Employers have not bought into Gen Z, which has spawned the roots of a youth employment crisis in the United States, but two local educators—Rachel Gans-Boriskin and Kristina Markos—are working to bridge the gaps between employers and their ever more youthful recruitment pools with the launch of GenSpark Solutions, a consulting service that seeks to help employers rethink their approach to engaging with young talent.

Gans-Boriskin is an adjunct staff member at Lasell University and a principal and partner at NOVL Consulting, which is the parent company of GenSpark. She has worked as an educator at the college level for over 20 years, but now she focuses her work on consulting and training members of the workforce.

Markos is an Associate Professor and graduate chair of the Communication Program at Lasell University and a board member at the PR Club, a professional development organization based in New England. Working over a decade as a college educator as well, she has focused most of her work on preparing students for their careers and mentoring young workers, and has worked even longer in PR and professional coaching.

The problem

Markos, a millennial, and Gans-Boriskin, a ‘Gen Xer’, notice a difference in workplace standards and communication amongst the various generations who currently coexist in the workforce.

“In my experience managing student interns and workplace sites, I was seeing big gaps between what the students thought they were going to get and what the internship sites thought they were going to get,” Markos noted; Gans-Boriskin adding that, “From my work in workforce development, managers really don’t know how to support or how to manage younger employees.”

However, as Markos also emphasized, these generational differences are often overplayed and do not reflect the realities which she and Gans-Boriskin have noticed throughout their careers, and both pointed to the fact that these expectations and preconceived beliefs were at the crux of the problem.

“We’re acting as intercultural translators, in order to help people engage in dialogue instead of coming in with different stereotypes that are quite rigid,” Gans-Boriskin explained.

And then there are the effects of social media on the preconceived beliefs which both employees and employers hold about each other.

“There are these videos which say, ‘this is your Gen X manager’ or ‘this is your Boomer boss’,” Gans-Boriskin said, “but the posts go the other way too – ‘this is Gen Z’, the fragile person who can’t handle anything. And all of that means we’re not actually engaging with the individuals in front of us.”

The mission

GenSpark entered development in 2023 and was officially released this month. It works within the communication industry, and their approach to consulting relies on research-based programming.

Their press release is accompanied by a white paper, titled, “Ready or Not, Here They Come: Understanding and Integrating Gen Z into the Intergeneration Workforce,” which dives into the meat and potatoes of the current problem with intergenerational communication in the workplace, and consists of extensive primary and secondary research conducted over a six-month period.

When commenting on the manner of services which are provided by GenSpark, Markos laid out a rough outline of the program which clients could expect.

“We do a tailored survey with clients to identify specific pain points, so that when we actually do the consulting we’ll have a tangible report that says, for example, your mid managers are stressed out by managing up and down, or your upper management is really struggling with the fact that everybody’s demanding to work from home,” she said. After this initial census-taking, “we take everybody’s pain points and we eliminate that assumption making, that maybe younger folks aren’t willing to pay their dues, or that younger people have of, this stuff is outdated.”

“This service is really unique in that, given our expertise and our experience,” Markos put simply, “we’re more than consultants, because we’re actually working on both sides of the house.”

With one foot in the boardroom and one in the classroom, the two are building bridges where once existed chasms.

You can learn more about GenSpark on its website.