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...

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

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?

A lot of people didn't play the PC version. They played console or mobile ports. Playing the PC version on lower end systems wasn't as easy in the early 10's.

I had a laptop that needed Optifine just to run it at 30 FPS on low settings. That laptop had no problem running FEAR on high settings, though. Weird.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

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.

Installing games was also a tad more difficult than using Steam, for instance. An install wizard is not hard to use, but not as easy as using an app storefront. Downloading apps from random websites is also a really bad idea unless you are able to verify if it's legit or not somehow.

There was also the issue of wanting to run certain software on computers you aren't allowed to install apps on, so many of us learned how to run Nintendo emulators off of USB storage devices.

I remember playing a lot of Tremulous this way.

 

[northstar747]

Dont forget putting games on your TI-83 lol

 

[Kel1 shi1]

There was also the issue of wanting to run certain software on computers you aren't allowed to install apps on

I had a version of Pac Man that was coded in Excel, I think there were other Excel coded games you could find to get around blocks to stop you playing games on work computers.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

By the time I got into middle school in the 2010s, I would argue at least 60% or more of my school already had a smartphone in their pockets. I swear to Christ, talking to my peers drove me bat-shit crazy, because all the faggots around me couldn't possibly understand how I didn't have a smartphone. I was the "faggot" for being perfectly fine having a piece of shit laptop, because even at that time, it wasn't a "gAyMeR Pee-Cee".

Fellow older Zoomer here. I didn't own a smart phone until I was in my 20's. I never had any interest in owning one when I was growing up, and I really only have a cell now out of necessity. I don't use it to play games or anything (I excised all vidya from my life last year), and I really just use it to call people and take pictures of stuff (I have a desktop computer for the Internet, and I own no other smart devices other than the phone). I never cared about trends, either. I realized pretty early on that trends come and go, and they're ultimately meaningless. I can't say the same for the other kids I went to school with; someone in high school once told me that I "have to" do something because it was a trend. I told him to get lost.

 

[BelUwUga]

Zoomers ended up crippled in this regard because big tech focused on ease of accessibility so hard and for so long that in the end, most zoomers have never had to do anything more difficult than tap their fingers on glass like retards at a zoo.
It's the same reason why there are similarly zoomers who cannot open a can of food if it requires use of a manual can opener.

"hurr durr my parents/teachers didn't teach me it's all their fault"

Zoomers grew up with access to the entirety of the world's knowledge in the literal palm of their hand.
And they still can't into folders or can openers.
kek

They also clearly didn't have to learn from old nerds like I had to. Articles like this are an invitation for open mockery and someone smooth talking you into deleting system 32. Worst case scenario now with an SSD is like an hour of downtime, max. A mini-PC can be had for like $100. Do you know how long recovering from a BSOD would take in XP? You'd be lucky to only burn an entire weekend. "How do X" in Google will probably instantaneously get you to results for issues I literally went to a brick and mortar library to learn about in the past. Smarter people than me have paved beautiful and perfect roads you zoomer dipshits only need to walk down.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

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.

Let's pour one out to the Dewey Decimal classification.

 

[Ser Prize]

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.

Doesn't help that past grade 4 school is effectively a public daycare so mommy and daddy can be good wageslaves for Mr Shekelberg. They don't teach actual critical thinking.

 

[Myles the Potatophile]

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?

A PCGamer mag pack-in CD came with a WAD file viewer in 1998 or so. That got me into studying how games like Quake 2, Doom, and Half Life were made. Counter-Strike was made by a few guys just for fun as a HL1 mod. Same with Team Fortress for Quake and TFC later in HL. Unpacking those WADs got me into making my own maps with Worldcraft, which was packed in with HL at some point.

It's so demoralizing to think how we went from people making stuff for the hell of it just because they could to nobody making much of anything because they're technologically retarded.

 

[Kheapathic]

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.

Doesn't help that past grade 4 school is effectively a public daycare so mommy and daddy can be good wageslaves for Mr Shekelberg. They don't teach actual critical thinking.

Said it several times here and will keep saying it; ~90% of what I learned in K-12, I had learned by 8th grade. Only things like Math and Science that build on each other were advanced. I wouldn't mind if we continued to push 9-12 years, we focus it more on skills/trades.

 

[Biggie Smalls' Taint]

Zoomers are set to be the dumbest generation yet, which is an achievement considering they're competing against millennials and boomers.

There are a ton of dumbshit millennials that can't into computers as well, but at least they can comprehend a file structure.

I went to a completely backwoods school full of dumbfucks. We had two computers in the library, and if you knew how to type more than 20 words per minute you were called a fag-nerd and the big kids would tie you to the basketball hoop and throw rocks at you. Even in that environment I managed to learn how to use a computer. You have to learn to be tech-savvy if you want to get pirated games working on a crappy laptop. Didn't need no teachers for that. Could have done without the rocks, though.

 

[PoppyFizz]

Knowing how fucking retarded my generation was in school and computer courses, I'm not too surprised Gen Z is, literally and technologically, illiterate.

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

The other major problem

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/brutal-discovery-as-google-parent-company-alphabet-sacks-12000-workers/news-story/f1ea7d81f1d263069dbdfaf22cfdef61

 

[veritarded]

it doesn’t take a whole lot of technical literacy to operate a mcdonald’s POS. yes zoomers know fuckall about technology but it seems it’s being used as an excuse for why so many of them just don’t work at all. a common one i see is “mental health” because zoomers can’t and won’t try to get out of their comfort zone

 

[TracdacianTortoise]

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 an entire day from turning into a day of nothing but pain. Thank you

Yeah, the problem of Engineers thinking they can just draw something on paper and it can be made regardless of physical realities is a common meme of sorts, albeit a very real one. The one I often here is engineers thinking you can CNC a pocket with square corners, I’m an engineer myself, and for our end of diploma project we had to design and build shit ourself. I reckon a large part of the source of it is a lack of in-depth experience on the tools, as well as often-times poor avenues of communication between fabrication and engineering. Often-times the engineer won’t have any clue what size drill bits are kept on hand. The ideal situation is a back and forth situation where both sides cooperate, often times the fabrication guys know useful tricks, or have seen a similar thing done somewhere else. C

 

[CuzinEd]

Young zoomies not knowing what folders are.
View attachment 4440800
Did none of you young niggers ever have any interest in computers and keeping shit separate? Im a fucking welder, what you would think of as a literal ape, but guess what bitch, i like writing, Microsoft Word 2016 ftw. Keeping chapters organized is a necessity. It's like the autism with keeping the peas from touching the turkey, but it actually makes sense this time. And I know I'm a zoomer saying this, but once again, my theory of pre covid graduate zoomers and these post covid zoomies with the nig-nog haircuts, and them being significantly dumber than those who came before (99'-01') seems to be true.

They are too busy working on their perms for that stupid looking haircut they like so much. They put more effort into talking and acting like niggers than anything else. I don't know what happened. When I was in my teens and early 20's I didn't see that many wiggers. I mean they did exist but it seems like every other Zoomer is a fucking wigger. I know some of the younger Gen X people were wiggers. The ones that were in their mid to late teens in the early and mid 90's.

I'm not surprised. They only know how to tap quickly, once tapping doesn't work, they are mpre fucked than your standard granny since the granny can at least admit she knows fuck all.

Aside from people just not having computers anymore, Windows being a lot less likely to shit itself removes another big part of a learning experience. I remember during the Vista days DREADING any sort of windows update. Since half the time it would break something hard and I'd either have to fuck around in the registry in safe mode, try any random solution I could find in a dodgy website or what ended up happening, format and reinstall. After a few of those I went with a standard master slave setup where I could quickly reinstall in the slave, set as primary, move files from old primary and be done with it.

Basically, like so many have said, there is an inheret lack of curiosity, and those that do suddenly find that these black boxes are very hard to do something outside of their main scope.

That's because Vista was garbage. Easily one of the worst MS OS they ever released. Even Windows 8 wasn't that bad. Things got better with Windows 10. XP was the peak. Windows 95 98 98S3 and Millenium Edition were good as well. But Vista was trash. It was so bad MS dropped it as soon as they could.

Zoomers ended up crippled in this regard because big tech focused on ease of accessibility so hard and for so long that in the end, most zoomers have never had to do anything more difficult than tap their fingers on glass like retards at a zoo.
It's the same reason why there are similarly zoomers who cannot open a can of food if it requires use of a manual can opener.

"hurr durr my parents/teachers didn't teach me it's all their fault"

Zoomers grew up with access to the entirety of the world's knowledge in the literal palm of their hand.
And they still can't into folders or can openers.
kek

That's what I don't get. They have access to all this information and videos of people willing to show them how. Yet they complain no one ever taught them. It's the most nigger tier behavior ever.

 

[Scale Smerch]

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.

This honestly sums up most of the issues I'm seeing with juniors (and even some senior managers). Generalizing a problem isn't some esoteric magic, it's an expected life skill because outside of very niche frontier research more often than not you're simply taking existing knowledge and applying it slightly differently - once you can do it everything becomes a breeze. Our education system has failed hard in this and it should be what we correct first because it's how we keep our vital infrastructure from turning into cargo cults.

Yeah, the problem of Engineers thinking they can just draw something on paper and it can be made regardless of physical realities is a common meme of sorts, albeit a very real one. The one I often here is engineers thinking you can CNC a pocket with square corners, I’m an engineer myself, and for our end of diploma project we had to design and build shit ourself. I reckon a large part of the source of it is a lack of in-depth experience on the tools, as well as often-times poor avenues of communication between fabrication and engineering. Often-times the engineer won’t have any clue what size drill bits are kept on hand. The ideal situation is a back and forth situation where both sides cooperate, often times the fabrication guys know useful tricks, or have seen a similar thing done somewhere else. C

Heh I can relate to this. As a facilities engineer the best compliments I always got were from operations staff whenever I took the time to walk down a facility with them and discuss/plan out a change. Just spending a couple hours to garner their input and learn of any quirks and nuances saved on countless days worth of headaches owing to poor design screwing with day to day operations. Engineers may know the math behind something and have the right to design the product, but it doesn't excuse not accounting for what's realistic or what people will wind up using. Humility and respect really are lost arts.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

Yeah, the problem of Engineers thinking they can just draw something on paper and it can be made regardless of physical realities is a common meme of sorts, albeit a very real one. The one I often here is engineers thinking you can CNC a pocket with square corners, I’m an engineer myself, and for our end of diploma project we had to design and build shit ourself. I reckon a large part of the source of it is a lack of in-depth experience on the tools, as well as often-times poor avenues of communication between fabrication and engineering. Often-times the engineer won’t have any clue what size drill bits are kept on hand. The ideal situation is a back and forth situation where both sides cooperate, often times the fabrication guys know useful tricks, or have seen a similar thing done somewhere else. C

As soon as you hear the words "It's easy, you just...." you know troubles coming. Or "But we just told our customer we could do it".

 

[Seething Troon Collector]

I miss the old days.

I couldn't afford to get my computer fixed, so I had to learn every step of de-virusing and fixing those odd sounds myself. and like you said.
There's fucking black boxes everywhere. Even in consoles.

When I was a teen, my ps2 fucked up, I learned how to repair fucking lasers.
Then my PS3 fucks up and I learn that I can't swap the fucking harddrive /remove the saves without the encyrption key.

You’re really getting to the heart of the matter. People learn how these mysterious devices work by working on them, taking them apart, fixing them and all that. If it’s made impossible to do that than people don’t learn.

The problem is that I don’t see companies like Apple and Sony going back and undoing all of the planned obsolescence and DRM nonsense. That’s to say nothing of the OS being so simple that a toddler could figure it out.

 

[WelperHelper99]

They are too busy working on their perms for that stupid looking haircut they like so much. They put more effort into talking and acting like niggers than anything else. I don't know what happened. When I was in my teens and early 20's I didn't see that many wiggers. I mean they did exist but it seems like every other Zoomer is a fucking wigger. I know some of the younger Gen X people were wiggers. The ones that were in their mid to late teens in the early and mid 90's.

Again I don't get that fucking haircut, it seems to have popped up post covid. And they do act like Wiggers. I get that we're poor, but have some respect for yourself and stop stealing Hyundais like it's GTA!