s a teacher, Jeff Utecht taught both Millennials and Generation Z students. Now, he uses that knowledge to help company leaders, who might be Generation X or Boomers, better understand the differing perspectives of workers in both generations. An international presenter and keynote speaker, Utecht says generational misunderstandings cost companies time, money, and productivity.
On the opening day of the AGC of Alaska Annual Conference November 11, Utecht will deliver solutions for helping head off those misunderstandings and creating harmony within a workforce whose makeup might include members with differing ideas of what “work” should look like.
Utecht is the son of two educators and grew up working his family’s farm in the Spokane Valley. As a teenager, he was a volunteer teacher in the classroom of his mentor, a fourth-grade teacher. That experience launched both his career and his commitment to student learning. That drive led him to receive a Technology Leadership Project grant through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2001, which pushed him to experiment with blended learning, network literacy, and digital collaboration long before those terms became a common part of schooling.
Utecht is no stranger to Alaska; at the Alaska Chamber’s 2025 Alaska Business Summit in Girdwood, Utecht spoke about how to manage multi-generational workplace dynamics. He spoke on a similar topic with Arctic Slope Regional Corporation’s leaders last year.
Utecht says the construction industry, and the US workforce in general, is going through a double transition: simultaneous shifting of the generational understanding of what work means, alongside a shifting understanding of how work is structured, now that AI is a tool that can be used on some tasks.
“I believe all blue-collar jobs, construction being top of the list, are feeling this right now. We are redefining—or this generation of people coming into the workforce, Gen Z, is redefining—what it means to work, and we are struggling with that,” he says. “We have a generation that wants to engage in this work, but we have leaders who don’t understand them. And that’s the generational rub right now.”
Millennials, the largest generation in the workforce right now, were sold the idea that they had to be college ready.
“We took away all avenues for them to even see or believe that being in blue-collar [fields]—in construction, electrical, whatever—wasn’t even a pathway for them. So this generation (Gen Z), they’re coming back to that. It starts with our schools; our schools now have construction programs. We’ve got all these CTE [career and technical education] programs coming back, so these kids know there’s money to be made there,” Utecht says.
But Baby Boomer and Gen X company leaders might see Gen Z workers as lazy or not committed. Not so, in Utecht’s experience. “It’s not that they’re lazy. It’s that they view work differently. And they are forcing us, as a nation, to redefine work,” he says. “I run into people who run large firms to small firms that, they have kids applying, but they can’t keep a kid for two weeks.”
Either the new employee is frustrated with the workplace and doesn’t show up or the employer is frustrated with the worker and they fire them, Utecht says.
“There’s a mismatch there. There’s a communication issue,” he says. “If you want to grow your business, you’re going to need to figure out a way to work with this generation.”
Because the work still needs to be done, he says, and Gen Z holds the keys to getting it done.
“You’ve got a lot of contract work going on right now. We have a generation that, they’re willing to do it, but under their terms,” Utecht says. “That’s the huge rub right now.”
Utecht will be giving the keynote address at the AGC of Alaska Annual Conference Wednesday, November 11 at an afternoon presentation at the Hotel Captain Cook. For more conference news, or to register, visit the conference website: agcak.org/annual-conference.