Career Open Thread: “Prepared” Employees, Onboarding, and Mentorship in 2024

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group of young professionals gather around a table

Here's a fairly broad open thread question for today: Do you feel like new employees at your company or firm are less prepared than in previous years? If your office allows a lot of WFH days, how does onboarding look in 2024 — and how does mentorship look? What things are working in your company, and which ones really, really aren't?

There have been a TON of articles about this in the past 12-16 months. According to the WSJ (gift link):

The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills. 

This sentiment was echoed by a few responses in the most recent Corporette survey,* with some people commenting things such as:

  • Junior associates are woefully unprepared to be professional. Work ethic has seriously changed.
  • It seems like fewer and fewer of our junior employees have any work experiences outside of professional settings or internships, and it makes them very out of touch with the real world.
  • The newer hires seem to be less prepared to work with teams.

Obviously one huge way companies are trying to address this is by forcing employees to return to the office… but that tends to be wildly unpopular. Which then begs the question: How has onboarding changed at your company? How has mentorship changed? Whether you're a senior manager or a new worker just out of school, I'd love to hear your thoughts…

Readers, what are you seeing at your companies? Do you feel like new employees are less prepared than they were in previous years? (Or is this just a generational thing, and not a “loss of learning”/pandemic issue?) Do you think this is something that better onboarding and better mentoring can fix?

* I'm still reviewing the Corporette survey, but hope to share some of the info soon. The winners were picked back in December, and all have accepted their gift cards — congrats to B, K, and K!

Stock photo via Stencil.

11 Comments

  1. I’ll say yes, for my company. We had about 1/3 people as teleworkers in 2019, but they’d been in the office and requested that after at least 6 months to a year. Now, everyone can be a teleworker from Day 1 so it’s about 1/3 in the office. We haven’t properly adjusted the onboarding process for that. We’re a highly matrixed organization so it’s a lot of project-based worked and you rarely work with your manager. The onboarding needs to be better for the management and the projects so there are clear expectations about everything from timely communication to formatting & quality standards of our work. From a social standpoint, even in-the-office employees who are practically begging for more interaction and connection don’t have the (used to be) basic social skills to get a group together for lunch without help.

  2. Aren’t these just a subgenre of “Kids These Days” griping that’s been going on since the dawn of time?

    1. I know I heard a variation of “very out of touch with the real world” in 1994, so my vote is yes.

    2. As a millennial, I’m just thrilled that the media has decided to blaming some other group for destroying the workplace.

    3. I think some yes and some no. Your point is well taken (spoken as a member of the “Slacker” generation.) Curiously I just read a piece in the Washington Post (and heard the author interviewed on Marketplace) about the rising employment rate among teens and the author was talking about how employers were singing the praises of young people and talking about how they want to work (and comparing them positively to Millennials – who are apparently taking the place of Boomers are the demonized generation de jour).

      That said, I have personally seen that the pandemic and remote work have negatively impacted the preparedness and professionalism of young attorneys. So much of what they need to learn is hard to replicate remotely. Also (and this is purely my personal experience) they seem to be very defensive about what they do not know and what they need to learn. We have objective metrics that our first to fifth years are just less able to do the job, which would not be a problem if they were willing to be taught but an unusually high number are not. Combined with the number who do not understand that they are getting paid six figures and their job is not 9 – 5, our senior associates/junior partners are taking on more work and not being quiet about it.

      (Also – pet peeve of the quarter – I don’t care what TikTok apparently told you – yes we do need to know where you are working so stop giving me attitude when we ask; labor laws are a thing we have to comply with! And get off my lawn you pesky kid!)

      1. This resonates with my experience. I have had entry-level non-lawyers try to lecture me on labor law to comic effect. No, the organization does not have to pay you more if you choose to work remotely from a HCOL area; no, the organization is not legally required to pay for your internet service; no, there is really nothing you can do that will create a legal requirement for you to be immediately promoted to the same rank as someone who has 25 years of experience and is an international expert in her field. I have also found that although entry-level employees are no less skilled or knowledgeable than they were before the pandemic, they tend to be much less aware of how much they have to learn and much less willing to learn it. I have mostly observed this attitude among entry-level employees who went straight through law school or grad school after college, and not in employees who worked for a few years between college and law school or grad school. I also see it in my nephews who recently graduated and work in tech (FAANG and startups).

  3. The newbies in my all-volunteer organization certainly have no clue how to do things, and the experienced members are seriously hesitant to teach them because it will hurt their feelings to be told how to do things properly. Like, how to make an agenda, how to take minutes, how to prepare reports, how to transition from one year to the next. Nothing is enforced or *taught* and then they just wring their hands that “no one told them how to do X” but they’re not about to teach them how to do X because “I don’t have time.” Why did you join? Why did you accept a leadership role? Why bother?

  4. Someone should make a fun game or app that teaches these boring skills… my son is playing one now called “unpacking” that lets him organize and stuff.

    1. Cooking apps did not teach my child to cook, or to clean up after herself in the kitchen.

  5. This feels very relevant to me! I’m a newer employee in my company and industry and have to say that I agree that the lack of mentorship and training is going to hurt the workforce in the longer term. But I disagree with the assessment that newer employees are lazy. I think we’re trying our best but have become jaded after seeing during the pandemic how disposable people are to employers/corporations.

    I recently finished grad school (got a Masters degree to help me change fields from non-profit work to something with a higher salary because I’d like to afford to retire someday). My company insisted I had to relocate to one of their hub offices (luckily they did pay for the relocation), only for me to WFH because none of the professional development programming was actually happening and there was no desk for me. Now, 6 months later, they’re requiring 3x a week in person to “ensure a cohesive culture.” At no point during any of this was there any onboarding beyond an HR training about how to use WorkDay to request our PTO. I am a hard worker and eager to learn, but even after advocating for myself, trying my hardest to be self-starter, and flagging that I need onboarding to get up to speed, there’s been nothing. I thought RTO would help, but everyone I work with is based in different cities, so now I’m just driving an additional 2 hours each day to get right back on video call. I did work between college and grad school before COVID-induced WFH became prevalent and remember how much I was able to learn from watching others, etc. I feel like now I’m in the worst of both worlds…. I have do the commuting and get none of the benefits.
    I probably sound angry and that’s because I am, but maybe this provides a window into the flip side of the experience.

    1. This sounds very frustrating! But I don’t think new employees like you are the problem people are complaining about.

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