Young workers arrive believing in mentorship more than any generation before them, and they arrive shakier about their own odds. Both things are true at once, and the collision helps explain why so many talented hires quietly drift out the door within a couple of years.
Jean-Pierre Conte has watched that pattern up close, and his response starts long before these workers ever fill out a job application.
A generation short on guidance
Roughly 83% of Gen Z workers say a workplace mentor matters for their careers, yet only about 52% actually have one. Their confidence in their own ability to succeed slid from 59% in 2024 to just 39% a year later.
This cohort is set to make up most of the workforce by 2035. A confidence dip that steep, spread across that many people, becomes an employer problem whether or not anyone puts it on a dashboard.
The gap widens for women
Split the data by gender and it grows starker. Fewer than 10% of women hold a formal mentor at work, against 15% of men, and only 24% of women leaders have ever had one, compared with 30% of their male peers.
Ambition isn’t the missing piece here. Access is, and access is exactly the thing formal programs and early intervention can hand out on purpose rather than by luck.
Belief without access
Belief in mentorship has never run higher among the young, yet belief alone opens no doors. SEO Scholars, one of the programs Conte backs, reports a 100% college acceptance rate, and four out of five of its students become the first in their families to earn a degree.
Those results sit against a national graduation rate of roughly 20% for students from similar backgrounds. The gap has little to do with talent or drive and a lot to do with who gets steady guidance at the moments that quietly set a trajectory.
Conte’s answer: reach students first
Conte, founder and managing partner of Lupine Crest Capital, would rather build the habit before the first paycheck. SEO Scholars adds more than 600 hours of instruction across New York, San Francisco, North Carolina, and Miami, and pairs that classroom time with steady mentoring. “These are kids who, voluntarily in eighth grade, agree to go into this program and do after-school work, work on Saturdays, work during the summer, and extra tutoring to supplement their public school education,” Conte said. “Plus, they agreed to mentoring to get them to go to college.”
Students who grow up with that kind of steady backing tend to walk into their first jobs already knowing what a mentor is for, which is half the battle the surveys keep describing.
