The State of Early Career Development

Six months of research narrowed down to thirty-two pages of insights, observations and where I would invest first.

Keep scrolling for nine questions worth asking about your own organization.

The premise

The question we keep asking is the wrong one. It isn’t why this incoming generation seems unprepared. It’s what changed in the system that used to prepare them. Because something did change. Several things, actually.

Those conditions for early career development have been eroding for years. The pandemic accelerated it. AI is now removing another layer by automating the repetitive foundational tasks that used to be the hands-on learning environment for new hires.

The osmosis is gone. The bar is rising. Very few organizations have built anything intentional to fill the gap.

We are not producing a broken generation. We are producing exactly what the world we built is designed to produce. That’s not an indictment. It’s a design problem. And design problems have design solutions.

What is your early career system designed to produce?

These questions were developed after the conclusion of the 2026 research report to support leaders and practitioners in understanding their current early career development system. If you don’t like an answer, that signals an opportunity for improvement.

  • Not lunch-and-learns. Not presentations about strategy. Actual proximity to actual decisions. The osmosis that used to build judgment is gone, and almost nothing has been built to replace it.

  • A significant number of early career employees are waiting. Waiting to be told what to do. Waiting to be told it is okay to ask for help. Waiting for someone to confirm their idea has value. You cannot close a permission gap by telling someone to ask for less permission.

  • Managing someone who grew up with constant feedback, who may be navigating imposter syndrome from day one, and who often wants the why before they can commit to the what requires a different set of practices than managing someone shaped by the older professional environment. Most organizations hand every manager the same training.

  • Curiosity is what practitioners describe when they talk about people who stand out. Not the most technically skilled. Not the most experienced. The most curious. It appears in the World Economic Forum’s top ten core skills and it is rising. Most companies treat it as a personality trait rather than a practice.

  • Critical thinking lives in your head and only you experience it. Judgment is whether you act on the thought, adjust it, delay it, or set it aside. A logically sound conclusion still produces a bad outcome without it. Neither is being taught with much frequency.

  • Landing a first internship or full-time role has become a genuinely stressful event. That anxiety does not resolve when the offer comes. It changes shape. As one practitioner put it, the imposter syndrome does not go away when the offer comes, it just asks different questions.

  • The ladder up connects their role to strategy and builds purpose. The ladder out connects them to the rest of the business and shows them where they fit in the ecosystem. Most organizations do a little of the first and almost none of the second.

  • Two out of three Gen Z workers are worried GenAI will eliminate their jobs. Only one in five report any formal AI training from their employer. Assuming this generation arrives AI-fluent is a mistake that costs you twice.

  • Forty-eight percent of Gen Zs with close workplace friendships plan to stay past five years, against 33 percent of those without one. Sixty-four percent of early career women plan to leave their company within year one. Seventy-six percent have no mentor at the moment they need one most.