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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.