Resilience is often talked about as if it were a personality trait; some people have it, some don’t, and younger workers supposedly have less of it.
None of those assumptions are particularly helpful. Taking a skill-based view of resilience helps clear up much of this confusion and provides a more practical framework for leadership and L&D teams.
For us, resilience is not endurance, toughness or simply bouncing back. It’s the capacity to shift physiological and psychological state in response to demands, and to sustain that capacity over time. The ability to move from activation to recovery, from stress response to growth, from depletion to regeneration.
The practical implication here is that resilience is not a trait you either have or you don’t. It is a set of skills, which can be trained and, crucially, measured.
We have been gathering resilience skills data for years and our dataset shows both how to understand the resilience challenges of Gen Z and how L&D teams and leaders can address them.
Looking beyond stressor counts
A common assumption is that younger workers are more stressed because they are somehow less able to handle stress, but our data says otherwise.
The total stressor count is 2.90 for under 35s and 2.83 for over 55s: essentially a very similar number of problems.
What differs is the composition. Mental health concerns are flagged as a significant current stressor by 24.9 per cent of under 35s, versus 13.8 per cent of those over 55.
That’s 1.8 times the rate. And among women under 35, it rises to 28.8 per cent. Financial stress is elevated too. Work-life balance and unpredictability are higher. Family responsibilities, by contrast, are lower: that peaks sharply in the 35–44 group, as you’d expect from life stage.
The number of stressors only tells part of the story. For under 35s, their stressors are tilted towards mental health, unpredictability and money concerns. All of which are both hard for employers to reduce and exceptionally corrosive in combination.
Resilience is not a trait you either have or you don’t. It is a set of skills, which can be trained and, crucially, measured
The role of resilience skills
Under 35s show a broad prevalence of resilience skills. However, on the specific capabilities that best protect against corrosive stress, the picture is bleaker. They trail older groups on every top-impact skill, including focus, positivity, purpose and sleep.
Digging into the data, we built a regression model including both stressors and resilience skills for the age group, and the variance split was striking. Skills explained 56 per cent of the explained variance in Gen Z perceived stress. All stressors combined explained 24 per cent.
At least in this dataset, skills appear to account for more than twice as much of the explained variance as stressors themselves. This matters because it suggests the interventions L&D teams most commonly reach for, like reducing workload, improving flexibility and addressing growth gaps, are only addressing part of what drives stress. Those interventions are important, but they are not the whole answer.
So, the under 35s are facing a double challenge: a more corrosive stress load, alongside lower levels of the very skills that would help protect them most.
However, these skills are trainable. They are not fixed personality traits, but capacities that can improve through deliberate practice.
Reducing pointless workload, improving flexibility and addressing pay are all worthwhile. But the bigger impact comes from strengthening resilience skills: an area many organisations still invest in too lightly.
Around one-quarter of under 35s are already reporting severe stress and mental health concerns
Three ways to build resilience
1. A skill-based view
First and foremost, it is important to shift thinking about this topic to a skill-based view.
Rather than just measuring stress, or not measuring at all, assess skills and stress load.
A Resilience Screening helps identify weak skills, key stressors and who is already in the high-risk zone where skills training alone is not the right first step.
In our data, around one-quarter of under 35s are already reporting severe stress and mental health concerns. That group often needs EAP, coaching or referral support before skill-building becomes effective. Getting triage right is foundational.
2. Shared responsibility for upskilling
It is easy to point the finger. ‘Gen Z (or others) don’t have the skills to be resilient’. But actually, it is more nuanced.
They do have many resilience skills, but not always the right ones, and for some, the stressor load is too high for upskilling.
Forge a shared plan for upskilling with the population in question and stick to it. Skill building takes time.
3. Treat resilience as a capability, not a wellbeing initiative
If it sits under wellbeing, it is often funded reactively and without proper measurement.
The stronger approach is to place it within L&D and capability development, with skills tracked, outcomes measured and resilience developed like any other business-critical capability.
The gap between the youngest workers and their older colleagues is not a generational character difference.
It is a specific, measurable pattern of skill deficits and stressor profiles. Which means it is, in principle, addressable.
The question is whether organisations design to that evidence, or keep responding to whichever wellbeing topic has arrived on the agenda this quarter.
