Teaching work, not jobs, to early-career hires

The first shock for many new graduates joining the workforce isn’t the workload. It’s the silence. A meeting ends, a decision lands, and nobody explains what just happened — or why one comment changed the temperature in the room. 

That’s the gap HR is tasked with closing when early-career hires arrive with strong credentials but thin workplace context, according to Anne-Marie Fannon, Director of the University of Waterloo’s Work-Learn Institute. Fannon has been studying that gap for years, and she’s clear about what employers should stop assuming. 

“HR managers need to close the gap between the things that they expect the learners will know and where the learners are coming from,” she says.  

Maurice Fernandes, Student Learning and Professional Development Coordinator at the University of Toronto’s Arts and Science Internship Program (ASIP), sees the same pattern from the pipeline side. “A job is about completing tasks, but work is about understanding how organizations function, how decisions are made, how work flows across teams, and how value is created,” says Fernandes.  

Hiring for ‘work ready’ versus designing for ‘career ready’ 

Fannon draws a line between preparing someone to perform a role and preparing them to navigate an entire labour market. “What we try to do at the University of Waterloo, specifically through the co-op program, is to give our students the skills they will need to be employable throughout their lives,” she says. “The biggest one these days is really skill, knowledge, and transferability — how do my skills transfer into new and different contexts that may be very different from the ones that I was trained in, and leverage them in emerging environments — this core skill of knowledge transfer.” 

She also stresses the importance for early-career workers to develop “core soft skills that help someone figure out who they are in a team and how they can contribute very quickly.” 

When young workers join an organization, early-career programs can turn into checkbox onboarding: a stack of modules, a manager intro, a laptop, then a sink-or-swim handoff. But if HR wants professional maturity — judgment, accountability, self-management — it has to acknowledge what school doesn’t teach well: ambiguity, politics, and the unwritten rules that drive performance, according to Fernandes. 

He believes that HR should treat internships and onboarding for early-career hires as workforce strategy, not cheap capacity. “Students aren’t just arriving job-ready, they’re also ready to contribute within real, organizational systems,” he says. “That really is the world of work — project management, taking initiative, how to run an effective one-on-one meeting with your manager.” 

Make the invisible expectations visible 

The biggest failure point isn’t that young hires are unable to learn — it’s that organizations don’t explain what they’re learning from day to day, says Fannon. “The biggest piece to me is that shift between the explicit instructions that a student gets and the implicit things and organizational politics that don't show up in the onboarding manual for new hires,” she says, adding that for entry-level hires, HR’s job is less about inspiration and more about translation and what “professional” means in the context of the organization. 

Fernandes says he’s seen how quickly new graduates default to school logic in the workplace — put in effort, deliver what was asked, wait for a grade — and how that clashes with how workplaces judge impact. “Performance on work is rarely evaluated on effort alone,” he says. “Employers are looking at impact, reliability, how they take initiative, and how well they work with others, especially when things get ambiguous and priorities shift, as is the norm within workplaces.” 

A lot of early-career programming within organizations still reads like a compliance exercise: here’s the policy deck; here are the tools; here are the KPIs, says Fannon. She suggests onboarding take a learner-first stance, especially in the first six to 12 months. “They’re really a learner in this organization, and we’re making sure that the training programs are in place, the mentorship is in there, and we’re looking for that growth in their understanding of expectations and cultural context that someone can have to understand how to navigate a workplace,” says Fannon.  

That approach doesn’t lower standards — it changes what you measure early, she adds. Instead of waiting for a performance problem to surface, she suggests that HR build touchpoints that force reflection: check-ins, peer cohorts, and manager toolkits that spell out what success looks like in plain language for those unfamiliar with the world of professional work. 

Fernandes frames it as a design choice: “I’d start with the idea that they should be onboarded as learners, not just placed into roles,” he says. “In my experience, early-career hires need structured opportunities to really be able to reflect, receive feedback, and understand how their work creates value.” 

Belonging isn’t a perk; it’s a performance prerequisite 

The word “belonging” gets tossed around, but Fannon ties it to outcomes HR leaders care about: commitment, retention, and willingness to stretch. “The core aspect for the new learner is really a sense of belonging — it’s psychological safety and it sounds very cliche, but we don’t always do it,” she says. “We don't always think how important it is for that 21-year old or 24-year old to feel like this is a place that they belong — introducing them to everyone on the first day and giving them the swag pack, for example, and giving them that spirit of this is who the organization is.” 

Fannon believes that this is where HR’s operational discipline shows up. “Who owns the first week? Who makes the introductions? Who checks that the new hire isn’t sitting in a Teams channel with no context and no relationships?” she says. 

It also means creating a safe channel that isn’t the direct supervisor. Fannon points to mentoring as a pressure-release valve for the questions new hires are often scared to ask in a one-on-one with the person who signs their evaluation. 

Remote work can limit structured learning 

Hybrid and remote work can amplify the hidden curriculum problem, because the passive learning channel disappears. Fannon doesn’t romanticize office life, but she’s clear about what gets lost. “We lose those touch points that taught us all how to navigate work,” she says. “It isn't to say that it can't be done in a remote context, but those informal engagements are so difficult to replicate in an online environment, so we're really encouraging employers to think intentionally about having people together and giving the new employees a strong network of people that they can reach out to, even if they're working remotely some or all of the time.” 

Deliberate cross-functional exposure for new hires is a good way to expose them to cross-functional collaboration and observe how work flows across the organization, says Fernandes. “This exposure has helped students understand how value is created end-to-end while also empowering them to contribute fresh perspectives that often spark innovation or process improvement,” he says. 

Fannon calls the payoff “talent and elasticity,” and it’s easy to translate into executive language. “Having workers come into your organization and be able to grow and to pivot and to shift,” she says. “We hear all the time from C-suite executives, ‘We need the adaptability, we need the resilience’ — and understandably so, we couldn't have imagined having to navigate this amount of change at this speed.” 

Focused onboarding builds commitment 

Teaching professional maturity and how the workplace works as part of onboarding early-career hires helps build organizational commitment, says Fannon. “This is a place that I want to be, this is a place where I want to grow, this is a place where I want to stay,” she says. “But also to have skills of resilience, adaptability, change management, and lifelong learning, that are going to be so core to shifting and growing as the organization grows.” 

As far as explaining the value of specific onboarding for early-career hires to the C-suite, time-to-productivity really is often the strongest entry point, according to Fernandes. “[New graduates] who understand how work actually works ramp up faster, require less rework, and ensure more independent problem-solving early on,” he says. “And engagement and retention really reinforces the story — when students understand the why behind their work, they're more invested, perform better, and are more likely to stay long-term within the organization.” 

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in April focuses on training and development. Full coverage can be found here.