New Grads Have No Idea How to Behave in the Office. Help Is on the Way.
As the Class of 2023 enters the workforce, employers are seeing a lack of the skills necessary to navigate the office. The solution: instruction on how to send an email, the right way to buttonhole the boss and what not to wear.
5 min
Recent graduates might be great at accounting or coding, but they need a little help when it comes to dinner parties and dress codes.
Many members of the class of 2023 were freshmen in college in the spring of 2020, when campuses shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They spent the rest of their college years partially in virtual mode with hybrid internships and virtual classes. Students didn’t learn some of the so-called soft skills they might have in the past by osmosis on the job, from mentors and by practicing on campus.
To address deficiencies in everything from elevator chitchat to presentation skills, companies, universities and recruiters are coming up with ways to train new hires and give them clear advice. They are eating it up.
Recent graduate Joslynn Odom had her first hybrid internship after her junior year and found working in person to be draining thanks to wearing professional attire and staying energetic consistently. It made her realise that she needed to sharpen her communication and networking skills.
Programming arranged by her college, Miami University in Ohio, has since helped. Just before graduation she attended an etiquette dinner where she learned to follow the lead of more senior leaders over dinner: Eat at their pace, discuss neutral topics and avoid personal questions. When buttering bread, it is best to put a slab on one’s own bread plate before applying it to a roll, and when cutting food, holding the fork hump-side up is best, she said.
“Knowing that, I feel more confident,” she said.
William Lopez-Gudiel, 23 years old, interned last year for Warner Bros. Discovery and found a presentation on office dynamics especially helpful. It covered dress codes, navigating interpersonal relationships and what working in person is like, he said.
The company said it has offered similar guidance in the past. Some of it felt like common sense to Lopez-Gudiel, who graduated in December from George Mason University and is a self-described extrovert.
But Lopez-Gudiel ultimately appreciated the information, realising that the pandemic may have limited what soft skills he might have learned at past work experiences. He will be working at the company full time as a software developer.
Many soon-to-be graduates are itching to get rid of Zoom and work face-to-face with co-workers where their interpersonal skills will be quickly tested. In an April survey of about 700 Class of 2023 graduates from the virtual student-health company TimelyCare, 53% said they wanted a fully in-person work environment, while 21% said they wanted to be fully remote.
Graduates’ disrupted college experience might mean they struggle with the basics reading colleagues’ cues or navigating a meeting, said Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management. In class, when students didn’t have cameras on, that was harder to determine.
New hires will need to learn “those nuances of, how do you actually create enough connection, visibility, ability to manoeuvre,” she said.
The missing piece for young professionals who have graduated since 2020, in fact, has been no real proximity to mentorship and leadership, recruiters say.
“This is so much more important today,” said Sandy Torchia, vice chair of talent and culture at KPMG, whose full-time hires this summer and fall will go to the firm’s training facility in Florida where they’ll get new presentation training.
They’ll practice scenarios involving conflict within teams, plus the basics of talking in person—as simple as how to introduce yourself to a client or colleague. Key tips include maintaining eye contact, taking pauses and avoiding jargon. It is also best to listen carefully to others, and to adjust your introduction to highlight pieces of your background that will be most interesting to them.
The company has found that some young professionals are stiff, talk too fast, or rely too much on filler words like “um,” as they presented. Some of the employees said they wanted to feel more comfortable, too.
Allan Rubio, 21 years old was a freshman at Dartmouth College in the spring of 2020. Online classes continued all through his sophomore year, which Rubio completed from his family’s home in Bangkok. Course sessions stretched to 11 p.m. or sometimes 2 a.m. local time, he said.
Professors were far more flexible on deadlines during the pandemic, amenable to extensions if students asked, he said. When Rubio had an in-person internship last summer, he realised his manager, team or client depended on him meeting deadlines.
Presentation skills are also something Rubio needs to learn better, he said. He had presented virtually in academic classes, and often kept a few thoughts and scripted language in a Notes file on screen—or on a separate device nearby. Once on a video call, he said, he blamed an internet delay while he stopped talking mid sentence and collected his thoughts.
None of those aids could help him through presenting in-person on stage at a hackathon on campus. It was more difficult than he expected, he said.
Since then Rubio, who graduated this month, has rehearsed extensively before live presentations. He lays out key points and slims a longer script into bullet points before memorising key areas.
Though new hires are digital natives, today’s graduates’ professional email skills need improvement, said Jialan Wang, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Many won’t acknowledge important messages but will expect a response from professors immediately, even over holidays, she said.
Michigan State University’s business-school career centre has urged companies to be explicit about what students should expect at work, to over-communicate details about how a first day will play out, what to wear and what people typically do for lunch.
The school last year began requiring many business students to take classes on soft skills in the workplace, after observing that students are more awkward and unsure when they network than they used to be, said Marla McGraw, director of career management.
The program goes step by step through an in-person networking conversation. In one handout, the centre instructs students to introduce themselves by their first and last name. “STOP! Let them tell you their name,” it reads.
Later it urges the students to share that they are interested in hearing about opportunities at the company and share that they follow the company closely, are familiar with its products or services or know someone who interned there, among other options.
“STOP! Pause for only a few seconds to see if they offer any questions or input on your above comments. They may ask you for your resume.”
Students should keep an eye out for signs that a person is trying to end a conversation, McGraw added. Someone might begin to gather their things, or look around the room, signalling they need to talk to another person. Often, one can facilitate a smooth exit by saying, “Well, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.”
Professional-services firms PricewaterhouseCoopers and Protiviti have had to tell some young workers what types of clothes are appropriate, including for client-site visits.
Many people are dressing less formally, said Scott Redfearn, Protiviti’s executive vice president of global human resources.
Now the company defines what it means by business casual—including slacks, tailored denim, sport jackets, dresses, skirts, collared shirts, blouses, sweaters and professional footwear—and explains why it’s important to maintain a serious professional image. The company also relays that when it is appropriate to wear bluejeans, darker hues without rips are best, he said.
The company has tried to be proactive when it shares broad guidance about attire, but when a worker shows up in athleisure or flip-flops, that is best handled with a one-on-one conversation.
“Working hybrid brings a lot more decisions to the individual employee,” Redfearn said.
During the pandemic, the firm extended its onboarding process to a series of small-group virtual meetings that took place over a full year. One topic includes making conversation as a social skill, he said. It includes an improv-based public-speaking workshop, where in one prompt, participants need to describe themselves in three words quickly, going with their first impulse. The company said the sessions help workers to find their authentic communication styles.
Protiviti hosts social gatherings around in-person meetings so that workers can practice.
Redfearn said he gives a pep talk to new graduates, urging them to introduce themselves around the office, stick their hand out and smile. Another tip: Have a prepared question ready to ask if needed.
—Ray A. Smith contributed to this article.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
Victorian auction buyers will soon receive a piece of information that has traditionally been withheld until bidding reaches it: the vendor’s reserve price. Under new property-sale and underquoting laws, agents must publish the agreed reserve at least seven days before an auction or fixed-date sale. Most changes begin on 1 October 2026 and apply to …
Continue reading “Victoria’s New Auction Rules Will Force Reserve Prices Into the Open”
Four decks, 34.5 metres and a made-to-measure interior: step aboard the new Custom Line Navetta 35, unveiled at Cannes.
Could fears of an AI apocalypse be distracting us from the dangers already here? Experts debate whether regulation should focus on speculative existential threats or present-day harms, including cyberattacks, weapons and unsafe autonomous agents. Read more via the link in bio.
5 min
There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.
Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.
Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.
And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.
At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.
She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.
Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.
Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”
OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.
The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.
“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.
AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.
Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.
Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.
Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.
Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.
“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”
In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.
Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.
“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”
One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.
This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.
AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.
“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.
Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.
The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.
Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.
Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.
“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”
Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
Set on one of the city’s last absolute riverfront sites, The Riversdale by Mosaic combines irreplaceable waterfront ownership with one of Brisbane’s most significant residential opportunities.
