I went to Gen Z bootcamp to find out if we need reforming

A video of Morgan Freeman appears on my screen. “What you see is not real,” he says in his deep Tennessee drawl from a darkened room. “What if I were to tell you that I’m not even a human being?” It takes me a minute to adjust. Is Morgan doing OK? I notice he’s not blinking; his head’s not moving. Ah ha...it’s a deepfake. I’m watching this clip as part of the UK’s first life-skills curriculum, which is being rolled out to thousands of Gen Z students in Greater Manchester.

They will learn essential tools including empathy, time management, challenging prejudice, financial literacy, and spotting misinformation online. The Unesco-partnered non-profit Higher Health has launched the nine-module programme to address a gap in soft skills among those aged 16 to 25, with plans for a nationwide expansion across different education providers such as sixth form colleges, young offender institutions, apprenticeships hubs, and graduate employment settings (it aims to reach 10,000 young people by September).

While I’m not actually one of the participants (I’ve been given access to the materials for this article), I am part of its target age group, and I can completely see the benefits. The course has been launched at a time when there is public concern about the future of my generation and how we will adapt to the workplace, especially since Gen Z is expected to make up about 27 per cent of the UK’s workforce this year.

Our negative reputation often precedes us: we’re represented in the media as a lazy, anxious and workshy generation, more snowflake than the millennials. What’s more, employers seem to be bracing themselves for our apparent ineptness: the accountancy firm Forvis Mazars recently launched a social skills course to teach Gen Z lessons on “picking up the phone”, which included simulations of client meetings.

From my perspective, it feels as though there’s a growing moral panic surrounding my generation, as if we require reform or an overhaul. But are we really broken? So doomed that we need to roll out another curriculum, on top of our 14 years of compulsory school education, to ensure that we are compassionate, socially informed, and ready for the real adult world? Really so hopeless that we have to sit through hours of instruction on self-care?

It does seem to be a rite of passage that the “lazy” and “anxious” labels are levied at the youngest adults joining the workforce (just look at how millennials were gawped at not that long ago). Resorting to clichés about the younger generation, rather than trying to understand them better, is easy. But if we ignore the realities of the circumstances in which Gen Z has emerged into the world, then we will be looking away from a unique set of challenges that might explain why we’re perceived so abnormally.

Professor Sandeep Ranote, a leading child psychiatrist who worked on developing the curriculum alongside Higher Health, has seen how those born between 1997 and 2012 — known as Gen Z — have grown up in an unstable world that has left them lacking some key social skills. She has developed what she calls the “five Cs” (Covid-19, climate change, cost-of-living, cyberspace and conflict) to represent the unique circumstances that the generation has lived through. “I’m calling the programme pre-prevention, because it’s giving young people a broader toolkit and skills for life at a really important transition time, between the ages of 16 and 25, since our brains are still developing until at least the age of 25,” she says.

Higher Health’s research has surveyed where Gen Z are struggling to adapt to the workplace, and communication is at the top of that list. “What we’re seeing is young people struggling with communication skills, over the phone or face-to-face, managing their own emotions, and managing relationships between peers and superiors — whatever workplace you’re in, if it’s retail, health or finance.”

The nine modules, which cover topics from gender equality to staying safe, money management and climate understanding, will be delivered through a mixture of peer-to-peer and online learning, with digital forums available for collective reflection. The course, while aiming to equip young people with skills for the working world, doesn’t shy away from mental health, either, with modules built around meditation and mindfulness.

One scenario in the empathy module asks you to reflect on your reaction when a friend announces that their partner has broken up with them. It feels like ample training for 16-year-olds who publicise their breakups on social media in real time. I wonder whether some of the older participants might find this sort of training rudimentary, though. Another role-play situation asks you to show how you’d confront a friend who was sharing inappropriate pictures, which is something I know my teenage Facebook-obsessed self could have benefited from.