Gen Z in the Workplace Is Losing the First Rung. Build It Back.

The newest worry about Gen Z in the workplace has nothing to do with their attitude. It's about the entry-level jobs they're supposed to start in, and how many of those are going away.

In early November, Guy Berger, the workforce economist in residence at Guild, published an analysis called The missing rung is a ten-year problem. His argument: employers are cutting entry-level hiring while they wait to see what AI will do, and if that freeze lasts a few years, they'll have nobody to promote a decade from now. HR Dive picked it up on Nov. 10 and put it in plain terms. Fewer junior hires today means a "donut hole" in the middle of the org chart later, right where your managers and team leads are supposed to come from.

If you run onboarding or manage new grads, this matters to you now, well before 2036. The first rung was where young people learned how to talk to a client, read a room, take feedback and make a judgment call. Most of us learned those things on the first rung without anyone calling it training.

What is the "missing rung" in entry-level hiring?

Berger describes the job market as stuck rather than collapsing. He writes that the hiring rate was 3.4% in September and the layoff rate was 1%, which makes it a low-hire, low-fire market. Nobody's getting fired, and nobody's getting in.

The people trying to get in are feeling it most. Over the past year, he reports, unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds with a bachelor's degree averaged 6.9%, up from 5.4% four years ago.

The part that got my attention was his description of what entry-level work used to be. The routine tasks weren't the most productive work, he writes, but they taught "context, business acumen and judgment." He calls it an apprenticeship that nobody called an apprenticeship. Now AI is taking a lot of those tasks, and the learning has to happen somewhere else.

He also points to history. Manufacturing went through a long hiring slump after the late 1990s, and the share of its workers in their 30s and 40s fell 13.2 percentage points from 1994 through 1997 to 2016 through 2019. That's the donut hole: plenty of young people, plenty of veterans, and a thin layer in the middle.

And if you think you'll just poach experienced people later, Berger has bad news. Your competitors are skipping the same hires, so the people you're planning to poach won't exist either.

Why are Gen Z communication skills lagging?

I wrote last week about why companies are firing Gen Z, and the complaints employers make are always about the same human stuff. They mention the blank stare, the phone call that never gets returned, and the meeting where the new hire doesn't say a word.

Read Berger's piece next to those complaints and the connection is obvious to me. The first rung was where those skills got built. You sat next to someone who'd been there ten years and heard how they handled an angry customer, and eventually you made a small mistake in front of a real person and found out you'd survive it.

Berger says it directly: AI can take the tasks, but it can't remove the human requirements of judgment, communication and complex problem solving. Those still have to be learned. So we've got a generation that already lost a couple of years of in-person reps to remote school and remote work, and now the jobs that would have given those reps back are disappearing too.

I'd call that a training gap, and right now employers are making it wider.

What comedy taught me about the first rung

Comedy has a first rung, and it's brutal. You host. You do the five minutes before anyone has finished ordering. You introduce other comics, and the crowd is talking through all of it. Nobody thinks it's glamorous, but it's where you learn to read a room, because the room is telling you exactly what it thinks.

I've hosted over 5,000 shows, and almost everything I know about holding an audience came from those unglamorous sets. You can't learn timing from a video. You learn it from a real person who doesn't laugh, and then you try again the next night.

In college I was a coxswain on Penn's varsity heavyweight crew. Same deal. Nobody hands a coxswain a manual on how to get eight exhausted people to pull harder. You learn it in the boat, with a coach yelling feedback from the launch.

Every skill employers say Gen Z is missing gets learned the same way, through reps and feedback. If the job no longer supplies the reps, the company has to.

How to rebuild the first rung for Gen Z employees

Berger's recommendation is to build a new apprenticeship deliberately: real work, real support and clear pathways. Here's what that looks like in practice for onboarding Gen Z employees, with a little of my own stagecraft mixed in.

• Pick one role and start there. Berger's most practical tip, from a panel he sat on, was to choose one job family that matters to your business and build a pathway for it. Skip the company-wide initiative.
• Replace volume with side-by-side review. He uses junior marketers as the example. They used to learn by writing a hundred first drafts, and now a tool writes the draft. So pair them with an experienced colleague who reviews the work with them and gives fast feedback.
• Run new hires in cohorts. Learning with peers, Berger notes, gives early-career people the network that "used to happen naturally on the job." It also gives them a safe room to be bad at things together.
• Rehearse the human moments. Taking an instruction and confirming it. Disagreeing with a manager. Leaving a voicemail, which I'm told is now an extreme sport. Five minutes of practice beats an hour of slides on "professional communication."
• Protect your managers' time. HR Dive notes that managers are already burning out. If the new apprenticeship is just extra unpaid work for supervisors, it won't last a quarter.

Humor helps with all of this, because nervous people don't practice. A room that's laughing is a room where someone will try the awkward thing out loud. That's the idea behind the New Hire Orientation and soft skills training for new hires I run. It's the same reps, with lower stakes, in about half the time.

Gen Z in the workplace still wants a ladder

Fortune reported on Nov. 8 that in Deloitte's 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 48% of Gen Zs said they feel burned out, and only 6% of Gen Zs and millennials named reaching a leadership position as their top career goal.

You can read that as "kids don't want to lead." I read it as people looking at a ladder with the bottom rung sawed off and making a reasonable call. Make the climb visible and teachable and I bet that number moves.

There's more on this in my Gen Z at work posts, and on using humor as a leadership tool. If your first rung is looking wobbly, let's build the practice back into your onboarding.