Of course it's different now. You can't just ask your teammate beside you if something goes wrong or learn by watching when they've already done what you have to do. And as aluded to, those over 40 are likely less self-conscious.
Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
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Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#12Gen Z are savvy with iPhones and other touch devices. They type incredibly fast on their phones but probably slower than millennials on computer keyboards. While we grew up with using laptops and PCs from a young age, they've been using smart phones and tablets.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#13We need to kill the meme that age and technical skill are at all correlated.
Big tanks to all the gray beards and gray ladies who taught me to hack Gibsons back when I was violating COPPA or whatever :-)
(Folks used to joke I looked like Abbie Hoffman when I had hair but you shouldn’t trust anything I say now according to him)
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#14No post body was provided.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#15I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with the internet through osmosis
It is less about being tech savy, it is the "tech" the Gen Z is savy at. And that tech has close to nothing to do with the tech they encounter in the workplace. Maybe in the field of social media ads, but even there the backend of social media might be different from the consumer front end.
One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#16I think one of the issues is that Gen Z’s tech devices are more geared towards content consumption. Phones and tablets are great for consuming content, but not so great for producing. A laptop or even better a desktop with a large high resolution monitor is much better suited towards content production which is what businesses actually need.
Previously, this was not as big of a difference as the personal computer of the past was typically a desktop computer. Now the personal computing device is likely to be a phone.
In addition, computers/phones/tablets are more appliance like, in that it is very easy to use and set up and not much reason for the average person to trouble shoot and fix issues. This is great, but can result in the average person treating it more like a black box. I think in the past, if you wanted to get anything done with your computer, you needed to be familiar with the system and troubleshooting (or else have someone in the household who was).
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#17I have only my personal experience and perceptions, but I think most people here (likely technically savvy) would agree that, quite simply, most people of any generation are not technically savvy. While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webp…
Another part of the problem is that a good chunk of kids only use phone/tablets/gaming consoles, and have little experience with desktops/laptops. Likely as a result, several university professors have reported issue with gen Z students not understanding what files and folders are: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#18Used to be for a fresh out of college worker, you just needed to show up to work on the first day, then anything you didn't know you could observe and learn through a mixture of osmosis and inquisition. Now, if you start a remote job, you have to have a baseline set of skills to navigate the corporate structure. Reaching out to the "people team" (read: HR) is unlikely to be all the helpful, and you may end up asking the wrong person, who will now be silently judging you for the rest of your tenure. In person, you make a quick friend over lunch and ask some questions off the cuff.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#19Is half the problem that gen Y grew up with email as a communications platform and had actual computers with actual mice and actual software installed on said computers. Gen z may be plugged into their phone, but a phone is a far cry from the tech that is actually used on the office. And Tik Tok isn't like an Excel spreadsheet. Further, prior generations had to write letters etc which transfers across to email in a p…
This. Most younger people I know, only need a real PC to write essays. Which then get automatically stored on some Office365 or Google school cloud.
The part about letters is not fair though, since most people also just learned it by having to write business letters.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#20I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with the internet through osmosis
On average though, we were. The previous generations were slower to use personal computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet. If you had to sit in front of a PC and install 7 discs from DOS in the mid 90s, or navigate the early web before Google, or cracked some $1200 Adobe software that you couldn't afford, or punted someone from an AOL chat room, you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud.