I think I’m getting old. I don’t feel old; in my mind I’m about 19. I have, though, started saying ‘old’ things.

Last week I told someone she reminded me a bit of myself ‘when I was younger’. I managed to hurt my own feelings with those words. Cringe.

A week earlier, I was telling someone that maturing in management meant finding a balance between empathy and commercial good sense: that you can’t please everyone.

To add to my woes, I accidentally called someone ‘my dear’. In the workplace. Cringe again.

The thing that is currently making me feel a very old 36 is that I have endured my first recruitment round with Gen Z candidates.

I was looking for someone to fill an entry to mid-level position and I was wholly unprepared for the experience.

I say endured because candidates who made it to the interview stage either didn’t manage to come to the interview in person (one dialled in from a couch), another openly admitted that she couldn’t remember why she applied for the job (because she didn’t know which job she was interviewing for), and one only was forthcoming with referees.

There was a lot of talk about what they ‘thought’ they could do but very little about what they could actually do, or how they would go about doing it.

If the public service had been a fly on the wall, it would have been one very appalled fly to see the STAR method of responding to questions was AWOL.

I don’t mean to willfully have a crack at the next generation, but I’m not quite over the shock.

Gen Z appear to have a disingenuous air of confidence about them. I suspect they are so used to crafting online personas that they have no clue about how to be true.

Perhaps they don’t recognise that lessons must be learnt, dues must be paid, and starting from scratch is the norm. Not knowing the answer to everything is okay.

I have no doubt that in my first job in marketing, as a 17-year-old, I was an absolute pain for my boss. I was a chatterbox who would distract my colleagues and I was always the first one to crack a beer when drinks came out on a Friday.

But I like to think I worked hard, and I was open to learning. I wanted to learn everything I could from my colleagues so that I wouldn’t always be the baby of the office.

I made mistakes, and my boss let me make them. He let me take the hits from clients when I deserved them, and he gave me some steep learning curves. And at the time I felt hard-done-by but now I know he was giving me the ultimate gift.

An openness to learning is the best possible thing you can have in the workplace, no matter at what point of your career you may be.

Each night I ask my five-year-old what she learnt at school that day and she asks me what I learnt at work. I make sure I always have something new to tell her.

Last week I learned that Gen Z is a whole new beast. A beast I’m a bit terrified to come up against (a bit like Odysseus and the Cyclops) – but one that I promise myself I will tame.

To Gen Z I say this – learning is the only way to move up and around with conviction. Coming in hot might work on TikTok, but it doesn’t work in business.

Cool your jets, do your research, open your mind, and learn that it’s okay not to know.

Time for me to get down off my generational soapbox, pass the baton back to the Boomers, and scroll Facebook while I drink a cosmo and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer re-runs in my skinny jeans and ankle socks.