Re-Thinking Employability: Gen Z and the End of the Old Certainties

By Jon Down, Director of Development, Grit Breakthrough Programmes and Anna Matei, Head of Futures, The London Interdisciplinary School

We know that students can have the most fantastic set of skills. At LIS employers tell us so: “she took initiative all the time to do more than was asked from her… was able to take charge right from day one... his ability to gather and synthesize information was amazing…. stand-out stakeholder management.” And, with Graduate Employability being one of the key metrics by which universities are being measured, this is great news.

And yet when Grit talks to employers they tell us, again and again, about how recent graduates struggle to adapt to the workplace, about the cultural dissonance around attitudes and behaviours. How (they believe) Generation Z are less resilient than previous generations. How (it is said) they won’t put in the hours, can’t stay the course. Their communications skills, we are told, are not up to the mark. They don’t have the right attitude: they are “chippy”, “negative,” “arrogant,” “too direct,” domineering.” The  language they use and the way they define their professional identity is too informal.

New Behaviours?

Is it simply that the skills, behaviours and attitudes of today’s graduates have changed since back in the day? “Intergenerational tension” is a phrase that comes up all the time and promotes the notion that these fault lines are the fault of the youngest working-age generation. But, as Bobby Duffy demonstrates in Generations, the narrative was the same when Baby Boomers first entered the job market.

Plus ça change…

Perhaps it’s not that graduates have changed, but that they are merely responding to the fundamental changes in some of our underlying assumptions about how the world of work operates.  For example, while the expected behaviour of graduates joining the workforce has remained unchanged for decades (put in the hours, often at low starting salaries, and work their way up a profession), graduates today are having to think beyond linear careers and into parallel and portfolio careers.

Many new job-seekers expect to be job hopping from short-term to short-term opportunity or to have to juggle passion projects while employed by one of the big corporations for some stability. These (multi)national giants are no longer the universally aspirational graduate career route. As scandal follows scandal,  role models are increasingly (young) entrepreneurs, activists and content creators who often operate through that most non-corporate, informal of channels: social media. No wonder there is a cultural dissonance.

The Wellbeing Gap

Then there is the divide in how wellbeing is perceived in the workplace and the compassionate and progressive policies of university campuses. Today’s graduates are more concerned about work-life balance and they are much clearer about their own boundaries: less likely to tolerate long working hours and a demanding culture for comparatively low pay - especially as they feel the very real impact of the cost-of-living crisis. The corporate world is quick to acknowledge that “diversity is the watchword for Gen Z” but support for new graduates from non-traditional backgrounds does not always follow. This can put off those who already believe that employers do “not want someone like me” from even applying for a job, so contributing to the vicious cycle that keeps their graduate outcomes below those achieved by their more well-connected, better-resourced peers.

But it’s not all hopeless: when employers tell us about challenges as they diversify their workforce; how a sense of belonging, resilience and confidence in graduates is more difficult to support when working with a broader demographic, there are lessons from HE we can help them draw on. After all, we’ve been wrestling with these issues for years.

Making it Work

LIS students (often those from diverse backgrounds) who have successfully held down demanding jobs at the same time as studying ‘full time’ for a degree can have exceptional skills. LIS’s unique immersive internship programme, with its access to paid, high-skill, degree-relevant experience, proves to students that they can “fit in”, build networks, and foster a sense of competence and, simply put, build employability in the corporate world.

It proactively uses the collective LIS network to broaden the connections and career horizons of students from under-represented backgrounds. Sometimes this means supporting employers to understand the value they will receive, not just the cost and commitment they incur. And the results are impressive: student support networks, confidence, and resilience grow. And employers see fast progress on projects that require both in-depth data analysis and research and project management requiring mixed (quantitative and qualitative) methods.

Over to Employers

At Grit, we have written elsewhere about the importance of graduates being able to articulate what it is they can bring to the workplace in a way that translates for an employer. Programmes like Grit’s can support students develop self-efficacy, self-regulation, resilience and confidence. So, yes, there is much more we in HE can do to better prepare students for the world of work ourselves. But we are in a period when some of the fundamental assumptions about what it means to be in work are under question. There are the tensions as old certainties are gone, the notion of “having a career” is changing, the boundaries and expectations of employees are being redefined.

If we want to enable today’s graduates to bring all their talents and energies to the workplace it is, perhaps, time to start asking a different question. As well as asking employers if they feel graduates they employ are prepared for the role, perhaps we should be also asking employers if they have the capacity to bring out the best in them. Perhaps we should be asking, how can we help?

Jon Down is the Director of Development at Grit Breakthrough Programmes. Grit delivers intensive personal development and coaching programmes in universities across the UK

Anna Matei is the Head of Futures at The London Interdisciplinary School. LIS teach undergraduates, graduates, and professionals how to tackle complex, real-world problems by applying knowledge and skills from a range of disciplines.