgeting. It also adds to your repertoire of tools to tackle problems with, even if you don’t use a formula as such, a concept you’ve learnt of may end up being useful. The way maths is taught in school is shit though, it’s basically designed to make mathematics as shitty, boring and uninteresting as possible.

 

[PyrrhicRustle]

I learned how computer work by modding games in middle school, plenty of these kids grew up when Minecraft was popular, did they just never look up how to install their own mods?

 

[WelperHelper99]

Plugging things into an online calculator or whatever is ok if what you’re doing doesn’t affect others. But at the point you’re using it on work that could affect others, you’re basically using the calculator as a “holy oracle” of sorts, assuming that whatever it puts out must be correct. Often times, in engineering and other fields, there is no pre-made calculator for your specific issue, and if you attempt to use the formula without having at least some understanding of what is going on, there’s a pretty good likelihood you’ll fuck something up.
Stuff like machining and welding is a bit different, most things you’re doing have been done before, and some autist will have created a comprehensive table of parameters to use, like feed rates, RPM, depth of cut and whatnot that you can refer to, but one should exercise caution if you’re designing something. Even computer simulations should be distrusted, results can be way off if you fail to take into account even one aspect of the setup.

Regardless, for most people, basic arithmetic is all that’s necessary. Mathematics should be taken up as a curiosity or hobby, more so than as something viewed as “necessary”, because it’s an endlessly fascinating field, and many of the ideas and tools in it end up being applicable, albeit not necessary, to everyday life, with regards to planning and budgeting. It also adds to your repertoire of tools to tackle problems with, even if you don’t use a formula as such, a concept you’ve learnt of may end up being useful. The way maths is taught in school is shit though, it’s basically designed to make mathematics as shitty, boring and uninteresting as possible.

Let me put it on record, I'm not a engineer, the people that actually  need that high grade autism. The math i use for my job is pretty basic: metric and imperial (SAE) measurements, which boils down to reading a tape measure, which is surprisingly useful. Things like geometry do come into play sometimes, but usually that's when you're working with tube and pipe and looking for diameters. And we do have specific formulas for different machines, though that's mostly stuff like mills and lathes.

Now designing stuff, you're right with a *. If I'm making something simple, sometimes it's faster to pull out the tape, weld it together, and do some rapid prototyping until it works. I don't recommend that if you're building a car lol, not unless you have a TON of cash to blow.

 

[TracdacianTortoise]

I learned how computer work by modding games in middle school, plenty of these kids grew up when Minecraft was popular, did they just never look up how to install their own mods?

By the time the younger Zoomers (Fortnite types) got into Minecraft, modding was quite streamlined, and mod managers existed to make it piss-easy. No opening up the jar file or anything, just plonk the mod files in the right folder.

 

[northstar747]

So I went to school in the 1990's. I had an apple IIGS at home and never really learned much on it.

Then in highschool it was PC, I think I had a 486 SX. I later went on doing tech stuff for my grandma. One time she looked at me and asked "how do you know this"

I remember one friend telling me to use MSCONFIG to turn off all the junk that was on the start up menu. I in turn taught him how to use folder options to make hidden folders...if you know what I mean.

Another dude at the school told me about an IRC group called insiders and well I learned how to pirate from that.

Fuck even the script kiddies fucked around.

I know a lady who dated a dude she met on some coding boot camp. Listening to her it sounds like the kid learned some basic shit in the command prompt, but never took his skills further most likely do to him having substance issues.

I would say yes having a group that just uses aps, for everything would make it harder for them to use tech in everyday sitations.

But fuck thats the whole point of those pie and ardunio ICU, its to give people a toy to tinker with.

 

[northstar747]

Let me put it on record, I'm not a engineer, the people that actually  need that high grade autism. The math i use for my job is pretty basic: metric and imperial (SAE) measurements, which boils down to reading a tape measure, which is surprisingly useful. Things like geometry do come into play sometimes, but usually that's when you're working with tube and pipe and looking for diameters. And we do have specific formulas for different machines, though that's mostly stuff like mills and lathes.

Now designing stuff, you're right with a *. If I'm making something simple, sometimes it's faster to pull out the tape, weld it together, and do some rapid prototyping until it works. I don't recommend that if you're building a car lol, not unless you have a TON of cash to blow.

I wanna ad to this.

Since your working in fabrication. Designing a part doesnt just need the engineers skills but also a boots on the ground mentality, about what the CNC machine can and cant do, or what might not be the best way to do something.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I wanna ad to this.

Since your working in fabrication. Designing a part doesnt just need the engineers skills but also a boots on the ground mentality, about what the CNC machine can and cant do, or what might not be the best way to do something.

YES. You have seen what unfortunately can sometimes be a difficult task. Basically the engineer knows the theoretical of what can be done, and the welder knows what he knows, and sometimes that means the engineer is wrong, or what he is asking to be done is dark souls level of difficulty. There is a culture barrier sometimes too, the grunt vs the desk jockey. When there is good lines of communication, absolute magic happens.

 

[Scale Smerch]

Having been on both sides of white collar engineering work and tech-bro code monkeying I can sort of appreciate the difficulty Zoomers are having, but there comes a point when education excuses no longer suffice for a lack of mental fortitude. Oh wow you don't know why the computer doesn't do the thing? Maybe use the Google black box to figure out why instead of internally crying and blaming your parents - hell that's how I picked up coding and securing my current job. Half of the problems now are due to coddled kids unable to handle challenge, hardship, and being told no, who break at the first sign of disagreement and wonder why the world doesn't bend to their will.

If parents and teachers both instilled a proper sense of curiosity and investigation (instead of lol let the calculator and AI assistant do it) many of the issues wouldn't be discussed because kids would know that the answer comes from looking it up, experimenting, or - god forbid - asking for help. I'm really appreciating getting out of the school system when I did back in the late 2000s because none of this 'common sense' knowledge is apparently present these days.

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.

This reminds me of my boomer dad. He's forever mournful the internet didn't exist in his time because if he had it medical school would've been a breeze getting into thanks to the sheer amount of knowledge at his fingertips. Far too many people now don't appreciate the possibilities information databases at your fingertips give you.

 

[Butterschmalz]

Way to go Gen Z! Let this shit crash into ground. Keep doing what you re doing. Keep taking those cute selfies... My favorite is the iconic Auschwitz selfie. Let it burn I say!

 

[LurkTrawl]

Why do these assholes care if they're going to be replaced by H1B's and illegals anyhow?

 

[Gottahavemysips]

I learned how computer work by modding games in middle school, plenty of these kids grew up when Minecraft was popular, did they just never look up how to install their own mods?

This is something I experienced first hand. I started playing Minecraft right around the time alpha had just released, and I was telling my friends about it. I was playing it on a massive pile of shit, so it wasn't like they didn't have good enough PCs. It wasn't until several years later when the massively cut down console versions released did they ever even give it a try, and then suddenly they were talking about how awesome it was. Modding never crossed their minds, they just waited for a shitty version to be released for their walled garden.

 

[DamnWolves!]

Also INDEX MATCH > VLOOKUP

Index-match has some specific use cases (usually involving cell address references or offsets), but XLOOKUP (VLOOKUP has been deprecated) is just so intuitive and fast. Instead of having to muck around with defining array sizes, xlookup has 3 parameters:

1. The thing you want to find
2. The range where you want to look for it
3. The matching range where you want to pull from.

So if I have "$AAPL" in A1, a big list of stock tickers in column C, and a matching list of prices in D, and I want to put the matching price in A2, the (draggable) function looks like this:

=XLOOKUP($A1, $C:$C, $D

In practice, it's "type =xlookup(, click on the thing you want to look for, click on the column heading to search, click on the column heading to return".

People watching you think this is magic and throw money at you to keep doing it.

We keep trying to push things like PowerBI but everybody always goes back to Excel just because everybody already uses it.

PowerBI is better for SQL databases than Excel sheets. If you have a SharePoint, you can do 90% of what BI does in Excel. Do yourself a favor and get the free PowerPivot extension for Excel, if you need to make an on-the-fly database bigger than Excel's million row limit.

I'm not super familiar with BI, but most of what I've seen it used for is making big-ass pivot tables and handful of graphs, with handy extra features like incremental refresh (which admittedly can be a pain once you're updating 20M rows in Excel).

Does it do other, better stuff?

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?

I have to admit that I use stuff like the compounding formula and probabilities in my daily work quite often, and I am not strictly in an accounting position. I do think you need to know how to math to be a generally good businessman, even just to know if something passes the smell check.

I think the general idea of learning about mathematical functions is an important one: the idea that anything can be modeled if you have enough input variables. General regression (and extrapolation) theory are also important concepts. In English, those are the ideas that effects are a composite of many different causes, and that past results are a good indication of future performance--and those are two lessons you want to drill into your head to be an effective person in life.

I recently read about a Wallstreetbets guy who kept selling very safe puts for like a modest profit every day. They had like a 99.5% chance of being worthless, meaning he'd pocket the premium and never had to pay anything out. He basically thought he had found a cheat code to print free money.

This worked for like a year, with him socking away a couple hundred bucks each day, until one day he got unlucky and the puts he sold were exercised way in the money, causing him to get assigned like $500,000 worth of SPY... brokerage liquidated and closed his account immediately, until he could pay up the additional $300k he owed.

Other people will compulsively gamble, because they think they have a system, not knowing that "the game was rigged from the start". Being good at math lets you properly assess risk vs reward in all aspects of life, IMO

Maybe use the Google black box to figure out why instead of internally crying and blaming your parents - hell that's how I picked up coding and securing my current job.

I have a standing bet with my staff that if they make me stop working to fix a problem and I find the answer on the first page of google, they owe me a drink.

The realization that you are likely not the first person who has run into whatever problem you happen to be facing right now is probably the single biggest improvement you can make to your work output. It feels like a lot of people just don't know how to generalize whatever their specific issue is, or otherwise can't articulate what their real problem is.

 

[PyrrhicRustle]

YES. You have seen what unfortunately can sometimes be a difficult task. Basically the engineer knows the theoretical of what can be done, and the welder knows what he knows, and sometimes that means the engineer is wrong, or what he is asking to be done is dark souls level of difficulty. There is a culture barrier sometimes too, the grunt vs the desk jockey. When there is good lines of communication, absolute magic happens.

I am an engineer, I don’t do much design work, but my coworker who does luckily used to be a machinist, so he has a practical understanding of fabrication and talks to me about it, and of other engineers who don’t understand the realities of how the drawing gets turned into a part. Putting features with arbitrary dimensions when it could be made with a standard dimensioned tool, then the shop has to call and ask if they really need it that dimension, which will require a special tool to be ordered for $5k extra and a six week lead time, or whether the engineer would like to switch to a standard dimension and have it done by closing that day.

 

[Kheapathic]

This reminds me of my boomer dad. He's forever mournful the internet didn't exist in his time because if he had it medical school would've been a breeze getting into thanks to the sheer amount of knowledge at his fingertips. Far too many people now don't appreciate the possibilities information databases at your fingertips give you.

Kids these days don't know the pain of going to the school/city/county library and trying to figure out "If I have to do a paper on x, I need to figure out what books are x-adjacent." No man, just google shit and CTRL+F, then C/V whatever you need.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I am an engineer, I don’t do much design work, but my coworker who does luckily used to be a machinist, so he has a practical understanding of fabrication and talks to me about it, and of other engineers who don’t understand the realities of how the drawing gets turned into a part. Putting features with arbitrary dimensions when it could be made with a standard dimensioned tool, then the shop has to call and ask if they really need it that dimension, which will require a special tool to be ordered for $5k extra and a six week lead time, or whether the engineer would like to switch to a standard dimension and have it done by closing that day.

Both of you are saints. You get the pain of taking a drawing and putting it in motion. I've seen many blueprints that once put into practice, have some dimensional issues to say the least. Having open communication with you guys is what prevents a entire day from turning into a day of nothing but pain. Thank you

 

[Kel1 shi1]

All the computer education I had is school was shitty 8 bit systems running "Educational" programs. My parents were too poor to buy a home computer and outside of that I worked out how to play games on my girlfriends moms computer. Provided I put the CD in the drive and a logo would pop up on the desktop.

Anyway about 7 years later I got my first office job. The very first day I was hit with win 95 and the Microsoft suite. I had no idea what I was doing but faked it through the first day. That very evening I went to my girlfriends house and told her I needed to know how this shit all worked which she knew because she had an office job.

It was a crash course that took about 3 hours but I got all the basics down ready for my second day at work. If you've got the drive to learn this stuff it's really not that difficult to get started.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

When I was in Junior High and High school, I was very frustrated by how basic-bitch the "computer tech" classes were. I only took them so I could graduate, even though there wasn't a single thing taught that I didn't already know in Elementary school.

I understand now. Zoomers and Gen Alpha are just as hopeless with tech as boomers are.

 

[melty]

So if I have "$AAPL" in A1, a big list of stock tickers in column C, and a matching list of prices in D, and I want to put the matching price in A2, the (draggable) function looks like this:

=XLOOKUP($A1, $C:$C, $D

That's pretty much what index match does - I guess I need to check out xlookup; when I learned index match it was superior to VLOOKUP which had some flaws like not looking up values to the left

I'm not super familiar with BI, but most of what I've seen it used for is making big-ass pivot tables and handful of graphs, with handy extra features like incremental refresh (which admittedly can be a pain once you're updating 20M rows in Excel).

Does it do other, better stuff?

Power BI makes shinier graphs. Someone earlier said it'll fast track you to management, that's because it makes upper management bait type stuff, particularly dashboards:

These can also be interactive which management really like. And like you said it's good for lots of data, you can easily connect to many data sources. For example one of the dashboard I'm working on connects to a particular API and pulls in about 20 different "tables", half of which are 5 million + rows. You can apply transformations and calculations on top of the data you pull in, link all your data to each other, and then transform it into a dashboard. In my case I link the API data to a few lookup tables, like one that associates a SKU with our product categories so I can display the api's data in terms of our products or whatever else people want to see. Something like this


Which I think is kind of like a SQL database but I know very little about SQL at this point, it's something I'm trying to learn more about. Tl;Dr it's better for more data and shinier graphs, and does more stuff. I'll have to check out power pivot, it looks kinda like a precursor to power BI.

 

[CuzinEd]

What drove most Millennials and some of the Gen X people to learn how to use computers was internet porn. If you want to see tits and ass on the internet at the click of a mouse or keyboard key, you needed to learn how to use a PC. But I would say the other and probably the biggest was PC gaming. At the time there were games on PC's you just couldn't get on consoles. These days PC exclusives are dead except for a few that get released mostly the point and click kind like RTS games and things like that. The days of the big-name PC exclusive are over. Also you can just get porn on your phone and jerk off wherever you want.

 

[Tetragrammaton]

I did enjoy school for one thing (which even now looking back has had less of a impact on my life than initially thought): finding friends and socializing. It was fun to play Yugioh at lunch, to collectively groan at the dumb assemblies, to go on some dates where the price of failure wasn't really very high.

That said in terms of actual learning, it was what you chose to get out of it. If you didn't want to learn, you wouldn't.

this is why i fully believe as far as school is concerned once you learn the basic stuff you should be able to learn whatever interests you and leave it at that. maybe even have classes where you are trained for a job you have in mind like a beginner level mechanic class or a pc repair and building class or programming or whatever else. it would make way more sense than teaching kids stuff they wont even remember or dont care enough to remember.