For decades, a hire right out of college took 8mo-2yrs to reach full productivity. That was fine. There was time, there was managerial bandwidth, and space for young employees to figure things out gradually.
That world is gone.
AI has raised the bar for what counts as useful output. Organizations are leaner. The pressure to demonstrate headcount ROI is faster. Two years is no longer a timeline companies can absorb.
Most organizations are not rushing to fix the ramp. They are complaining about the people on it. They make it sound like a personality problem. It isn’t.
What managers describe is instead an experience problem.
Young hires are not missing technical or academic knowledge. They arrive with that. What they are missing is what I call operational skill. They don’t know how to communicate under pressure, prioritize, escalate, absorb feedback, or build trust. This skill cannot be learned in a classroom. You can only become fluent through practice in the actual job.
Colleges cannot teach it. The company is the only place it can be built.
So, companies have two choices: own the solution or keep lamenting.
For organizations ready to solve, there are a few paths.
- Build experiential training internally (structured programs that put new hires in real situations with feedback loops). PwC UK did this, by introducing resilience training for all new Gen z hires in their first six months. KPMG followed and taught things like teamwork.
- Bring in outside help. Not every organization has an internal L&D function capable of designing this. External consultants who specialize in early-career readiness can build what you can’t.
- Equip your pipeline before the hire. Internship and co-op programs built around company specific performance standards function as pre-hire training..
- Accept the slow build. Let hires develop organically over time.
- Hire only experienced people and skip early career folks entirely.
The last two options are likely untenable. The slow build doesn’t fit today’s productivity timelines. Experienced-only hiring is expensiveand leaves organizations with no talent pipeline.
Which leaves one real option: stop treating this as a generation problem and start treating it as a business obligation.
