Trainees no longer ready for workplace

I think kids aren’t left to sort things out for themselves enough or told to just bloody get on with it. They don’t experience enough discomfort and when they do instead of being allowed to sit with that then figure out how to resolve it a parent tries to fix it.

I used to feel I’m a bit tough on my kid compared to some other parents but fuck it at least she’ll be employable. If mine cried over a sanction she had actually earned she would get short shrift for it. I do think we need to rethink parenting a bit, I’m definitely going to try to step back more.

The point is, SharpOpalNewt, that the overall standard of trainees seems to have significantly dropped, as posts describe. Of course trainees keep on learning, that's the point of supporting a trainee, but they need to have a basic level of ability to start of with.

Interesting you say that.. I am an immigration lawyer and have a client who recently has only hired Indians into this graduate trainee engineering roles. He said that every single British citizen hire he has brought in has let him down - lazy, not motivated to learn, going off sick every week. The now 3 Indian citizens he has hired have been an absolute dream - always willing to learn, respectful, turn up on time, and well qualified. It's not a case of exploitation, he's paying a decent salary, it's just the attitude of these individuals is so much better than the British workers he comes across. He's willing to pay the extortionate visa fees to secure reliable employees.

Also surely trainees are by their nature in training?

Employers seem to want to have their cake and eat it these days.

They want the education system to churn out perfectly formed automaton workers at 21 and don't seem to want to bother to train them up or pay for it in the sort of taxation required to have a very good state education system.

When in the past they'd have already been training them from the age of 14.

I don't think it's infantilisation to acknowledge that you are not your fully formed adult self at 18 and that the aim should be to grow and develop throughout our lives, not to stop when full time education does.

No, but that is when they should be developing towards that self. Not let off any sort of responsibility and self-sufficiency until their mid-twenties, by which point they are ruined.

I don't think it's infantilisation to acknowledge that you are not your fully formed adult self at 18 and that the aim should be to grow and develop throughout our lives, not to stop when full time education does.

I mean even in recent history the age of 21 was considered a bigger milestone than 18 and there has always been a recognition of youth lasting about up the age of 25. Even when life for a lot of people was more often pretty short.

"She was laughing at the idea of someone coming in to manage others when they hadn't worked at all"

That's not necessarily a bad thing. My first job after graduating was as a Trainee Manager with Sainsburys. There was a 12 month training programme where you had to learn about actually running a supermarket and also managing people.

Admittedly, I had worked for them while I was doing my A levels and a summer job while at university, but most people joining the training scheme hadn't worked before.

Likewise, one of my cousins. He went straight from university and joined the army as a commissioned officer. Straight in to manage others when he hadn't worked at all.

But if you're talking about a line management role that doesn't involve any sort of structured training then, yes, I agree with you that it is quite laughable.

My dad said that in the nineties, they had apprentices coming into the workplace who clearly didn't want to be there and didn't care. One put his feet on the table in front of the (very intimidating) HR woman. But I've also heard lots of reports of the latest generation being more entitled and delicate. This is a change in a few short years - people notice it getting worse year after year in schools.

This thread is extremely interesting. I’m currently three months into my PGCE at the ripe old age of 43 (44 next month). I’ve worked in a variety of schools from special to grammar, but thought now my own DCs are growing up I would give teaching a go. I adore my (non bursary subject). But at this point, I don’t think I want to teach at the end of my course. I may look at a SEN role. Schools are broken, there’s no time or money. I have 32 pupils in one GCSE class and half of them can’t access the curriculum. They can’t spell, let alone grasp complex concepts.

To say that the universities are holding students’ hands is an understatement. I have had lectures on how to speak to your mentor in a professional manner-how to make a phone call, how to dress! There’s older students that can barely speak English from all over the world, not sure how they’re going to promote literacy and oracy. It’s a massive cash grab. They’ll let anyone in.

I must add though that there are some amazing young people that will make excellent teachers on my course.

This is interesting because I saw a tiktok yesterday from a doctor who said similar about trainee docs - they come on ward rounds (or something, can't remember exactly and I'm not a doctor) and won't do blood draws or what have you because they don't feel like they should have to. He, as a seasoned doc, said that they need to know the basics so if they need to, they can do these things. Also that they're treating human beings and not an illness and it doesn't bode well if they never have any actual human contact!

The other stuff I can't comment on as all the 'trainees' I've ever had contact with have been on the graduate scheme for our company so if they don't work hard they don't pass and also don't have a job.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-development

This "brain not fully developed until 25" thing does seem to have been swallowed whole and it is much more nuanced than that.

Also, it begs the question how the vast numbers of previous generations in human history coped with being considered fully fledged adults by their early 20s. I think in part at least it was because embracing responsibility for themselves as adults was expected of them. This is not a pop at young people. They are being failed by being infantilised in this way.

Very much agree with the spoon feeding aspect of this. I went into a school very recently to shadow teachers in an essay-based subject and they were teaching paragraphs with gaps for the students to fill in by year 8 or 9. By year 10 students were then regurgitating these paragraphs on their own. Added to that, the lesson plans the teachers were using were centrally-produced. It's almost like the learning expected is too hard for the average student, so teachers are making it easy by simply telling them what to write.

I can see how that might approach might work for more STEM-type subjects, where there are formulas to be learnt and applied, and perhaps also for MFL/grammar rules but it seemed odd with a humanities subject. Anecdotally, parents that I know have told me that when they asked at parents evening about concerns that their child didn't like poetry, they were told not to worry since they would just tell them what to write.

It is because everything they need to pass the exam is spoon-fed.
Schools and colleges are under so much pressure to get results (league tables, Ofsted, etc) that they dare not give the students/pupils an inch to think for themselves and mess up.

There is no time for mistakes. No time for 'reading around the subject for general background'. Just each tiny bit of curriculum fed to them to memorise. Essay writing is modelled and scaffolded, each paragraph taught, so no room for the student to be creative in how they approach their writing.

So when faced with a blank email in an office and told to 'email the client', they have absolutely no idea how to start. Where is the model/scaffold/example to copy? Where is the content that used to be spoon-fed?
They are lost.

Following - interesting discussion.

@colddays

The young people we have are the product of the society and culture the adults have created. Its no good blaming young people for not being responsible if we are not taking responsibility for the environment we brought them up in.

Nail on the head there. It's not the kids' fault that they've been badly "brought up" by parents and teachers. They know no different. They're not allowed the freedom that kids used to have. They're not given boundaries.

I took physio students on placement for about 30 years and they were generally of a certain standard, with the odd few really excellent or poor ones.

Then in the last few years I worked (so about 2017 to 2021), that changed. They were almost all either brilliant or terrible. The brilliant ones were almost fully-formed newl-qualified physios even on their first placement, and the terrible ones were terrible in a way I'd only seen once before in my career - kind of incapable of seeing what they were doing wrong, which was basically a compltee lack of common sense or care for patients.

I really enjoyed working with and supporting students, and spent a lot of time with them, which I increased for anyone who was struggling. But these hopeless students were on the whole not willing to stay late or come in early so I could give them more help.

One even accused me of bullying him because I gave him a very poor assessment (he was cruel and belonged nowhere near patients, whch I had no qualms about saying to him or his tutors). Luckily I had a long track record of excellent feedback from students, which just made him look even more of an arse. But I do wonder what the hell happened to universities to change the calibre of students, for better and for worse, so dramatically.

Its lack of free unsupervised play too. Kids used to take themselves off to play by themselves in their local neighbourhoods all day. That's where kids learnt independence skills, problem solving skills, conflict resolution, working together to acheive, and had to do all this themselves as they were unsupervised. Now there is a culture of not letting your kids our unsupervised - kids have organised play dates or go to adult supervised and controlled activities.

The young people we have are the product of the society and culture the adults have created.

Its no good blaming young people for not being responsible if we are not taking responsibility for the environment we brought them up in.

@taxguru You make a very good point about the quieter students. My introverted dc is one of those. The lockdown meant he no longer had to explain again and again why they didn't want to go out, just wanted to watch a movie on the laptop, was happy to go the pub for a quick pint and back. He sailed through lockdown and aced his degree much to my utter surprise.

In my previous job I did some research around this, not necessarily trainees but young people newly entering the workplace and the view of many employers was that young new recruits lack basic work readiness skills. Which are the attitudinal and basic self-organisational skills that you mention.

I am in a 2nd year OT degree apprenticeship. I work FT and have uni time every week with uni lectures every 6 weeks and placements. Recently returned from third placement and it was interesting hearing their feedback. They said it had been refreshing to have students who were on board and enthusiastic and actually turned up! It sounds like the students from BSC who are likely younger who were on placement last year needed a lot of hand holding and did a lot of WFH. We find this with new starters at work. They want to WFH a lot which they do have a right to, but how can you learn a new job properly without being in the office talking with colleagues and networking?

You're blaming the teachers who taught them for not telling them off & just praising them, 'dont tell them off for being lazy', but at the same admit that you yourself no longer discipline kids as you'll get nasty email from parents. Well, there's your answer. It's not the teachers that are to blame (not to mention hopefully most kids spend more time with their own parents than the teachers!) it's the parents. We have a generation of parents who they themselves were parented badly now and it's producing these feckless and entitled young adults.

As an ex-primary teacher, I don't think I can blame trainees/ECTs in some ways. I think the reality of teaching as a profession is so far away from the lovely, hopeful vision that trainees begin with. That's driven out of you pretty quickly. I can't blame them for already wanting out of it.
I think perhaps the younger generation find the demands too much or aren't emotionally mature enough to cope with it? Our brain isn't fully developed until our early-mid twenties so I do think this has an impact, coupled with the state of society in general and the world these young people have grown up in.

There have always been the good, the middling and the hopeless. Friend and colleague of mine was supervising a graduate student in training for a professional role. One morning she was staggered to get a call from said student saying that they wouldn't be coming in as it was raining and they didn't like driving in the rain. I stress we are talking normal rain, not a storm and their route to work was 1 A road. Trains were available also.

This was 30+ years ago.

The thing is that not so long ago (just a few decades), children as young as 15 were starting in the workplace in full time/permanent jobs, and more recently it was 16, then 18. Now because of the obsession with Unis, it's risen to 21, and now it seems they're being excused until 25 due to "brain development". So, in a few decades, the age of being able and capable of proper work has fallen back by a whopping 10 years. Sorry, don't accept that at all. It's just facilitating even more molly-coddling to excuse them by saying about brain development. These "child-adults" need to be challenged more about their behaviour and not allowed to get away with it. They need proper sanctions and punishments, otherwise, they're still not going to be "fully functioning adults" even at 25!

As an ex manager, l can see both sides of this.
Not with trainees, but with younger employees, ie, first/second jobs.
Most were fine. Friendly, keen, enthusiastic and eager to learn the job.
I also had a couple who were a nightmare. One in particular.
She clearly didn't want to be there, didn't pull her weight in the office, very hit and miss as regards timekeeping, constantly on her phone.
I once had to tell her that she shouldn't be painting her nails in the office ("I'm on my break!")
The dealbreaker was when l'd had a day off, and came back to work to the rest of the shift complaining about her. Someone from another part of the building had come into our office, and she'd sat chatting to them for over an hour while everyone else was working (our work was on a timely basis, we had an hour to process it once it came in).
I printed up activity logs (our work was data entry, so keystrokes were recorded) for that particular period of time, not just for her, but for the rest of the shift, went through them with a fine tooth comb, and the other staff were right. She'd done nothing, when they'd worked constantly.
Knowing the person she was, l then asked another manager to check the logs so there was no question of her activity, or lack of, and so that l couldn't be accused of picking on her. They reached exactly the same conclusion as me.
So l had to speak to her about it. She was totally unconcerned, sat picking her nails and sighing. I had to escalate it to my line manager, not just because of the inactivity, but also because of her attitude.
Fortunately she got pregnant not long after, and left.
Conversely, I've just recently retired from retail (a stop gap for a few years) and the youngsters l worked with there were lovely. Hardworking, friendly and keen.
Even though they were usually only there temporarily/in seasonal roles.