We didn't prepare them for work
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week calling Gen Z 'A New Lost Generation.'
The argument: young people today are entering the workplace without the social skills they need to navigate organisations. They struggle with face-to-face conflict. They avoid spontaneous conversations. They don't know how to read a room, pitch to a boss, or give feedback without a script.
And the data backs it up. A recent Harris Poll found that 82% of managers say their Gen Z hires need more interpersonal skills training. More than in previous generations. More than they expected.
I read it twice. Because it made me angry, and I had to figure out why.
Here's the thing: the WSJ piece is right about the problem. But it's asking entirely the wrong question.
It asks: how do companies fix Gen Z?
The question it should be asking: how did we let this happen - and where should the fixing actually start?
Where we actually are
Let me be honest with you. I've been watching this conversation build for years. And it frustrates me, because the framing is always the same.
Gen Z gets called lazy. Unmotivated. Difficult. Oversensitive.
But if you actually read the research - and the WSJ piece does get into this - what you find is that these young people have grown up in a perfect storm of circumstances that systematically denied them the environments where social skills develop.
Only 56% of Gen Z make it to adulthood having had a romantic relationship. That compares to more than 75% for previous generations. This matters, because early relationships - messy, awkward, real ones - are where we first learn to cooperate, forgive, read emotions, and have hard conversations.
Then add: more college students learning online than in person by 2025. Formative years spent in breakout rooms and group chats instead of lecture halls and common rooms. A pandemic that finished the job.
This generation didn't fail to develop soft skills. They were never given the conditions to develop them.
And we waited until they showed up to work to notice.
Cheat sheet
5 things the WSJ piece gets right - and what they actually mean
Social skills are learned through experience, not instruction.
The article is clear: you can't teach someone to navigate a difficult conversation by sending them a module. You learn it by being in the room. By watching. By making mistakes in front of people who are invested in you getting it right. That environment has been missing for years.
Digital communication creates a specific kind of anxiety.
Gen Z didn't grow up bad at communicating - they grew up brilliant at asynchronous, text-based communication. What they find terrifying is the unplanned, spontaneous, high-stakes interaction. The corridor chat. The moment someone pushes back in a meeting. The feedback that lands unexpectedly. Those moments require a completely different skill set.
The cost is enormous - and it lands on everyone.
High turnover. Young people leaving jobs without understanding why. Leaders frustrated and unable to explain it. A generation that doesn't become the seasoned mid-level talent organisations need in 10 years. The pipeline breaks.
The corporate fix is right. It's just not enough on its own.
The article's recommendations are aimed at managers and organisations: set clearer communication norms, create cultures of asking, reduce the guessing game. That is the right intervention for the workplace - and it's work we do too. But if the only place we build these skills is at the point of hire, we'll be building them forever. The corporate fix treats the symptom. We also need to treat the cause, which means starting much earlier - so that by the time someone walks through the door at 22, the foundations are already there.
The system isn't asking schools to build this - and teachers are carrying that alone.
Teachers are trying. Many of them are actively working to develop these skills in their students - but they're doing it without infrastructure. Human skills aren't built into the curriculum in any systematic way. There's no reinforcement loop, no progression framework. It gets squeezed in around the edges by teachers who are already managing enormous amounts of behaviour, admin, and pressure. That's not a teaching failure. That's a design failure. The system measures academic attainment. Human skills development is left to goodwill.