Gen Z is often branded a “lazy” generation of workers with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder. But PwC U.K. says the real challenge isn’t motivation—it’s resilience. These young professionals are eager to succeed in their own way, but the pandemic may have left them with gaps in essential skills. So the “Big Four” consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands with “resilience” training for fresh-faced hires.
“Quite often we are struck that the graduates [who] join us—who are meeting all the cognitive tests we’ve set—they don’t always have the resilience,” Phillippa O’Connor, chief people officer at PwC U.K., recently toldThe Sunday Times. “They don’t always have the human skills that we want to deploy onto the client work we pass them towards.”
“We’ve really doubled down, particularly [with] this year’s graduates,” O’Connor continued. “We’re doing a whole load of separate training in their first six months with us, really about resilience, really about some of those communication skills.”
The executive described resilience as the ability to handle day-to-day work dynamics—especially pressure, criticism, or sticky situations. That skill, she said, is particularly crucial in a deal-making environment, where managing challenges is a “core” part of the job.
