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Bridging the Soft Skills Gap
Book

Bridging the Soft Skills Gap

How to Teach the Missing Basics to Today's Young Talent

Bruce Tulgan
Jossey-Bass, 2015

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Many managers complain that generation Z employees (born between 1990–1999) “arrive late, leave early, dress inappropriately and spend too much time on social media.” While acknowledging that it never serves to paint an entire generation with too broad a brush, Bruce Tulgan reports that supervisors often find younger staff members lacking in “workplace citizenship.” He provides easy-to-follow, short but detailed lesson plans to help managers train gen Zers in soft skills, like collegiality, “professionalism, critical thinking and followership,” If you want your 20-something staffers to get along with people, develop self-awareness and focus on others, you may need to teach them how. getAbstract recommends Tulgan’s pragmatic counsel to managers who supervise gen Z employees and to young employees and job applicants, as well.

Take-Aways

  • While generation Z (born between 1990–1999) workers are proficient in “hard” or “technical skills,” they tend to have poor “soft skills,” like collegiality or followership.
  • Instead of accommodating the organizations they work for, generation Z workers expect their firms to accommodate them.
  • Gen Zers believe in self-expression and may not follow standard work rules or customs.

About the Author

Bruce Tulgan is the founder and CEO of RainmakerThinking, a management research and training firm. He holds a fifth-degree black belt in classical Okinawan Uechi Ryū karate.

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    W. A. 8 years ago
    MBTI and enneagram are not evidence-based
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    F. v. getAbstract 8 years ago
    ...there are also a few positives about being generation Z!