Gen Z's Work Superpower
Spoiler alert: It’s not TikTok-making.
My professional career was born into a world of remote work. In the summer of 2021, I kicked off my first “real” internship at a media company in Washington D.C.—and never once stepped foot in the office. There was no water cooler, office banter, or real “face time” with coworkers. In fact, my first corporate interactions, for better or worse, were all through the unforgiving, unfulfilling medium of Zoom. I’ve been blessed with perhaps better communication skills and more training than many within my generation, however, and I’d like to believe that my ability to network and navigate office settings has caught up to that of the average 21-year-old pursuing a career. Yet there are still those moments when I wonder: How much “growth” did I miss out on from that year of remote work? How many opportunities did COVID-19 rob me of? And, more broadly, how much did the pandemic further my generation’s already mixed approach to being in the workforce in the first place—a workforce we’re projected to be a third of in less than two years?
Much has been made of the problems Generation Z (born 1997–2012) is bringing into the workplace. Demanding and uncommitted, the narrative goes. We lack soft skills, which leads into many other negative stereotypes: emotionally unprofessional, addicted to the softest support for our own mental health, and lacking the tools necessary to handle a degree of inevitable workplace conflict. We have trouble staying at jobs, too, due to difficulties in both finding places that reflect our values and feeling valued ourselves. So are there any positives to the post-COVID generation, the fastest-growing group in America’s workforce?
Recent research indicates that Gen Z faces the same technological barriers that many other generations do. It seems counterintuitive: Shouldn’t young, technologically literate people be able to figure these things out? Well, the skills that allow my generation to reach millions on TikTok and Snapchat aren’t the same skills that prepare us for workplace functionality. Or, in one researcher’s words, “neither watching TikTok videos nor playing Minecraft fulfills the technology brief.”
It’s not even the case that we can make up for that skills disparity with above-average motivation—research also indicates that Gen Z is at least perceived as highly unmotivated, with 27% of employers saying they’ve had to fire a Gen Z employee within the first month.
So, are there any positives to my strange, mental-health-focused generation? There’s one big one—and it’s one that really doesn’t feel like a positive…
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