It’s both a meme and a complaint among early-career job seekers: the entry-level position that requires at least three years of experience. Although this idea sometimes simply offers comic relief during the stressful process of job searching, it speaks to a real concern among both early-career professionals and leaders. Namely, many new employees enter the workforce unprepared to meet organizations’ expectations.
In a 2025 survey, only 22 percent of business leaders said they believe entry-level workers are very or completely prepared for their roles. The majority of these leaders point to a lack of soft skills, including communication, adaptability and collaboration. Worse, these are often difficult skills to assess in the hiring process.
Many younger professionals are also concerned about their preparedness. More than two-thirds of Gen Z employees now admit to feeling out of their depth at work, and many are turning to AI. 59 percent say they have used AI to complete work tasks because they felt undertrained. Of course, soft skills are people-focused and can’t effectively be outsourced to AI.
Moreover, this lack of training can leave early-career employees without confidence in their skills and an inability to perform well in their roles. This poor basis for a career can potentially slow their growth for years to come.
Getting entry-level employees up to speed and thriving in their positions doesn’t need to be a stressful or overly costly process, however. Any leader can create a junior talent development strategy that’s both efficient and effective with these key steps.
How to Develop Entry-Level Talent
- Audit your onboarding: Provide clear learning roadmaps to build confidence and establish clear role expectations from day one.
- Make training interactive: Use gamified quizzes, polls and anonymous Q&As to assess skill gaps without causing high-stakes pressure.
- Adopt microlearning: Replace lengthy training sessions with bite-sized, self-paced learning modules to avoid information overload.
- Foster continuous learning: Integrate interactive digital tools into daily workflows to support skill development at every career level.
1. Audit Your Onboarding
First impressions matter, especially when a new role is an employee’s first introduction to the workplace. Despite this, just 12 percent of employees say their company does a great job onboarding new hires. Onboarding isn’t just about getting laptops set up and connecting employees to the company tech stack. It’s also a critical time to introduce new team members to the organizational culture and prepare them to contribute to it. Some companies may even treat it as a probationary period, where both the organization and employee decide if they’re a good fit together.
Because of these various requirements, onboarding not only must equip employees with the information and tools they need, but also help them build confidence in their ability to succeed and grow.
There are many ways to design onboarding, but one of the most important goals should be clarity. Clear expectations are a key ingredient for employee engagement, but they’re especially important for early-career professionals. Entry-level employees who complete onboarding should understand what’s expected of them in their role, how they can build their skills and where they can find more support or guidance.
Clear learning pathways are critical for achieving this. With a guided learning roadmap, new entry-level employees can see their next steps and exactly what they still need to learn, whether that be getting up to speed with company software or important safety procedures. Each completed step in the onboarding process becomes a “small win” to celebrate, boosting their confidence that they’re equipped for their role.
2. Maximize Training Impact With Interactivity
One of the most effective ways to ensure clarity of expectations and preparedness among employees is to make onboarding and training interactive. An effective way to do this is through gamified quizzes, polls, Q&As and brainstorming sessions. Interactivity lets leaders assess new employees’ existing knowledge and skills without adding unnecessary pressure.
New employees, especially those at the entry-level, may hesitate to raise their hand and ask questions, but low-stakes review through games, which can even be done anonymously, can uncover these information and skill gaps so you can address them right away. For example, a company could transform their onboarding presentation from a dry slide deck into a two-way experience by adding in gamified quiz questions to check participants’ understanding and reinforce key messages, as well as using polls, surveys, and Q&As to gather instant feedback.
Beyond skills gaps, interactive activities such as brainstorming sessions can also identify talents and fresh ideas that would benefit the team. Team-based challenges like knowledge tournaments can likewise help employees break the ice with other new hires and existing employees. They can even start building soft skills like collaboration and communication.
3. Trade Training Days for Bite-Sized Learning Sessions
Onboarding and training can require new employees to absorb a lot of information at once, which can be overwhelming, especially for younger employees who are new to working. To avoid information overload, try breaking down long training sessions into quick, engaging and easy-to-digest learning experiences. This approach, also known as microlearning, gives employees a step-by-step roadmap and helps them build a sense of achievement along the way. These short sessions can be completed asynchronously at employees’ own pace, used as icebreakers in meetings or added to presentations to reinforce participants’ learning.
4. Empower Employee Learning at All Levels
With the rapid pace of change in technology and ways of working, all employees will essentially be entry-level in certain skills or areas of work. According to McKinsey, almost nine in 10 business leaders say their companies are either already facing skill gaps or expect them within the next few years. Unfortunately, only one-third of employees are satisfied with their organization’s opportunities for skill development. This is why business leaders must shift from thinking of training as a one-time experience to making it part of every employee’s routine.
With interactive digital tools, companies can weave learning moments into the flow of work. For example, team leaders can assign a self-paced gamified quiz about a new product to ensure everyone is informed before a meeting to plan the launch. Or kick off an all-hands meeting with a quick knowledge challenge to wake up the room and hook the audience into the key topics of the day. By integrating interactive learning into daily life in the organization, leaders can foster a culture of curiosity, knowledge exchange and growth mindset, from entry-level to CEO.
Discovering the right junior talent and helping them unleash their potential is a challenge. By making learning accessible, engaging and part of a clear pathway to development, however, organizations can help shape the next generation of talent into the agile and innovative future leaders they will need.
