Gen Z in confidence crisis: Third of 18-24-year-olds are too scared for public speaking or doing a presentation in front of fellow staff… after years of Zoom schooling during the pandemic

Generation Z is suffering a crisis of confidence due to the coronavirus pandemic – with fewer young adults confident enough to speak in public, according to polling shared with MailOnline.

Polls conducted by Survation show that 35.32 percent of 18-24 year olds feel less confident when speaking in public than before the global health disaster.

Elocution experts believe that many Gen Zers — who would have been between 14 and 20 years old when the pandemic first broke out — have been deprived of formative experiences like giving talks to classmates, where most of their communication skills were captured through video calls. during closing.

As a result of the years-long gap in their development, experts fear that they will suffer professionally or academically by falling short in job interviews against older candidates or getting poor grades in group presentations at school or university.

Experts have called on employers – who are already using perks such as free food to lure Gen Z out of their bedrooms and into the office – to help younger workers with their communication skills to avoid becoming a ‘lost generation’.

The Survation survey, commissioned by speaking agency Speak With Impact, found that around 20 percent of 18-24 year olds were “much less confident” in their speaking skills compared to before the pandemic, while 15 percent were “slightly less confident” had in their speaking skills. confident’.

Generation Z – people born between the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2010s – were the only age group to record a net negative score, meaning the relative majority are less confident than before.

In other age groups, from 25 to 64, a slight majority of people said they had become more confident speaking in front of an audience about Covid; the largest increase in confidence occurred among those over 65.

Gavin Brown, founder of Speak With Impact, told MailOnline that he commissioned the research after hearing a growing number of stories from young people who lacked the confidence to speak in public.

Mr Brown said: “We have a real challenge there for that age group – who were at the end of school, some of them probably in the early years of work or university, depending on what they did.

“This is a group of people who have never really spoken in public before – and while others have said they’re worried about having to speak in a room again, these are people who have never been in a room at all.

‘They haven’t had those early experiences of public speaking at school, or at university, or in your first job, where you make mistakes but learn quite quickly.

“When you’re in the room, all eyes are on you, and when you’re on Zoom, you can’t see all eyes are on you.

“If you’ve spent your formative years on Zoom or Teams, and you suddenly walk into the room for the first time, it’s probably quite nerve-wracking.

“It’s not learning to talk in the room again. It’s learning to speak in the room.’

Fearing public speaking is not a new phenomenon; it even has a name, glossophobia, derived from the Greek word ‘glossa’, meaning tongue.

A YouGov survey published in 2014 found that public speaking was the third biggest fear among Brits, with more than half of us fearing it ‘very’ or ‘a little’.

The only thing British adults were more afraid of – at least before the pandemic – was snakes and heights, by the narrowest margin.

But as a result of lockdown, and being removed from society for so long during their formative years, Mr Brown believes Generation Z is at a disadvantage when it comes to competing for jobs or impressing bosses.

The 48-year-old, a former Lawyer and Conservative MSP, says employers should be prepared to show some compassion to junior staff and apprentices if they struggle to speak up.

He added: ‘The line managers of (younger) people, their bosses, all of that, will be in one of those higher age categories. And for those people, their self-confidence has probably dropped a little bit during the pandemic, but they’re not starting from scratch.

“But this younger age group, who have never spoken in public, suddenly have to do it where the stakes are higher, but those listening won’t fully empathize. There is a gap that many employers need to take into account.

‘Employers need to realize that it will take a while for young people to fully enter the workforce, and that you need to have a huge amount of empathy for them, and help them, guide them, train them, to get them to the top. level they would like to be at.

‘It doesn’t have to be a lost generation. We can be optimistic and create a generation that thrives, but that will take extra work.”

Business leaders have expressed concern that an entire generation could be “lost” as the coronavirus pandemic has deprived them of vital social and professional opportunities.

Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon said last month that Generation Z was “work shy” and unable to engage in civil debates on controversial topics because they had spent the pandemic on social media and filtered what they saw to share. to align with their own views.

She told the Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention: ‘What we’re seeing with young people coming into the workplace – especially post-pandemic – with this concentration of short-form content (like TikTok) is that they don’t have the skills to debate things.

“They don’t have the skills to debate, they don’t have the skills to disagree and engage, because they haven’t been educated, especially because they haven’t been to college anymore to have those kinds of debates, to to get to the point where you’re like, ‘There are people who have a difference of opinion with you and you’re happy to accommodate that, and that, in my opinion, is a very dangerous step change that we’re seeing.’

Major employers also say workplace “cohesion” among employees is declining due to the pandemic.

Big Four accountancy firm KPMG – which employs 14,000 people in Britain – said it was offering free food to employees, but this did not attract staff back to the office.

NHS data shows that one in five 17 to 24 year olds reported a mental illness in 2022 and 635,000 Brits are currently not working due to nerves, anxiety or depression.