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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

#31

Post by AbrahamParangi »

Consumption software and production software has diverged tremendously over the past three decades. It used to be that the software you used to read the news and the software you used to write the news were both fairly clunky and required your brain to be on. Today, production software is still about the same but consumption software has been polished to the point of being completely effortless and largely brainless. Just keep scrolling.

Consumer uses of software are 100:1 in favor of consumption which now teaches essentially no useful skills because we got good at UX and good UX means the user doesn’t have to think.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#32

Post by mFixman »

nkrisc wrote: post #8

I 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…

Most people of any generation are not technically savvy. Most people here in HN were technically savvy before formally joining the tech industry.

Our industry benefited a lot from new employees who had prior experience fighting against buggy Linux distributions or writing random hacks for fun [1]. One of the many consequences of the abatement of general purpose computing is making it harder for teenagers to accidentally discover this wonderful world.

[1] https://xkcd.com/519/

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#33

Post by s1artibartfast »

I wonder how much of this has to do with poor tools being rolled out that entry level workers have to deal with. I feel like this is definitely the case in my big company. I was lucky enough to promote out of the front line rolls before any of the tools were replaced with strictly inferior alternatives. I can't use them effectively either, but at least I don't need to use most of them anymore. I have a lot of sympathy for junior employees that need to do their day-to-day work.

Now I just have to deal with garbage tools where it takes maybe an hour to process an expense report in concur or find the right training module to be compliant

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#34

Post by thenerdhead »

Maybe this is more of a lagging generational tooling thing.

When I entered the workforce as an 16 year old, I used popular tools like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Trillian, xFire, mIRC, and more. The workforce was stuck using email and in-person meetings.

Now, the workforce is using similar concepts to those popular tools I would use all built into a single platform known as Slack/Teams/etc. I'm in the peak years of my career 30 y/o+ and thrive on these tools.

But maybe gen z is used to other tools like Discord, OBS, TikTok, etc. Slack/Teams doesn't exactly transfer over 1:1 to these tools. So they have to learn the lagging way until the leading way becomes the new way?

To say they are not tech-savvy seems very odd. They are especially tech-savvy, just not with the current tools.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#35

Post by masswerk »

I'm not surprised at all. (I actually assumed this, when the talk about "digital natives" was en vogue.) As it happens, we tend to accept technology that was mostly sorted out when we were born for granted and this tends also to be the kind of technology we're least prone to investigate. E.g., when I was born, high frequency (HF) was mostly sorted out. But, just before this, it was a hot topic in research and hobbyist magazines. To me, however, it had always been a given and I'm probably the last person to ask about this. There is no comparison to the kind of knowledge an individual who followed the emergence of a technology with some interest may have. (These will be always a minority, though.)

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#36

Post by nkrisc »

tlogan wrote: post #30
nkrisc wrote: post #8

I 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…

I would say that it is not about being tech savvy it is more about how their brain is wired. Some people just do not do analytical thinking: break down a complex a task into smaller, more manageable parts and make a plan. In other words, they do not think step-by-step. And majority of computer task require that type of thinking.

I agree but I think that is why they are not technically savvy. I've seen clever, analytical people become technically savvy through necessity and exposure simply because they are an analytical thinker and the understanding came easily to them. I see it in BAs all the time who come in fresh with little technical understanding, but after a year or two working on a system they understand it almost as well as the developers who created it. Then they start making the connections to the other tech in their life and their understanding grows.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#37

Post by fleddr »

The computing environment of earlier young generations were near-identical to what is found in the workplace. Desktop, mice, filesystems, office programs, the like. So the transition is smooth. Not so much for smartphones.

My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.

I gave my nephew my old gaming PC. As soon as anything unexpected happens or there is a problem, he's helpless. Not only does he not know what to do, he can't be bothered to self-resolve it. Spoiled with tech that "just works".

There's other differences. For example, they don't do email. They may have it but never check it. My niece was warned that her admission to university would be handled via a form and email confirmation, which then needed her final confirmation, with a strict deadline. Everybody around her told her to check daily, it's of a life-changing importance, and still she didn't. They simply can't seem to imagine a world outside snapchat or whatever the hell they use.

And there's differences in etiquette. Meme-like poor writing skills. Different expectations of privacy (none), things not professional-proof.

Apart from these generation-specific issues, I'd still emphasize the more generic issue that affects all generations. Training on these tools is absent or poor. I work in a giant company and the typical employee has absolutely no idea how Teams or SharePoint works. They get by memorizing the 3 things they absolutely need, whilst not knowing about 90% of the tool's capabilities. And due to these tools rapidly changing, they simply stop bothering to learn it.

We VASTLY overestimate people's abilities to intuitively understand these tools.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#38

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

nkrisc wrote: post #8

I 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…

> I think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.)

Every single company I've worked for has had at least one meeting where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the conferencing setup.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#39

Post by sadmin »

eatonphil wrote: post #4

> One in 5 of the 18-to-29-year-olds polled in the report, which surveyed 10,000 office workers in 10 markets including the U.S. and U.K., said they felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to only one in 25 for those aged 40 years and over. Further, 25% of the former age group would actively avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, whereas it was just…

I very much think this is the correct take, a few comments in this thread seem to come from users who are a bit too deeply embedded in the tech world, and can't see this perspective.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#40

Post by Kon-Peki »

chrisco255 wrote: post #20
mattnewton wrote: post #2

I 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 g…

> If you had to ..., 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.

Maybe a little. But:

Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that.

My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???

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