It’s 1:58pm. Maya, a second-year business student, is sitting alone in a borrowed seminar room with her phone face up on the desk. At 2pm, a graduate recruiter is due to ring her for a 15-minute screening call about the placement she has wanted since first year.
She has rehearsed her answers. She has a document open with notes on a group project she led. She has checked her signal twice.
At 2:00pm, the phone lights up with an unknown number, and for three long rings, Maya just stares at it.
Careers staff at Nottingham College saw so many students stumble at telephone pre-screening that the college started running sessions on phone anxiety. Its careers adviser, Liz Baxter, told CNBC she would expect at least three-quarters of a class of 25 to 30 students to admit to it. A 2024 Uswitch survey of 2,000 UK adults found that 23% of 18 to 34-year-olds never answer voice calls, and 56% assume an unexpected call means bad news.
A phone call is a small thing. It’s also a neat stand-in for the problem employers keep describing: capable, well-qualified young people who haven’t had enough chances to practise the conversations that working life runs on.
The Gen Z soft skills gap is the difference between the interpersonal skills employers expect from new hires and the skills Gen Z graduates show when they start work. The areas employers flag most often are verbal communication, professionalism, resilience and self-awareness. Teamwork and technical ability, interestingly, tend to score well.
Gen Z is usually defined as people born from 1997 onwards, the cut-off the Pew Research Center uses, with most researchers closing the generation around 2012. That means almost every student in a UK, US or Canadian college or university right now belongs to it.
The most useful way to read the evidence is as a practice gap. Soft skills improve the same way any skill does, through repetition and feedback, and many of the everyday situations where earlier generations picked up their repetitions have shrunk.
The numbers are blunt, and they come from both sides of the Atlantic.
In the United States, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) compared how graduating students rate their own career readiness with how employers rate new graduates. On communication, 78.1% of students consider themselves very or extremely proficient. Only 53.5% of employers say the same about the graduates they hire. The gap on professionalism is nearly 30 points (79.7% against 50.3%), and on leadership it is 35 points. Teamwork is the exception: students and employers almost agree.
NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update strikes a gentler tone. Employers see new graduates as reasonably prepared overall and give them high marks for teamwork, but they are less impressed with communication, professionalism and critical thinking. NACE’s own conclusion is that students need help articulating and demonstrating their skills.
In the UK, the picture is moving in the wrong direction. The Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 Student Development Survey of 148 employers found that 54% said graduates did not meet expectations on self-awareness, up from 35% in 2023. Concerns about resilience rose from 30% to 46% over the same period, and concerns about work-appropriate verbal communication climbed from 7% to 22%. Employers were broadly satisfied with problem solving and other analytical skills. The academic side of graduate readiness is mostly landing. The interpersonal side is slipping.
Then there are the more dramatic headlines. A Workplace Intelligence survey for Hult International Business School of 800 HR leaders and 800 recent graduates found that 89% of HR leaders avoid hiring recent graduates, and 37% would rather hire a robot or AI. In an Intelligent.com survey of 966 US hiring managers, six in ten had fired a recent graduate hired that year, and 39% cited poor communication skills.
Treat those last two with some care. Commissioned surveys tend to produce headline-friendly framing, and Intelligent.com’s own adviser warned managers against dismissing Gen Z on the strength of stereotypes. But when NACE, the ISE and commercial pollsters on two continents keep pointing at the same handful of skills, the pattern is hard to wave away.
Students rate their communication skills 25 points higher than employers do, which is exactly what you’d expect from people who rarely get honest, immediate feedback on how they come across.
Every generation of graduates has been told it isn’t ready for work, so it’s fair to ask what has actually changed. Four things stand out.
Texts, voice notes and DMs let you draft, edit and delete before anyone sees what you meant to say. Uswitch found that 61% of 18 to 34-year-olds would rather receive a message than a call. That’s a perfectly reasonable preference with one side effect: real-time conversations with strangers, such as ringing a GP surgery, returning something faulty or asking a manager for help, happen less often, so each one feels bigger.
There’s a hopeful detail in the Uswitch findings, though. Young people are still happy to talk on the phone when the call is arranged in advance. What unsettles them is the unplanned version, where they can’t prepare. That’s good news for educators, because preparation is something you can teach, and rehearsal turns an unknown conversation into a familiar one.
Placements and part-time jobs are where most people learn how work conversations go. The ISE found that 77% of employers think graduates who completed an internship or placement arrive with better skills and attitudes. Yet Fortune’s coverage of Cengage Group’s 2025 Graduate Employability Report notes that one in five graduates said their programme did nothing to help them build in-person connections.
The NACE data shows students overestimating their soft skills, and that’s predictable. Without regular, honest feedback, nobody can see their own blind spots. AI writing tools may be widening the distance between the application and the person, too: the ISE found that 48% of employers worry graduates who use AI in the selection process misrepresent their abilities. A polished application followed by a hesitant interview is a jarring combination for any recruiter.
The old deal was simple: hire for potential and train the rest. In 2025, Cengage Group found that 76% of US employers were hiring the same number of entry-level workers or fewer, and 91% of HR leaders in the Hult study estimated that hiring and training a recent graduate costs at least twice as much as onboarding someone experienced. Meanwhile the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of employers see skill gaps as the biggest barrier to transforming their business, with resilience, flexibility and agility near the top of the core skills they want. More of the work of getting graduates ready is landing on education.
Good soft skills training looks more like sports practice than a lecture. Students attempt the thing, get feedback, think about what happened and try again, ideally many times before it counts.
The research supports this. A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry of virtual reality simulation for nursing students found a significant overall improvement in communication skills (an effect size of 0.44), and whether a study included debriefing was one of the factors linked to its results. The lesson travels well beyond nursing: rehearsal works best when students stop and reflect on it afterwards.
Employers are asking for the same thing in their own language. In NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, employers reviewing CVs said they want evidence of teamwork, problem-solving and communication, and more than half listed ten or more skills on their wish list. Students can only give convincing evidence of a skill they have actually used.
In practice, effective soft skills training tends to share a few features: realistic scenarios, a safe space to get things wrong, feedback that arrives straight away and is specific enough to act on, guided reflection, and enough repetition to build real confidence.
For a long time the hard part was scale. One lecturer can’t run thirty mock phone screens in a week. AI roleplay has changed that. Students can rehearse a job interview, a tricky conversation with a patient or an unexpected call from a recruiter with an AI character that responds to what they actually say, then get instant feedback and go again as often as they like.
None of these needs a curriculum rewrite. Educators can start this term and help students make progress quickly.
Swap one reading for a ten-minute rehearsal, using a ready-made scenario or one you build yourself. Start with the moments students dread most: phone calls, asking for help, receiving critical feedback and disagreeing politely. Set it as homework so they can fail in private, then bring the best and worst moments into class for discussion. A hospitality lecturer might start with a guest complaining about their room. A nursing tutor might start with a patient refusing their medication. An employability lead might start with that unexpected call from a recruiter. The scenario matters less than the habit of having a go.
Feedback that arrives a fortnight later on a marking sheet rarely changes behaviour. Students need to know straight after the conversation what worked and what didn’t. An AI coach can ask every student the reflective questions you’d ask if you had time to sit with each of them after every attempt.
With more than half of UK graduate employers flagging self-awareness, reflection deserves real time in the timetable. Self-awareness grows when students compare what they think happened with what actually happened. Two prompts go a long way: what did you notice about yourself, and what would you do differently next time? Reading a transcript of their own conversation is often the moment it clicks, because students can see the question they dodged or the point where they talked over someone.
What gets assessed gets taught, and soft skills are easily crowded out by content that is simpler to mark. Define what good soft skills look like in your discipline, whether that’s building rapport with a patient or structuring a STAR answer to a workplace question, then assess every practice against those criteria. Seeing the distance each student has travelled, and how a whole class is moving, gives you evidence for quality assurance and accreditation conversations as well as for your own teaching.
The best scenario in the world won’t help if it lives in a room nobody books. Plenty of students would rather practise on their own laptop at 11pm than sign up for a slot. Others benefit from a booked session with support on hand for a first attempt, or a whole-class activity you debrief together. Think about how you’ll deploy practice before you think about content, and put it where students already work, such as inside your LMS. If you’re planning at institution level, see how universities and colleges are building practice into their programmes.
Maya’s three rings of hesitation say very little about her character or her potential. They say she hasn’t made enough calls like this one.
Imagine she had rehearsed it ten times the week before, with an AI recruiter who asked awkward follow-up questions and pushed back on her answers. Imagine she had read a short report afterwards and talked through what she’d change with a coach. She’d still be nervous. She would also pick up on the first ring.
Gen Z brings real strengths into work. Employers in the NACE research already rate Gen Z's teamwork and collaboration highly, and rate their technology skills even higher than graduates rate themselves. The soft skills gap is narrow, specific and well documented, and it responds to one of the oldest fixes in education: let students practise, tell them how it went, and let them go again.
What is the Gen Z soft skills gap?
It is the gap between the people skills employers want and the skills young graduates show when they start work. Employers most often say new graduates need help with speaking clearly, coping with pressure and knowing their own strengths and weak spots.
Why do Gen Z students struggle with soft skills?
Mostly because they get less practice. Many young people talk by text more than by phone or face to face. Fewer get a job or a placement before they finish their course. Skills like talking to a boss get better with practice, and they have had fewer chances.
How can colleges and universities teach soft skills?
Let students practise real conversations again and again. Give them feedback straight away. Ask them to think about how it went. AI roleplay helps because students can practise at any time and try again as often as they like.
Can soft skills be measured?
Yes. Teachers can pick clear goals, like “asks good questions” or “stays calm”. Each practice can be scored against those goals, so teachers can see who is getting better and who needs more help.
1.Baxter, L., quoted in “Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses to learn the lost art of a call.” CNBC Make It, syndicated by NBC New York, 2024. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/gen-z-battling-with-phone-anxiety-are-taking-telephobia-courses-to-learn-the-lost-art-of-a-call/6152855/
2.Nottingham College. Phone anxiety training (employer and student programme). Accessed October 2026. https://www.nottinghamcollege.ac.uk/employers/employee-training/professional-upskilling/careers-and-employability/phone-anxiety-training
3.Uswitch. “Call me maybe (not): a quarter of young people never answer the phone.” Survey of 2,000 UK adults, 9–12 April 2024. https://www.uswitch.com/media-centre/2024/04/Call-me-maybe-quarter-young-people-never-answer-phone/
4.Dimock, M. “Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins.” Pew Research Center, 17 January 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/
5.Gray, K. “The Gap in Perceptions of New Grads’ Competency Proficiency and Resources to Shrink It.” National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 13 January 2025. Data from NACE 2024 Student Survey and Job Outlook 2025. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/the-gap-in-perceptions-of-new-grads-competency-proficiency-and-resources-to-shrink-it
6.NACE. “Employers Give New College Grads a Passing Grade on Job Readiness.” Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update press release, 28 May 2026. https://naceweb.org/about-us/press/2026/employers-give-new-college-grads-a-passing-grade-on-job-readiness
7.NACE. “The High-Impact Skills College Students Should Showcase on Their Resumes.” Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update press release, 23 April 2026. https://naceweb.org/about-us/press/2026/the-high-impact-skills-college-students-should-showcase-on-their-resumes
8.Times Higher Education. “Almost half of employers think graduates ‘lack resilience’.” Reporting the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) Student Development Survey 2025, 7 May 2025. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/node/736769
9.Personnel Today. Coverage of the ISE Student Development Survey 2025 (148 employers, January–March 2025), May 2025. https://www.personneltoday.com/?p=334242
10.Workplace Intelligence. Case study: Hult International Business School graduate skills gap survey (800 HR leaders, 800 recent graduates, October 2024; published 2025). https://workplaceintelligence.com/case-study-hult-international-business-school/
11.Workplace Intelligence newsletter. “The stark reality of workforce readiness among recent graduates” (Hult survey findings), 2025. https://newsletter.workplaceintelligence.com/posts/labor-shortages-the-end-of-dei-and-the-stark-reality-of-workforce-readiness-among-recent-graduates-2
12.HRreview. Coverage of Intelligent.com survey of 966 US hiring managers (August 2024), 2024. https://hrreview.co.uk/?p=377128
13.Cengage Group. 2025 Graduate Employability Report: Closing Career Readiness Gaps. September 2025. https://blog.cengage.com/2025-graduate-employability-report-closing-career-readiness-gaps/
14.Fortune. Coverage of the Cengage Group 2025 Graduate Employability Report (educator vs graduate readiness), 15 September 2025. https://www.fortune.com/2025/09/15/professors-vs-students-workforce-readiness-gap-students-prepared-workforce-students-feel-unready-entry-level
15.World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025 (digest). 7 January 2025. https://weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/digest/
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