In this blog, Suzanne Lampert, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences, shares her experiences on how to engage Gen-Z students and prepare them to be Global Changemakers. 

 

Between February 2024 and June 2025, I was a Programme Redesign Lead (PRL) for the Edinburgh Business School (EBS) Learning and Teaching Transformation Project (LTTP). The primary aim of the LTTP was to identify how we can deliver the EBS educational principles of practice-oriented, future-oriented, and accessible education. If our current generation of students are going to be tasked with rebuilding tomorrow, Higher Education (HE) has an important role to play in preparing them for that task.  

The once–in–a–decade opportunity to transform our School’s on-campus learning and teaching came at a challenging time for the sector and for our students (Hassock & Hill, 2022). The Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have both impacted student engagement (Hulene et al., 2023; Schofield, 2024; Office for Students, 2023) and the employment market into which EBS students will progress continues to change, shaped by technical developments such as advances in AI, and the pressing need to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  

In my teaching, I want to speak directly to Gen-Z students – I want to ask them if they will be ready to start making their impact on the future when they leave university. I don’t expect them to be able to answer this question, but I want to encourage them to think about the skills they will be expected to have when they start applying for jobs or the skills needed for employment; and I want them to realise that the future is dependent on them and their fellow Gen-Z students. I do, however, want to reassure Gen-Z students that they do not need to prepare for the future alone. Universities can play a key role in helping Gen-Zs: 

  • access and excel in higher education, 
  • meet the expectations of industry, and  
  • develop the capabilities and skills needed to influence the economies and societies of the future. 

It is clear that Gen-Zs have some very valuable skills to offer society (skills needed by future leaders, skills that can shape tomorrow’s world, skills that can improve society) but they have also grown up during very turbulent times (McKinsey and Company, 2024) and may therefore need more support to allow them to reach their full potential. 

Industry needs are increasingly focussed on capabilities and skills rather than knowledge, and employers want graduates with a strong work ethic, professionalism, and the ability to solve tomorrow’s societal issues (Morgan, 2019). One of the big challenges is that we don’t know what those societal issues are yet. This is what led me to the topic of meta skills – “innate, timeless, higher-order skills that create adaptive learners and promote success in whatever context the future brings” (Skills Development Scotland). The Scottish Qualifications Authority identifies three broad categories of meta-skills: 

  • Self-management – focusing, integrity, adapting, initiative. 
  • Social intelligence – communicating, feeling, collaborating, leading. 
  • Innovation – curiosity, creativity, sense-making, critical thinking. 

Students and graduates may have missed opportunities for developing/strengthening these meta skills, not recognise that they have these skills and/or not know how to put these skills into practice and create impact.  

HE can help with these issues and reduce the gap between what employers need and what Gen-Z graduates can offer (Visser & Terblanche, 2025). Universities are typically slow to change but Covid-19 demonstrated that rapid change is possible. My experience here at Heriot-Watt is that we are being responsive to the changing environment and thinking to the future. Our University Strategy 2035 is focussed on employability, online offerings, and partnerships; and the Learning and Teaching Transformation Project (LTTP) produced some potentially very impactful recommendations. 

These recommendations include: 

  • Programme Redesign 
    • Redesigning programmes to integrate employability skills, industry-relevant knowledge, and practical application throughout the curriculum. 
    • Stronger emphasis on technological proficiency, including artificial intelligence (AI) and data literacy. 
    • Programmes that allow students to engage with topics such as digital transformation, sustainability, and global citizenship. 
  • Faculty Empowerment 
    • Empowering academic faculty colleagues by devolving responsibility. This approach promotes local contextualization, fosters innovation, and creates a more dynamic and responsive educational environment.
  • Choice of Delivery Mode 
    • There is growing demand for, and opportunity to provide, more flexible learning modalities more effectively meeting the diverse learning needs of an increasingly heterogeneous student body. Expansion of online learning and the provision of further opportunities for on-campus students to engage in digital learning can really support the goal of making university education more accessible. 

Finally, individual teachers or course leaders in HE can support Gen-Z students by: 

  • incorporating activities that allow the development of students’ meta skills, 
  • using activities that encourage reflection on skill development,
  • ensuring course and programme learning outcomes include the application of knowledge, 
  • using authentic assessment (Archer, Morley & Souppez, 2021), and 
  • exposing students to professionalism and providing opportunities to engage with industry early on, and then throughout our programmes.  

By transforming our learning and teaching strategy and by taking steps as individual course leaders, we can help our Gen-Z students develop the skills and capabilities needed to create real impact in the future.

 

TEDxHeriot Watt University: How higher education maximizes potential of Gen-Z | Dr Suzanne Lampert

The blog is based on a talk Suzanne gave at TEDx Heriot-Watt on 18 July 2025. Watch Suzanne’s TEDx talk on YouTube.

 

References 

Archer, M., Morley, D.A. and Souppez, J.B.R.G. (2021) Real world learning and authentic assessment. In: Morley, D.A. and Jamil, M.G. (eds) Applied pedagogies for higher education. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46951-1_14 (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

Hassock, L. and Hill, C. (2022) Employability and employment: The role of higher education in a rapidly changing world. In: Ng, B. (ed.) Higher education and job employability. Knowledge Studies in Higher Education, vol. 10. Cham: Springer. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05716-8_8 (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

Hulene, G., Cronshaw, S., Davies, E., de Main, L., Holmes, H., Hope, A., Odindo, C., Page-Tickell, R., Rawal, A., Roberts, S., Talbot, D., Vieth, S. and Wolstencroft, P. (2023) Student engagement guidelines: Learning from innovative practices introduced in response to COVID-19. A collaboration of 10 UK modern universities. QAA. Available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/members/qaa-report-on-student-engagement—gh-02-05-23.pdf?sfvrsn=639aa81_8 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

McKinsey and Company (2024) What is Gen Z? Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-gen-z (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Morgan, S. on behalf of AGCAS Scotland for QAA Scotland (2019) Focus on graduate skills (graduates’ and employers’ views of graduate skills development). QAA Scotland. Available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaas/focus-on/employers’-and-graduates’-views-of-graduate-skills-report-2019-08-22.pdf?sfvrsn=8906c681_8 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Office for Students (2023) Evaluation report of the cost-of-living research in 2023. Available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/85f7735e-a702-4e91-be12-321c9c760ac1/evaluation-report-of-the-cost-of-living-research-in-2023.pdf (Accessed: 4 March 2025).

Schofield, C. (2024) ‘The impact of the cost-of-living crisis on online student engagement and future study plans’, Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 29(3), pp. 502–519. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2024.2371643 (Accessed: 10 March 2025).

Visser, C. and Terblanche, N. (2025) ‘The soft-skills characteristics of Generation Z employees: A scoping review and research agenda’, SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 23, a2975. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajhrm.v23i0.2975 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Skills Development Scotland (n.d.) Meta-skills progression framework. Available at: https://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/media/rbmj1kjm/meta-skills-progression-framework.pdf (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) (n.d.) Meta-skills. Available at: https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/110308.html (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

 

Image credits:

Header image: Photo, ‘Person examining a prototype’, on Microsoft stock images

Suzanne Lampert TEDx (c) Suzanne Lampert