05/01/2026

The Professionalism Gap: Bridging Expectations from School to Work for Gen Z

By Rebecca Burtram

Gen Z is often seen as a workplace enigma (Royle, 2025). While many individuals from this generation (born between 1997 and 2012) are talented, intelligent, and capable, the group carries a persistent negative reputation in professional settings (Intelligent.com, 2024a). Employers frequently report challenges such as inconsistent work habits, weak communication, and a lack of professionalism (Intelligent.com, 2024b).

Employers have long expected entry-level workers to demonstrate communication skills, problem solving abilities, and the capacity to keep learning. Just over a decade ago, employers mostly believed those expectations were being met. In a 2013 employer survey, 67% said all or most college graduates had the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in entry-level positions (Hart Research Associates, 2013). This is a harsh contrast to the 75% of companies (in a 2024 survey of 966 business leaders) who reported “some or all of the recent college graduates they hired this year were unsatisfactory” (Intelligent.com, 2024b).

These gaps in the professional skills of the Gen Z employee are better understood as learned patterns rather than as inherent generational flaws. Many reflect educational environments that increasingly emphasized completion, flexibility, and support, often without equivalent emphasis on accountability, initiative, and independent problem solving.

Gen Z workers may seek help from career development professionals after struggling to maintain employment or gain traction at work, receiving difficult feedback, experiencing anxiety or stress related to workplace demands, or feeling dissatisfied and uncertain about their career direction (Deichler, 2021), all of which can reflect the gaps between professional expectations and the educational environment. Career development professionals have a unique opportunity to help the Gen Z worker bridge these gaps. By supporting the development of accountability, ownership, and professionalism, they can help Gen Z individuals transition into the workplace with greater confidence, replacing school-based habits with professional skills that foster credibility, trust, and long-term success.

Understanding the Source of the Skills Gap

Older generations, such as Millennials and Gen Xers, often see Gen Z workplace behaviors as character flaws, but there is a clear connection between Gen Z workplace patterns and the actions of public school systems. School practices such as lax deadlines (Hills & Peacock, 2022), the normalization of chronic absenteeism and more permissive responses to inconsistent attendance (Malkus, 2026), and grade inflation (Carey & Carifio, 2012) have shaped the habits Gen Z brings to the workplace. For the past ten to fifteen years, public school students have experienced environments where the following behaviors were standard:

• Turning in work for full credit at any time without communicating delays or requesting extensions
• Waiting for someone to provide scaffolds, sentence starters, or even the answers instead of attempting to problem solve independently
• Staying home or arriving late as often as desired without consequence
• Receiving half credit when nothing was submitted and full credit simply for completion rather than quality

Gen Z learned their current behaviors were acceptable to others, without learning that these differ from professional behaviors. Because they are learned behaviors, the new ways to succeed in professional settings can also be learned. Professional skills are teachable behaviors, not personality traits or generational flaws.

Building the Bridge

The goal for career development professionals should be to help Gen Z clients recognize that workplace expectations differ from school expectations and to identify, name, and better understand the skills needed to succeed at work. These new behaviors include accountability, proactive communication, independent problem solving, and reliability. The following strategies address three common gaps in Gen Z workplace readiness by defining the missing skill and the activity to assist with learning to replace the unacceptable behavior.

Gap: Deadline Ownership and Proactive Communication 
Bridge Strategy: Deadline Ownership Contract

In this strategy, the career development professional helps the client apply the practice either to an actual workplace assignment or to a simulated task designed to build the skill. Every task is assigned with a hard deadline and a communication checkpoint, often 48 hours before the due date. At the checkpoint, Gen Z clients must identify one of three project statuses.

• Confirm on-time completion
• Flag a risk and propose a revised plan
• Ask for help with a specific barrier to completion

Late submission of the deliverables without prior proactive communication should be viewed as a failure of the communication task, even if the client completes the work later. Career development professionals can use the communication checkpoint, especially when a client fails to respond proactively, as an opportunity to give direct feedback, identify repeated patterns, and work with the client to assess whether they develop stronger habits over a four- to six-week period. This approach retrains the Gen Z client’s understanding of the educational systems’ modus operandi that work deadlines are always flexible into a professional understanding that deadlines require communication, not silence.

Gap: Problem-Solving
Bridge Strategy: Three Before Me Rule

This strategy builds initiative, ambiguity tolerance, and independent thinking by delaying the reliance on immediate help. Clients must document the following before asking for help:

• What they already know or tried
• One proposed next step
• One specific question

This retrains dependence on others into a productive struggle and prepares participants for real workplace scenarios where managers expect employees to propose solutions and operate under incomplete information.

Gap: Reliability and Time Ownership
Bridge Strategy: Presence as a Commitment Exercise

This strategy reframes attendance as a choice with predictable outcomes rather than simply a rule to follow. This moves clients from passive compliance to active ownership, helping them understand that punctuality and presence shape how others experience their professionalism. To learn this new perspective, clients track the following for each scheduled commitment:

• Scheduled start time versus actual arrival or absence
• Whether advance notice was given when late or absent
• Who was impacted by the client’s late arrival or absence and how

Career development professionals should help their clients understand the potential impacts of a lack of punctuality or excessive absences. Impact on others could include lost meeting, class, or work time; colleagues covering or repeating responsibilities; and disruption to work or instruction. Impact on themselves could include missed context or instructions, reduced credibility, fewer future opportunities, increased stress, and slower skill development. This approach builds consequence awareness without punishment and reinforces reliability as a professional identity that directly affects trust, learning, and opportunity.

Bridging the Gap in Professional Skills

The challenges employers see in Gen Z employees are not mysteries and they are not moral failures. They are the predictable result of a school system that rewarded flexibility, completion, and accommodation without teaching accountability, communication, or ownership. Understanding that context, shifts the conversation from frustration to responsibility.

Bridging the gap between school and work behaviors requires more than telling Gen Z to “do better.” It requires naming the rules they learned, acknowledging why those rules worked in school, and then deliberately teaching what works in the workplace instead. Deadline ownership, problem solving, proactive communication, and reliability do not emerge through maturity alone. These skills are built through practice, feedback, and clear expectations.

Career development professionals are uniquely positioned to build this bridge. By making the unspoken curriculum visible and teaching the behaviors schools did not, Gen Z workers learn what they were never explicitly taught and what employers now demand. When the bridge is clear, Gen Z does not resist crossing it.

References

Carey, T., & Carifio, J. (2012). The minimum grading controversy: Results of a quantitative study of seven years of grading data from an urban high school. Educational Researcher, 41(6), 201–208. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12453309 

Deichler, A. (2021, June 28). Generation Z seeks guidance in the workplace. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/organizational-employee-development/generation-z-seeks-guidance-workplace 

Hart Research Associates. (2013). It takes more than a major: Employer priorities for college learning and student success. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://dgmg81phhvh63.cloudfront.net/content/user-photos/Research/PDFs/2013_EmployerSurvey.pdf 

Hills, M., & Peacock, K. (2022). Replacing power with flexible structure: Implementing flexible deadlines to improve student learning experiences. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361914631_Replacing_Power_with_Flexible_Structure_Implementing_Flexible_Deadlines_to_Improve_Student_Learning_Experiences 

Intelligent.com. (2024a, November 19). 4 in 5 Gen Z employees say they’re victims of generational stereotypes, costing them jobs and promotions. https://www.intelligent.com/4-in-5-gen-z-employees-say-theyre-victims-of-generational-stereotypes-costing-them-jobs-and-promotions 

Intelligent.com. (2024b, September 13). 1 in 6 companies are hesitant to hire recent college graduates. https://www.intelligent.com/1-in-6-companies-are-hesitant-to-hire-recent-college-graduates/ 

Malkus, N. (2026, February 2). Progress on absenteeism is stalling. What can we do about it? Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-progress-on-absenteeism-is-stalling-what-can-we-do-about-it/2026/02 

Royle, O. R. (2025, January 22). Gen Z really are the hardest to work with—even managers of their own generation say they’re difficult. Instead bosses plan to hire more of their millennial counterparts. Fortune. https://fortune.com/article/how-to-work-with-gen-z-vs-millennials-work-ethic-employees-workplace-recent-grads/ 

Rebecca Burtram is the co-founder of AscendED Consulting, where she and Adam Howard transform the way organizations work with Gen Z through actionable insights, systems, and leadership training. A National Board Certified Teacher with more than two decades of experience in education, marketing, and nonprofit leadership, Rebecca brings a rare generational lens shaped by having taught every Gen Z cohort. Recognized as the 2025 Washington Post Teacher of the Year Runner Up, she equips leaders to move organizations from good intentions to lasting impact. Contact her at rebecca@ascended-consulting.com