We raised ourselves, now we’re raising the workforce.
My dad worked third shift at GM for 30 years and played softball four nights a week. My mom was responsible for everything else, which she poorly managed while chain-smoking Capri Menthol Ultra Light 100s in front of the black and white TV in our kitchen. They stayed together unhappily because that’s what you did when you were Christian Reformed in Allendale, Michigan; hard things got avoided, and kids got locked outside to entertain themselves.
So we did.
We rode bikes down dirt roads surrounded by cornfields, swung on rope swings, climbed trees, and figured out how to survive on the “mean” streets of a small town where the biggest danger was boredom. We walked half a mile to our bus stop because kids actually rode buses back then, and parents didn’t wait in line at school drop off. We got to watch TV on Fridays – TGIF was the reward for surviving the week – and went to church twice on Sunday, where naps were mandatory, and television was not.
This is Gen X; born between 1965 and 1980, forty percent of us came home to empty houses after school, while the rest of us had parents who were physically present but emotionally checked out. We formed neighborhood gangs with their own hierarchies, rules, and consequences. We negotiated, we fought, we made up, and we did it all without a single adult stepping in to mediate. We experienced a galaxy far, far away in wood-paneled basements, and Princess Leia became our first feminist icon because she could do it better and smarter than any stupid boy. We watched The Goonies and understood that a ragtag group of misfits could outsmart the adults if they stuck together.
We are feral, resourceful, and tough as hell, and businesses need us more than ever.
We’re in Crisis
There is a talent crisis in America, and it’s not about finding people – it’s about finding people who can succeed and excel in the workplace. According to a 2025 General Assembly study, 56% of business leaders blame weak soft skills for entry-level employees being unprepared for their jobs, up from 50% just a year earlier. In the U.S., that number rises to 58%. Six in ten companies have already fired recent college graduates this year for performance issues tied to a lack of motivation, poor communication, and unprofessional behavior.
The skills gap is costing companies $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue globally; a lack of communication, adaptability, problem-solving, and conflict resolution is crippling businesses. The World Economic Forum reports 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025 just to keep up, and 87% of companies worldwide either currently have skills gaps or expect to face them within the next few years.
Society broke something. Our educational systems got obsessed with standardized testing and participation trophies and stopped teaching resilience. Then a pandemic came along and robbed an entire generation of the messy, uncomfortable, in-person experiences where these skills actually develop. They spent college semesters in lockdown, missing internships, mentorships, and the osmosis-like knowledge transfer that happens when you’re physically in a room with people who know more than you. They never had the group projects with the one kid who never pulled his weight, or the part-time jobs where some manager named Gary taught you life isn’t fair, now go clean the toilet.
Gen X to the Rescue
As Gen X business owners, we didn’t learn soft skills in a classroom. Pew Research describes us as “savvy, skeptical, and self-reliant.” We learned to handle failure because we failed constantly, publicly, and without a safety net, and we got back up because what else were we going to do?
It’s not soft, it’s survival.
Fixing this requires more than a lunch-and-learn or a LinkedIn course. In 2026, 8THIRTYFOUR is launching a comprehensive soft skills program, built by and delivered by the most feral of all generations – Gen X. It is built on everything we learned growing up playing Atari and yelling at our sister to get off the phone so we could get on the internet.
The focus is on critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and conflict resolution while also addressing the mental and emotional alongside the professional, because you can’t separate how someone handles stress from how they handle a difficult client conversation.
It means being part employer, part mentor, part coach – roles the workplace never had to play before, but now must. You could argue this isn’t our job and say we’re business owners, not substitute parents or life coaches, plus we had to figure this out on our own, and so should they, but you’re wrong. No one else is going to do it.
It’s time for the Goonies to ride again; we have a workforce to rescue.
