Fear, Not Resistance: Why Workforce Entrants Are Struggling with Change
Yesterday at UK SHEL, the Schools and Higher Education Leaders Conference, I presented findings from our Workforce Entrants Skills Survey. Among the gaps identified across all stakeholder groups, one theme emerged: skills related to change. Adaptability, flexibility in role and thought, and change management. The collective picture painted was of skills that are, to use a technical term, brittle.
During the Q&A, I was asked a question about what it was within “change” that was proving such a problem. Change has always been around; it’s nothing new. And organisations have always struggled to get it done well.
It’s a reasonable framing. Change management, as a discipline, exists largely to address resistance. We’ve built entire methodologies around overcoming the manageable blocks that emerge when people are asked to give up something familiar for something new. Except that’s not what we’re seeing with workforce entrants. Not according to the 51 interviews we conducted following our initial survey.
What we’re seeing is fear.
Resitance Vs Fear
Resistance to change typically manifests in people who have something to lose: a decade of expertise, a comfortable routine, a sense of competence built over years. Change management frameworks are designed for precisely these scenarios, helping people navigate the transition from known to unknown whilst acknowledging the legitimate grief of letting go.
Workforce entrants, by contrast, aren’t giving up ten years of practice; they’re just getting started. If anything, they should be a force for change, bringing fresh perspectives and fewer entrenched habits. Instead, those interviewed reported seeing not resistance to change but fear of it, and treating it as the same thing will lead us to interventions that miss the mark entirely.
The volume and velocity of change has reached a point where something that is true today may not be true tomorrow. Timelines have shifted so dramatically that my observation, based on these interviews, is that our current education and pre-work systems simply do not prepare people for the rate of disruption they will experience from day one in their roles.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 41% of organisations expect to reduce their workforce before 2030 due to automation, whilst 70% plan to hire people with entirely new skills (World Economic Forum, 2025). Entry-level job postings have fallen by 29 percentage points since January 2024 (Randstad, cited in World Economic Forum, 2025). In 2024, 1.2 million UK graduates competed for just under 17,000 entry-level positions. Deloitte’s 2025 survey found that 61% of Gen Z and millennials worry that generative AI will make it harder for younger generations to enter the workforce, specifically because it automates tasks traditionally performed by entry-level workers (Deloitte, 2025).
So, whilst it’s easy to say we must not fear the future, if I were starting today, I would be terrified. Heck, I’m not starting today, and I’m still not exactly confident.
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What Fear Does to Us
To understand why this matters for our work, we need to understand what fear does to the brain and body, because fear operates through mechanisms that undermine the very capabilities we need people to develop.
The stress response, as most of us learned, involves fight or flight. What we weren’t taught is that this framing, whilst useful, is incomplete. Research on the defence cascade identifies a broader spectrum of responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop (Kozlowska et al., 2015). Each represents a distinct neurological pattern, and each has implications for how people show up at work.
Fight involves confronting the threat, which might manifest as defensiveness, anger, or excessive self-criticism.
Flight involves escaping, either physically or mentally, showing up as overthinking, overworking, or staying constantly busy.
Freeze involves paralysis under stress, the inability to move forward despite high internal anxiety.
Fawn involves appeasing others to stay safe, often at the expense of one’s own needs, manifesting as people-pleasing or difficulty setting boundaries.
Flop involves complete nervous system collapse, becoming physically or mentally unresponsive (McLeod, Guy-Evans and Yeung, 2025).
These responses are automatic, not choices. When someone’s survival system activates, the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for judgment, learning from experience, and staying self-aware, effectively shuts down (Fisher, cited in Noack, 2025). This finding largely comes from research into trauma, and whilst the current job market may not constitute trauma in the clinical sense, chronic uncertainty triggers similar neurological pathways.
The prefrontal cortex is the most evolved brain region, governing our highest-order cognitive abilities. It is also the region most sensitive to the detrimental effects of stress exposure. Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities, and more prolonged stress exposure causes architectural changes in prefrontal dendrites (Arnsten, 2009). Put simply: sustained fear doesn’t just feel bad. It structurally impairs the brain’s capacity for exactly the kind of flexible, adaptive thinking that the modern workplace demands.
Chronic stress biases decision-making towards habitual responding rather than flexible adaptation (Soares et al., 2012). Working memory becomes impaired and cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift between tasks or mental sets, suffers measurably (Shields, Sazma and Yonelinas, 2016). This creates a cruel irony: the very skills workforce entrants need to develop, adaptability, flexibility, and confident decision-making, are the skills most undermined by the fear they’re experiencing about their uncertain futures.
Five Things L&D Can Do
I’m always wary of prescriptive lists. The problems we’re facing are systemic, and no article can provide the solution. But if you’re reading this and wondering what you might do differently, here are five practical interventions that address fear rather than resistance. My hope is that they can act as a starting point for your thinking on how you can best support those entering your workplace for the very first time.
Be honest about uncertainty
Fear of the unknown is often worse than fear of the known. When organisations hide or minimise the changes happening around roles and technology, they don’t reduce fear; they amplify it, because people sense the dishonesty and lose trust. One European leader, cited in PwC’s 2025 Workforce Survey, made communication with employees a priority, ensuring everyone understood not just what was happening but why. You communicate by example, not just words (PwC, 2025). Transparency won’t eliminate fear, but it prevents fear from metastasising into paranoia.
Build navigational skills, not just technical skills
When the landscape shifts constantly, knowing how to navigate matters more than knowing the terrain. This means teaching people how to process uncertainty: structured reflection practices, scenario planning at an individual level, and frameworks for making decisions with incomplete information.
Normalise questioning across the business
People experiencing fear often feel unable to voice their concerns, either because they don’t want to appear weak or because they’ve learned that organisations punish vulnerability. We can influence this by modelling openness in learning environments, normalising questions about job security and AI impact, and ensuring that development conversations acknowledge rather than dismiss the legitimate anxieties people carry. This doesn’t mean providing false reassurance, just making space for honest conversation.
Invest in connection
Fear isolates people. The freeze response in particular can make individuals withdraw from precisely the social connections that might help regulate their nervous systems. Mentoring programmes, peer learning communities, and opportunities for workforce entrants to build relationships across the organisation can counteract this isolation. Research on stress consistently shows that social support moderates the impact of chronic stress on cognitive function (PwC, 2025).
Create low-stakes opportunities to practise change
If the fear response is triggered by perceived threat, then one intervention is to reduce the perceived stakes of adapting. Small experiments, safe-to-fail pilots, and opportunities to try new approaches without career consequences can help people build confidence in their capacity to navigate change. This is particularly important for workforce entrants who may have limited experience of successfully adapting to workplace shifts. Confidence comes from evidence, and evidence requires opportunities to act.
None of these interventions will solve the structural challenges facing workforce entrants. They won’t reduce the velocity of technological change or expand the entry-level job market. But they address fear at its neurological roots: by reducing uncertainty through honesty, building adaptive capacity, creating social connection, and providing low-stakes practice.
References
Arnsten, A.F.T. (2009) ‘Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), pp. 410-422.
Arnsten, A.F.T., Raskind, M, Taylor, F, Connor, D (2015) ‘The effects of stress exposure on prefrontal cortex: Translating basic research into successful treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder’, Neurobiology of Stress, 1, pp. 89-99.
Deloitte (2025) 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
Kozlowska K, Walker P, McLean L, Carrive P, (2015) ‘Fear and the Defense Cascade: Clinical Implications and Management’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 23(4), pp. 263-287.
McLeod, S., Guy-Evans, O. and Yeung, F. (2025) ‘Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn: How We Respond to Threats’, Simply Psychology.
Noack, K. (2025) ‘The 5 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, & Flop’.
PwC (2025) Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025.
Shields, G.S., Sazma, M.A. and Yonelinas, A.P. (2016) ‘The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison with Cortisol’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, pp. 651-668.
Soares, J, Sampaio, A, Ferreira, L.M., Santos, N, Marques, F, Palha, J, Cerqueira, J, and Sousa, N. (2012) ‘Stress-induced changes in human decision-making are reversible’, Translational Psychiatry, 2(7), e131.
Woo E, Sansing LH, Arnsten AFT, Datta D. (2021) ‘Chronic Stress Weakens Connectivity in the Prefrontal Cortex: Architectural and Molecular Changes’, Chronic Stress, 5.