The sad decline of on-the-job-training
The first day at a new job is always weird. You have no idea what you're supposed to be doing, who to talk to, or how to even really be. The theory is that over time you get the hang of it — but lots of workers make it months into their jobs and feel like they're still kind of winging it. It's not that they don't want to learn; it's that nobody's teaching them. In many pockets of corporate America, on-the-job training mostly amounts to "figure it out." Workers are struggling to get a handle on their jobs, and this failure falls on everyone — companies, managers, human-resources departments, and, in some cases, the workers themselves.
You don't need to look far to find evidence that people don't feel ready when it comes to work. Some bosses complain that Gen Z workers don't know what they're doing and are lazy. HR professionals and Gen Z workers argue that young people want to be successful in the workforce, but they simply aren't given the tools to do it. In a survey from the software company Adobe, 83% of Gen Z respondents said having a mentor at work was crucial to their career, but only half said they had a mentor. It's not just young workers who are facing a training problem; it's everybody. For Gallup's employee-engagement indicator, which analyzes employee perspectives using random samples of working adults, less than half of US employees said they knew what's expected of them at work. This is a costly problem, too: Gallup found employees who weren't engaged cost $8.8 trillion in lost productivity worldwide.
Just figuring out the day-to-day basics of the job is a challenge. The pandemic-driven upheaval of the past several years led to high amounts of job-hopping, organizational brain drain, and a decline in loyalty among employers and employees. The chaos has left employers, managers, and employees wondering just how much time and money it's worth investing in training in the first place. The rise of remote and hybrid work has complicated the situation even more. It's tough to learn by osmosis over Slack, and the deluge of HR apps and training modules isn't filling in the gaps.
