This fall, I interviewed 85 recent graduates of various colleges to discuss their success in finding a job. We spoke in settings as varied as Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street site in Manhattan, and meetings of young conservatives.

Of those I interviewed — many from prestigious schools — only five are in the career field they prepared for; the rest are unemployed or in jobs they hope are temporary. Graduates with once-marketable degrees in accounting and computer science, for example, now compete with applicants who have five years of experience and will accept the same entry-level salary.

Mainly because there are too many applicants for too few jobs, employers are ignoring résumés that once commanded interviews. But in my work as a management consultant, I find that many executives also feel that recent graduates have contributed to a perception problem: that young people have been so pampered by hovering parents and so untested academically that they bring little value to today’s demanding workplace.

A surprising number of senior managers have always championed the hiring of young people who seem unlikely candidates for corporate life: theater majors, for instance, or campus activists with mediocre grades, or eccentric computer prodigies with few social skills. These managers realize that while irreverent newcomers might create chaos in quiet offices, they also bring fresh ideas.

But recently, I have heard some of these managers grumble that painful job hunts have sapped young people of their daring, creativity and willingness to challenge old procedures.

Until recently, common wisdom held that older employees resisted change, were slow to adapt to technology, were less productive than younger associates and resented taking direction from bosses younger than their children. Those perceptions are changing significantly in organizations I work with.

Older employees, desperate to rebuild their 401(k)’s, are reinventing themselves — by welcoming new procedures, becoming technologically adept, bringing mature problem-solving to their jobs and responding willingly to younger bosses. Managers have become far less tolerant of the missteps that were once expected of any new hire, and are finding that older employees make fewer of them.

Some of the least judgmental, most supportive managers I know are criticizing recent graduates for poor quality of written and oral reports, and for difficulty in drawing essential facts from masses of data. Earlier generations heard this criticism, too, but employers flooded with résumés have become far more selective than their predecessors.

Amid relentless talk about unemployment, little is said of the impact on the nation’s future of a generation convinced that the workplace has little use for it. This generation must regain its confidence if we are to remain the birthplace of ideas, products and services that shape the world.

The quickest way to rebuild that confidence is to form partnerships between recent graduates and the companies they hope will employ them. Entrepreneurs and corporate managers, current and retired, are eager to be mentors. They are active in the Young Presidents’ Organization or in professional and alumni groups in many cities.

Corporations, in turn, should consider investing in training and developing a generation they will eventually need. High-potential graduates for whom there isn’t an immediate opening could be hired, not as unpaid interns but as salaried trainees given three to six months to prove their value in a series of assignments. Those who don’t seize the opportunity can quickly be dismissed. Trainees should be given mentors to help them avoid the small missteps that can damage a career before it starts.

DETERMINED to cut costs, many corporate officials will undoubtedly dismiss as impractical the idea of investing in employees they don’t immediately need.

But a choice must be made: employers can keep faulting overindulgent parents, ineffectual teachers, colleges without required subjects and graduates unsuited to today’s complex workplace, or they can play a greater role in training and developing a generation longing to take its place in the American mainstream.

Robert W. Goldfarb is a management consultant and author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.

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