Business

Gen Z grads are now being given ‘resilience’ training at PwC U.K. to toughen up for the job

Published

2 hours ago

December 15, 2025

Gen Z is often branded a “lazy” generation of workers with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder. But PwC U.K. says the real challenge isn’t motivation—it’s resilience. These young professionals are eager to succeed in their own way, but the pandemic may have left them with gaps in essential skills. So the “Big Four” consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands with “resilience” training for fresh-faced hires.

“Quite often we are struck that the graduates [who] join us—who are meeting all the cognitive tests we’ve set—they don’t always have the resilience,” Phillippa O’Connor, chief people officer at PwC U.K., recently toldThe Sunday Times. “They don’t always have the human skills that we want to deploy onto the client work we pass them towards.”

“We’ve really doubled down, particularly [with] this year’s graduates,” O’Connor continued. “We’re doing a whole load of separate training in their first six months with us, really about resilience, really about some of those communication skills.”

The executive described resilience as the ability to handle day-to-day work dynamics—especially pressure, criticism, or sticky situations. That skill, she said, is particularly crucial in a deal-making environment, where managing challenges is a “core” part of the job.

According to O’Connor, many younger workers simply didn’t get the chance to build that muscle during the pandemic, when lockdowns disrupted education and early workplace experiences that would normally help develop it.

But by offering this special training, PwC is ensuring the talent that fills its 1,300 open U.K. graduate jobs this year—which received around 47,000 applications—are well-equipped to succeed.

Fortune reached out to PwC for comment.

Companies are offering Gen Z special training

PwC’s “resilience” training is just one example of how employers have been stepping up to ensure Gen Z is primed to succeed in the workforce.

In 2023, fellow “Big Four” consulting giant KPMG supplied extra instruction to its Gen Z hires. The business provided training for its graduate talent, out of concern they were struggling to adapt to professional life—particualry when it came to “soft skills,” how to give presentations, work in a team, and manage projects.

The chief people officer of $1.5 billion data protection start-up Cohesity, Rebecca Adams, has also pushed for inter-generational cohesiveness.

Earlier this year the executive led the charge to skill bosses in managing the young professionals, citing that Gen Z responds to feedback differently: “They want to know why, how—they want constant feedback.” On the flipside, she described having to teach “basic things” to young staffers that would mind-boggle their Gen X counterparts.

“How do I manage my calendar? You actually have to accept the meeting request,” Adams explained toFortune in September. “You can’t just walk out of the meeting that you’re in because you have another one while it’s still going on.”

Charitable organizations are also stepping up to solve Gen Z’s professional pitfalls. Radical Hope is a nonprofit helping equip college students with essential skills including communication, interpersonal dexterity, and emotional intelligence. It began as a pilot program at New York University back in 2020, after experts noted “elevated anxiety, stress, and depression” among students within the previous years—and has spread to 75 college campuses so far.

Liz Feld, the CEO of Radical Hope, hopes the Gen Z trainees will become adept in the skills “we all got growing up at the kitchen table.” Even the little things, like small talk, can be a challenge for the young hopefuls striving to one day succeed in the workplace.

“They won’t ask someone, ‘Do you want to go to the dining hall and grab dinner, you want to go grab a beer, you want to go for a walk, you want to get a coffee?’” Feld told Fortune, adding that if someone says “no,” their confidence is crushed. “They internalize the whole thing. The face-to-face rejection is what they’re afraid of.”

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Business

Fed chair race: Warsh overtakes Hassett as favorite to be nominated by Trump

Published

6 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Wall Street’s top parlor game took a sudden turn on Monday, when the prediction market Kalshi showed Kevin Warsh is now the frontrunner to be nominated as the next Federal Reserve chairman, overtaking Kevin Hassett.

Warsh, a former Fed governor, now has a 47% probability, up from 39% on Sunday and just 11% on Dec. 3. Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, has fallen to 41%, down from 51% on Sunday and 81% on Dec. 3.

A report from CNBC saying Hassett’s candidacy was running into pushback from people close to President Donald Trump seemed to put Warsh on top. The resistance stems from concerns Hassett is too close to Trump.

That followed Trump’s comment late Friday, when he told The Wall Street Journal Warsh was at the top of his list, though he added “the two Kevins are great.”

According to the Journal, Trump met Warsh on Wednesday at the White House and pressed him on whether he could be trusted to back rate cuts.

The report surprised Wall Street, which had overwhelming odds on Hassett as the favorite, lifting Warsh’s odds from the cellar.

But even prior to the Journal story, there have been rumblings in the finance world Hassett wasn’t their preferred choice to be Fed chair.

At a private conference for asset managers on Thursday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon signaled support for Warsh and predicted Hassett was likelier to support Trump on more rate cuts, sources told the Financial Times.

And in a separate report earlier this month, the FT said bond investors shared their concerns about Hassett with the Treasury Department in November, saying they’re worried he would cut rates aggressively in order to please Trump.

Trump has said he will nominate a Fed chair in early 2026, with Jerome Powell’s term due to expire in May.

For his part, Hassett appeared to put some distance between himself and Trump during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday.

When asked if Trump’s voice would have equal weighting to the voting members on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, Hassett replied, “no, he would have no weight.”

“His opinion matters if it’s good, if it’s based on data,” he explained. “And then if you go to the committee and you say, ‘well the president made this argument, and that’s a really sound argument, I think. What do you think?’ If they reject it, then they’ll vote in a different way.”

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Business

What happens to old AI chips? They’re still put to good use and don’t depreciate that fast

Published

37 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

New AI chips seem to hit the market at a quicker pace as tech companies scramble to gain supremacy in the global arms race for computational power.

But that begs the question: What happens to all those older-generation chips?

The AI stock boom has lost a lot of momentum in recent weeks due, in part, to worries that so-called hyperscalers aren’t correctly accounting for the depreciation in the hoard of chips they’ve purchased to power chatbots.

Michael Burry—the investor of Big Short fame who famously predicted the 2008 housing collapse—sounded the alarm last month when he warned AI-era profits are built on “one of the most common frauds in the modern era,” namely stretching the depreciation schedule. He estimated Big Tech will understate depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028.

But according to a note last week from Alpine Macro, chip depreciation fears are overstated for three reasons.

First, analysts pointed out software advances that accompany next-generation chips can also level up older-generation processors. For example, software can improve the performance of Nvidia’s five-year-old A100 chip by two to three times compared to its initial version.

Second, Alpine said the need for older chips remains strong amid rising demand for inference, meaning when a chatbot responds to queries. In fact, inference demand will significantly outpace demand for AI training in the coming years.

“For inference, the latest hardware helps but is often not essential, so chip quantity can substitute for cutting-edge quality,” analysts wrote, adding Google is still running seven- to eight-year-old TPUs at full utilization.

Third, China continues to demonstrate “insatiable” demand for AI chips as its supply “lags the U.S. by several generations in quality and severalfold in quantity.” And even though Beijing has banned some U.S. chips, the black market will continue to serve China’s shortfalls.

Meanwhile, not all chips used in AI belong to hyperscalers. Even graphics processors contained in everyday gaming consoles could work.

A note last week from Yardeni Research pointed to “distributed AI,” which draws on unused chips in homes, crypto-mining servers, offices, universities, and data centers to act as global virtual networks.

While distributed AI can be slower than a cluster of chips housed in the same data center, its network architecture can be more resilient if a computer or a group of them fails, Yardeni added.

“Though we are unable to ascertain how many GPUs were being linked in this manner, Distributed AI is certainly an interesting area worth watching, particularly given that billions are being spent to build new, large data centers,” the note said.

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Business

‘I had to take 60 meetings’: Jeff Bezos says ‘the hardest thing I’ve ever done’ was raising the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon

Published

1 hour ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Today, Amazon’s market cap is hovering around $2.38 trillion, and founder Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest men, worth $236.1 billion. But three decades ago, in 1995, getting the first million dollars in seed capital for Amazon was more grueling than any challenge that would follow. One year ago, at New York’s Dealbook Summit, Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin those early fundraising efforts were an absolute slog, with dozens of meetings with angel investors—the vast majority of which were “hard-earned no’s.”

“I had to take 60 meetings,” Bezos said, in reference to the effort required to convince angel investors to sink tens of thousands of dollars into his company. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, basically.”

The structure was straightforward: Bezos said he offered 20% of Amazon for a $5 million valuation. He eventually got around 20 investors to each invest around $50,000. But out of those 60 meetings he took around that time, 40 investors said no—and those 40 “no’s” were particularly soul-crushing because before getting an answer, each back-and-forth required “multiple meetings” and substantial effort.

Bezos said he had a hard time convincing investors selling books over the internet was a good idea. “The first question was what’s the internet? Everybody wanted to know what the internet was,” Bezos recalled. Few investors had heard of the World Wide Web, let alone grasped its commercial potential.

That said, Bezos admitted brutal honesty with his potential investors may have played a role in getting so many rejections.

“I would always tell people I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment,” he said. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive. But I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better odds than the real odds.”

Bezos said getting those investors on board in the mid-90s was absolutely critical. “The whole enterprise could have been extinguished then,” he said.

You can watch Bezos’ full interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin below. He starts talking about this interview gauntlet for seed capital around the 33-minute mark.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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