From Compliance to Competence.

Attracting Young Talent Is Hard. Helping Them Belong Is Harder.

Across logistics, warehousing, construction and other frontline industries, employers are facing a challenge that goes well beyond recruitment.

Finding people is difficult. Keeping them is even harder.

Recent research paints a stark picture. In Ireland, 37% of employers say frontline and operations roles are among the hardest positions to fill, while skills shortages remain at record levels. Operations and logistics continue to feature prominently among the occupations employers struggle to recruit for.

The UK’s warehousing sector faces similar pressures. Industry leaders continue to warn about an ageing workforce, persistent skills shortages and the need to make logistics a more attractive career for younger generations.

But recruitment is only half the story.

Once someone walks through the door, the real question becomes:

How quickly do they feel capable, connected and confident enough to stay?

The first few weeks matter more than we realise

For an early career starter joining a warehouse, construction site or production facility, every day is filled with unfamiliar processes, new colleagues and unwritten ways of working.

Traditional onboarding often assumes that handing over a manual or asking someone to read a Standard Operating Procedure is enough. It rarely is.

People may sign to confirm they’ve read a document. That demonstrates compliance. It doesn’t necessarily demonstrate understanding.

Learning happens when people can see the task, hear the reasoning behind it and revisit it when they need to. That’s especially true in operational environments where much of the knowledge isn’t written down at all – it’s held by experienced colleagues and shared in conversations, demonstrations and moments on the job.

Someone who feels they’re making progress is far more likely to become engaged.

Someone who feels they’re simply trying to survive the first few weeks is much more likely to start looking elsewhere.

Designing learning for the next generation of frontline workers

At Slick+, we care deeply about helping new employees settle into a role faster. Not simply by giving them more information, but by giving them the right information at the moment they need it.

Short, practical videos. Real colleagues. Real workplaces. Searchable guidance that fits naturally into the flow of work and into their preferred learning format.

While our platform is designed for employees of every age and experience level, we’re especially interested in understanding how younger workers learn best.

That means asking them directly.

Listening before building

This year we’ve had several valuable opportunities to do exactly that.

The first came through a roundtable organised by Mark Hayward of Sway PR as part of an EY Foundation work experience initiative in Manchester.

The discussion focused on a simple question:

If you’re learning how to do a job, would you rather read about it or watch someone demonstrate it?

The answer was remarkably consistent.

Participants viewed short video explanations as clearer, more engaging and more inclusive for people with different learning preferences. There was also broad agreement that asking employees to acknowledge they’ve read lengthy documents often proves compliance with a process – but not necessarily learning.

Secondly, we’ve been working with MSc students from Dublin City University, who are conducting an independent consultancy project with Slick+.

Their research explores the relationship between employee support, confidence and retention. They’ve designed a survey and completed an initial A/B pilot comparing learners supported with Slick+ against those following more traditional approaches. The study measures factors including time to competence, confidence performing newly learned tasks, knowledge retention and perceived organisational support.

The full report will be published later this year, and we’re excited to share the findings.

Finally, our intern programme graduates have been reviewing several years of research projects we’ve undertaken with universities and student consulting teams, including work by the Irish Student Consulting Group exploring how Generation Z prefers (i.e. ‘needs’) to learn in the workplace.

They are now bringing these insights together into a live dashboard that will help organisations understand not only whether training has been completed, but whether it’s genuinely landing on the frontline – and ultimately contributing to operational performance.

Because training shouldn’t end with a completion tick-box.

It should help people become safer, more confident, more productive and more likely to stay.

Young people aren’t the problem. They’re one of the best sources of solutions.

One thing we’ve learned repeatedly is that involving younger generations and early career professionals in product design is never just a box-ticking exercise.

They challenge assumptions. They ask different questions.

They notice friction that more experienced workers have simply learned to accept.

Every conversation leaves us with ideas we wouldn’t have come up with ourselves.

Whether you’re redesigning onboarding, improving frontline learning or trying to build a stronger operational culture, there is enormous value in inviting younger employees into the conversation early.

There’s a beautiful Irish proverb:

“Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí.”

Praise the young, and they will flourish.

Perhaps that’s not just good advice for raising the next generation.

It’s arguably one of the smartest workforce strategies organisations can adopt today.