Gen Z is often branded a “lazy” generation of workers with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder. But PwC U.K. says the real challenge isn’t motivation—it’s resilience. These young professionals are eager to succeed in their own way, but the pandemic may have left them with gaps in essential skills. So the “Big Four” consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands with “resilience” training for fresh-faced hires.
“Quite often we are struck that the graduates [who] join us—who are meeting all the cognitive tests we’ve set—they don’t always have the resilience,” Phillippa O’Connor, chief people officer at PwC U.K., recently toldThe Sunday Times. “They don’t always have the human skills that we want to deploy onto the client work we pass them towards.”
“We’ve really doubled down, particularly [with] this year’s graduates,” O’Connor continued. “We’re doing a whole load of separate training in their first six months with us, really about resilience, really about some of those communication skills.”
The executive described resilience as the ability to handle day-to-day work dynamics—especially pressure, criticism, or sticky situations. That skill, she said, is particularly crucial in a deal-making environment, where managing challenges is a “core” part of the job.
According to O’Connor, many younger workers simply didn’t get the chance to build that muscle during the pandemic, when lockdowns disrupted education and early workplace experiences that would normally help develop it.
But by offering this special training, PwC is ensuring the talent that fills its 1,300 open U.K. graduate jobs this year—which received around 47,000 applications—are well-equipped to succeed.
Fortune reached out to PwC for comment.
Companies are offering Gen Z special training
PwC’s “resilience” training is just one example of how employers have been stepping up to ensure Gen Z is primed to succeed in the workforce.
In 2023, fellow “Big Four” consulting giant KPMGsupplied extra instruction to its Gen Z hires. The business provided training for its graduate talent, out of concern they were struggling to adapt to professional life—particualry when it came to “soft skills,” how to give presentations, work in a team, and manage projects.
The chief people officer of $1.5 billion data protection start-up Cohesity, Rebecca Adams, has also pushed for inter-generational cohesiveness.
Earlier this year the executive led the charge to skill bosses in managing the young professionals, citing that Gen Z responds to feedback differently: “They want to know why, how—they want constant feedback.” On the flipside, she described having to teach “basic things” to young staffers that would mind-boggle their Gen X counterparts.
“How do I manage my calendar? You actually have to accept the meeting request,” Adams explained toFortune in September. “You can’t just walk out of the meeting that you’re in because you have another one while it’s still going on.”
Charitable organizations are also stepping up to solve Gen Z’s professional pitfalls. Radical Hope is a nonprofit helping equip college students with essential skills including communication, interpersonal dexterity, and emotional intelligence. It began as a pilot program at New York University back in 2020, after experts noted “elevated anxiety, stress, and depression” among students within the previous years—and has spread to 75 college campuses so far.
Liz Feld, the CEO of Radical Hope, hopes the Gen Z trainees will become adept in the skills “we all got growing up at the kitchen table.” Even the little things, like small talk, can be a challenge for the young hopefuls striving to one day succeed in the workplace.
“They won’t ask someone, ‘Do you want to go to the dining hall and grab dinner, you want to go grab a beer, you want to go for a walk, you want to get a coffee?’” Feld told Fortune, adding that if someone says “no,” their confidence is crushed. “They internalize the whole thing. The face-to-face rejection is what they’re afraid of.”
