Remote and hybrid work are not going anywhere. Most employees like the flexibility and employers like the cost savings. It sounds like a win-win but there’s a quieter issue showing up beneath the surface, especially for workers who are early in their careers.
If you’re just starting out, learning how to do a job with a specific skillset is only part of the challenge. Learning how to work is something else entirely. And that part has gotten harder to absorb when most of your experience happens through a screen.
Younger workers are missing the exposure of work.
Work Is More Than Tasks
When people talk about “learning on the job,” they rarely mean formal training. They mean everything that happens in between.
For example, you don’t learn how to handle a tense conversation by reading a policy docs or pick up office norms from Slack threads.
A lot of growth used to happen by accident like watching how someone handled a bad meeting or overhearing a difficult client call. None of that fits neatly into a zoom meeting.
For younger workers entering a hybrid or fully remote environment, those moments are rare or nonexistent. They still get the work done, but the context around it is hazy.
The Missing Middle
In a traditional office, early-career employees were surrounded by examples of what “good” looked like. They didn’t just receive feedback like many remote workers do now. They were surrounded by actions and behaviors. Remote and to some extent Hybrid work interrupts all of that.
When you’re remote, you mostly see finished work, not how someone got there. That can leave younger employees feeling unmoored.
This tension shows up frequently in conversations about Gen Z at work. Many of them are deeply motivated by purpose and growth, but struggle to find either when their work feels disconnected from people and process. Articles like our Motivating GenZ one explore that disconnect and why motivation alone isn’t enough when the structure is missing.
This isn’t a failure of remote work but a mismatch between how work used to be learned and how it’s currently delivered.
The Reality
Younger workers aren’t failing in remote and hybrid roles. They’re navigating them without the invisible scaffolding previous generations took for granted.
If organizations want early-career employees to grow, they have to acknowledge that skill development is social. It’s observational, and messy. And it doesn’t automatically happen over Wi‑Fi.
The sooner companies accept that reality, the better positioned they’ll be to support the next generation of workers, wherever they happen to log in from.