As We Embrace Workplace Transformation, We Can’t Ignore the Next Generation of Talent

Right now, we’re living through an exhilarating digital transformation. We can work and learn across continents from the safety of our homes. HP and others have stepped forward to facilitate this sea change, and we’re proud to be part of it.

But alongside the transformation is another worrying reality: Young people are struggling to overcome last year’s immense career-related challenges. In a survey of employers, 25 percent said they halted recruitment of recent college graduates or rescinded job offers during the pandemic. Internship programs — a lifeline for college students entering the workplace — were cancelled or cut back. Many 2020 graduates were forced to pull together a patchwork of freelance gigs to survive.

We can’t afford to sit back and watch. Our workplaces need the talents of this generation. So how do we empower them in the midst of transformation?

Magic Happens When We Model What We Want

Change management, flexibility and agility are now among the most important skills employers want in job applicants. But to demand those qualities in hires, companies need to also live by them. In the early months of the pandemic, for instance, HP quickly transitioned its internship program to be virtual. When countless companies cancelled their programs, HP also created a Summer Scholars program that allowed more than 2,000 students and recent grads to gain valuable technical skills and professional experience as they completed an accelerated journey across our whole business, learning about gaming, software and data analytics, the printing and computing lines of business, supply chain, and sales. This summer, we welcomed another cohort of remote interns.

If we want to benefit from the ingenuity of the up-and-coming generation, we must enable them. Getting creative when it comes to maintaining learning opportunities for them in a virtual world is just one way to do that. I’m proud that HP didn’t push its internship opportunities aside, and I’m equally proud that many who participated in the programs have since been hired full-time.

Hybrid Workplaces Call for Circular Rather Than Linear Careers

As we welcome new hires to our workforces, we have to rethink their trajectory. There’s no denying that the future of our workplaces is bound to be hybrid — one that blends in-person and virtual modes of interacting. Our new, non-traditional workplaces call for a new kind of career path as well. A career is not a straight line anymore — it’s a collection of experiences. We need to foster opportunities for learning early and frequently by getting people comfortable moving between roles within our organizations. That rotation mindset should be built into all our processes, from recruitment to onboarding to promotions.

Thanks to our digital transformation, these rotations don’t have to be physical. The flattening of our world through virtual space means that a team’s members can be based anywhere. There are limitations to this idea, of course — sometimes you just have to soak up a real place to truly understand a market and the needs of people living there. But that’s where hybrid work comes in. We can blend all these new ways of working with the existing ones to allow people to learn across borders.

Learning to Solve Problems as Entrepreneurs

In a way, I’ve been learning across borders for my whole career. Early on, I was told I would likely not be a senior executive leader because I didn’t have an MBA. Well, I’m proof that those rigid ideas are untrue. Throughout my career, I’ve rotated across different roles, worked in different regions around the globe and participated in brief, intensive learning programs that have been tremendously helpful to putting frameworks into practice with hands-on discussions and testing. It’s a model that worked well for me in tech and was also suited to our fast-paced lives — ongoing education in shorter bursts.

Prestigious credentials just don’t mean as much anymore in our evolving workplaces. After all, many of the leaders I’ve spoken to say it was real-life experience and continuous learning they’ve relied on to face the challenges of the past year, not what their degrees, alone, taught them.

We need to foster adaptability and entrepreneurialism as strengths. If we want to empower our teams to pivot in the face of change and do it fast, they can’t be afraid of failure. We should encourage people at all stages of their career to collect experiences of all kinds. That set of experiences is something that we all can leverage to speed up learning, to apply learnings across businesses and companies and to help others evolve their ideas and businesses faster.

While we’re in this innovative moment, we can’t ignore the struggles the next generation of talented individuals have faced in the past year. Let’s wholeheartedly embrace new models for fostering the development of those who will push our organizations to new heights in the years to come. People early in their careers want to solve problems, and they want to disrupt the status quo. Continuing to engage their fresh perspectives is how we’ll thrive and ultimately, create sustainable business for the future.?