Opinion | Older employees could learn from Gen Z's work attitude, says skills expert - he's not wrong

Speaking on a panel at Fortune’s Global Forum in Abu Dhabi, president of the Workforce Skills division at education company Pearson, Michael Howells, said that with the working world experiencing so many major shifts, older employees could take a note from the way younger generations approach work.

Young workers have built up somewhat of a negative reputation for themselves – many employers think Gen Z is lazy, unwilling to debate or disagree, entitled, and yet want flexibility, high salaries, and extreme success, all for nothing.

Whether this reputation has grown from stereotypes or truth is another question (it’s probably a bit of both because no generation is a homogenous group), but can younger generations, with all their supposed negative attitudes and poor work ethic, really teach more experienced generations a thing or two?

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When Howells said this statement to an audience of people, what he meant was that young workers, who have grown up whilst some of the biggest technological developments simultaneously occurred, have experienced having to adapt and embrace new forms of tech, from software to social media apps, new phones, and new hardware.