Is Everything You Know About Gen Z at Events Wrong?

TL;DR

Your Gen Z event strategy is probably built on research nobody has pressure-tested against an actual Gen Z. The stats are real. The conclusions the industry has drawn from them are, in several cases, wrong. On this Aftershow of Event About It, Megan Martin brought her 27-year-old assistant Sierra Siebulrud to her first industry conference at Cvent CONNECT 2026, then read 17 published Gen Z stats back to her one by one and asked her to agree or disagree on the record.

Key Takeaway: The stats that fell apart all failed the same way. Each one measured a behavior and then assumed a preference. Gen Z is not avoiding your networking because they dislike networking. They are avoiding it because nobody taught them how. That distinction changes what you build.

Summary

The event industry has produced an enormous amount of research on Gen Z in the last two years. Bizzabo, Freeman, GoGather, Eventbrite, and Cvent have all published data on what this generation wants from live experiences. Organizers are now designing agendas, session lengths, networking formats, and booth strategy around those findings.

Almost nobody has read the findings back to a Gen Z and asked whether they hold up.

So we did. Sierra Siebulrud is 27, currently exploring which industry she wants to build a career in, and had never attended a major conference of any kind before Cvent CONNECT 2026. She spent five days shadowing Megan through the creator program: content capture, podcast interviews, client meetings, partner receptions. A full immersion, and an unusual vantage point.

Worth naming up front, because it matters for how you read her answers: Sierra did not attend independently. She had a guide, an all-access badge, and a room full of people who already knew Megan. This is one Gen Z’s read from a very good seat, not a representative sample. What makes it useful is not statistical validity. It is that she had no industry conditioning to filter it through, and she answered honestly when the research got something wrong.

If you are an event leader, B2B event marketer, or conference organizer building next year’s program around Gen Z data, this is the pressure test that data has been missing.

Key Themes and Takeaways

1. Gen Z Is Not Avoiding Your Networking. Nobody Taught Them How.

“Disagree. The older generations, and mine included, are pushing technology so much that it is just kind of a default. I think in-person is something Gen Zers would like to do more of.” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Stat: 60% of Gen Z workers actively avoid in-person networking opportunities, while 86% say networking is vital for career growth (The Interview Guys).

Sierra flatly disagreed with the first half and immediately agreed with the second. Her reasoning is the part worth writing down: the generation that pushed digital-first onto Gen Z is now reading avoidance data and concluding that Gen Z prefers screens. She sees it the other way around. In-person is the novelty. It is the thing her cohort at CONNECT gravitated toward each other over, precisely because it felt new.

The Stat That Actually Explains It: Only 25% of Gen Z professionals say they know how to network (The Interview Guys). Sierra agreed with this one without hesitation. “It’s just something that I never thought would be such a pivotal part of career building.”

Put those two numbers next to each other and the avoidance stat stops being a preference finding. It becomes a skills finding. Eighty-six percent know it matters, twenty-five percent know how to do it, and the gap between those two numbers is where the avoidance lives. That is not a generational attitude problem. That is a training gap your event is uniquely positioned to close and almost certainly is not closing.

Sierra also lost roughly three years of ordinary social development to the pandemic. She was in college when it hit. Her public speaking class ran on Zoom. “You can be confident all day long to a screen. It’s very different standing in a room full of your peers, all staring at you, judging you.” The interpersonal reps most professionals accumulate between 19 and 22 simply did not happen for this cohort.

Key Takeaway: Stop treating networking as an amenity you schedule and start treating it as a skill you teach. Add a facilitated first-timer session that covers how to open a conversation, how to exit one, and how to follow up. Sierra’s own request was for short, tactical guidance she could watch before arriving. If your event does not provide it, TikTok will, and TikTok will not mention your brand.

2. The Attention Span Myth: She Would Sit Through Your Hour-Long Session

“If I’m watching something for an hour on my TV, it’s so easy for me to grab something and scroll. But if I’m sitting there physically at a conference listening, my attention needs to be where I am.” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Stat: Only 7% of Gen Z are willing to sit through an hour-long session, even an engaging one (GoGather 2025 Gen Z Conference Survey).

This is the stat most likely to be quietly reshaping your agenda right now, and Sierra disagreed with it outright. She understands where it comes from. She named the media environment and the trained impulse to keep moving. But her actual behavior in a physical room contradicted her own generational profile, and her explanation of why is the insight organizers should take from this entire piece.

Attention is contextual, not generational. On a couch, a screen competes with every other screen. In a ballroom, she made a decision to be there and behaved accordingly.

The Stat She Fully Agreed With: 61.4% of Gen Z say they lose interest in conference sessions that feel dull or irrelevant (GoGather survey, via Cvent). The reaction from both sides of the table was immediate and identical: why is this filed under Gen Z? That’s an everyone thing.

Correct. Nobody has ever wanted to sit through a boring session. Filing that under Gen Z lets organizers shorten sessions instead of improving them, which solves the wrong problem at real expense.

Proof arrived unprompted. Days after CONNECT, Sierra could still recall a specific speaker because he opened by telling the room he could not touch his toes and predicted that was the only thing they would remember. “You’re so freaking right. I know you can’t touch your toes.” She could not recall the content of sessions she had photographed the slides of. The variable was not runtime. It was whether the speaker gave her something to hold onto.

Edutainment (definition): Content designed to educate and entertain at the same time, on the principle that information people enjoy receiving is information they retain and repeat. In an event context, edutainment means building sessions that earn attention through delivery rather than assuming attention based on the agenda slot. The term is applied to event strategy by Megan Martin of M Squared Dynamics, who uses it as a core design standard for both session programming and content production.

Key Takeaway: Before you cut your sessions from 60 minutes to 20, audit whether your sessions are boring. Sierra will give a good speaker a full hour. She will give a dull one four minutes and a photo of a slide she never looks at again. Shortening a weak session produces a shorter weak session.

3. The First-Timer Experience You Are Not Designing

“I had my weird purple badge on and they said, we’ll get her a new one. I immediately thought, what does the purple mean?” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Reality: Sierra’s first fifteen minutes at Cvent CONNECT 2026 consisted of walking into a building with thousands of people moving in every direction, no idea where the ballroom was, and a badge color she did not have the decoder ring for. Within an hour she was in a partner reception full of executives thinking, in her words, “these are some big people in events and I should be on my best behavior.”

Every organizer reading this knows what a purple badge means at their own event. That is exactly the problem.

The Acronym Tax: Asked whether the jargon was a barrier, Sierra did not hesitate. “There was DMC, and so many little short acronyms for something. Who knows what they meant. Whatever you guys are saying, it’s interesting, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Megan’s own reaction on the record: having a newcomer beside her was a reminder of how much industry shorthand gets used in front of people who cannot decode it. This industry is worse than most about this, and every unexplained acronym is a small tax on a first-timer’s confidence.

What Actually Worked: Two named humans who pulled her into conversations and made introductions. Not an app, not a lounge, not signage. When asked whether a formal first-timer mentor pairing would feel forced, she said the opposite. “A mentor would be huge just to show you the ropes. If I went in there blindly, I would have been so overwhelmed. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Her Own Advice to Future First-Timers: Journal at the end of each day. She took photos of slides and admitted she will never look at them. What she wishes she had done is spend ten minutes each evening writing down what mattered, which is also, not coincidentally, exactly how Megan operates on site.

Key Takeaway: Build a real first-timer track and staff it with people, not signage. Pair every first-time attendee with a returning attendee. Publish a plain-language glossary of your own badge colors and industry acronyms in the mobile app. Then schedule ten minutes at the end of each day and tell attendees explicitly to write down what mattered. The retention value of an attendee who understood day one is worth more than the booth you sold to pay for it.

4. Your Swag Budget Is Buying You Almost Nothing

“Sometimes the merch and the swag could be overdone. You leave with so much stuff you don’t need, and you’re just going to toss it or give it to Goodwill anyway.” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Question: Does a company’s swag actually influence whether you visit their booth?

Her answer was a qualified “kind of,” and the qualification is where the money is. The one activation that genuinely worked on her was Visit Dallas, which brought a hat and tote customization experience to the floor. It worked not because of the merchandise but because the activity was a preview of the destination itself. “It made me more curious about Dallas. It’s somewhere I never really considered going, but it was on my radar after that.”

Then Megan asked the better question. What about a company with nothing glamorous to preview, like an insurance provider or a financial services firm? What gets you to that booth?

Sierra’s answer, unprompted, was a data visualization. She described wanting to see a real pricing comparison across carriers, laid out visibly at the front of the booth, showing how the product performs against alternatives at different coverage levels. A chart. She would rather have a chart than a tote bag.

Why This Matters for Measurement: A booth visit driven by free merchandise and a booth visit driven by a genuinely useful comparison are recorded identically in your lead scan report. They are not the same event. The first is noise. The second is a behavioral intent signal, because the person walked over specifically to evaluate your product against a competitor’s. If your booth strategy optimizes for scan volume, you are systematically manufacturing the first kind and calling it performance.

Behavioral intent signals (definition): Attendee actions at a live event that indicate genuine buying interest when read in context, as distinct from actions driven by incentive or convenience. Applied to event strategy by Megan Martin of M Squared Dynamics, the principle is that the behavior alone is not the signal. The context around the behavior determines whether it means anything at all.

Key Takeaway: Move a meaningful share of your swag budget into something that demonstrates the product. A comparison chart, a live teardown, a calculator, a five-minute hands-on demo. Then measure booth visits that led to a real conversation separately from total scans. The gap between those two numbers is the honest measure of whether your activation worked. For more on separating signal from noise in event data, read How to Turn Event Data Into Buying Signals.

5. The 30-Second Rule That Decides Whether Your Follow-Up Lands

“If I remember them, and if it was a notable conversation, I would accept. If it wasn’t notable, I would decline.” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Question: You met someone for thirty seconds at a conference. They send a LinkedIn request. What decides whether you accept or ignore it?

The bar is one word: notable. Not seniority, not company, not mutual connections. Did the conversation register as memorable at the time. If yes, accept. If no, she does not ignore the request. She declines it.

This is a harsher standard than most post-event follow-up strategy assumes. The prevailing model is volume: scan everyone, connect with everyone, sequence everyone, let the funnel sort it out. Sierra’s rule means that model does not just underperform with this cohort. It gets actively rejected, and a declined request is a door that does not reopen.

The AI Line She Drew: Asked whether she would use ChatGPT to learn how to network, she said no. “AI is going to tell me what to do robotically. I want more of a personal feel.” Asked whether she would use ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn follow-up to someone she met at CONNECT, the answer flipped instantly. “That I have ChatGPT’d.”

Read that boundary carefully, because it is a precise one. AI is acceptable for execution and rejected for the human judgment layer. She wants a person to teach her how to walk into a room. She wants a tool to help her write the message afterward. Any event education product that inverts that, offering an AI networking coach instead of a human one, is solving the half of the problem she does not have.

Key Takeaway: Design your event so that fewer, better conversations happen instead of more scans. Then rebuild follow-up around the notability test. Reference the specific thing you actually talked about in the first line of the connection request, or expect the decline. Volume follow-up is not neutral with this cohort. It costs you the relationship outright.

6. Where Gen Z Looks Before Your Event, and It Is Not Google

“Little bits and clips like that would be super helpful. How you connect with someone at a networking event, how to start a conversation at a networking event.” — Sierra Siebulrud

The Question: Where do you go to prepare before walking into a networking event?

TikTok first, YouTube second, Instagram rarely, Google not at all. Not AI for this either. She wants short, specific, human-delivered tactics: how to start a conversation at a networking event, how to introduce yourself, what to do with your hands.

The implication for your event content strategy is direct. The window where you can shape a first-time attendee’s confidence opens weeks before they arrive, and it opens on a platform most B2B event teams treat as optional. If your pre-event content lives entirely in an email sequence and a PDF agenda, you are absent from the place where your least experienced attendees are actively preparing.

The Free Marketing You Are Not Designing For: 64% of attendees want shareable, “Instagrammable” moments built into the experience (Bizzabo, via BizBash). Sierra agreed and immediately called herself guilty of it. She posted across TikTok and Instagram all week. Her friends, none of whom work in events, watched the whole thing and asked what on earth she was doing.

The moment she singled out as most shareable was the brand reveal itself: the video, the announcement, the instant the colors changed in the room. “That’s something people would gravitate to watch and see online. And that’s just random people like me posting. That’s marketing they would not normally have if people weren’t there with their Instagram.”

She used the phrase “undervalued marketing tactic.” She is right, and she is describing organic reach into an audience your paid channels cannot buy.

Key Takeaway: Produce short-form pre-event content on TikTok and YouTube aimed specifically at first-timers, covering the practical anxieties nobody addresses: what to wear, what your badge colors mean, how to start a conversation. Then design at least one deliberately shareable moment into the general session and give people a reason to film it. Both of these cost far less than the swag table in section four.

7. The Retention Test: “I Want to Want My Boss’s Job”

“If I don’t want my boss’s job, this isn’t something I see long term.” — Sierra Siebulrud

Why This Belongs in an Event Strategy Post: Because the event industry has a talent pipeline problem, and every leader reading this is either hiring Gen Z or losing them. Sierra was asked directly what makes her stay at a company versus bail within a year. The answer was one sentence and it functions as a diagnostic you can run today.

Look at the person directly above every junior hire on your team. Would that hire want that job? If the honest answer is no, you have your attrition forecast.

What She Means by Growth: Not title inflation. Room to contribute. “There’s not exactly room to give a pitch for something you’re passionate about or where you see a flaw.” The signal she reads is whether a junior person’s idea can travel upward at all, or whether it gets routed to a higher executive by default.

How She Verifies Culture Claims: This one should genuinely unsettle a few employer brand teams. Every company claims great culture, so she ignores the careers page entirely and goes to LinkedIn to read the posts of the most junior employees. Not the CEO. The people who started recently. And she screens for whether the posts read as authentically theirs or as generated. “You can tell if it’s an AI post on LinkedIn, or if it’s actually them saying, oh my gosh, congrats, this is amazing.”

The Management Model She Wants: Sierra told a specific story about a manager who inserted herself into a difficult client conversation to protect her, without knowing the account work Sierra had been doing. It read as micromanagement, and it removed a rep she needed. Asked what better would have looked like, she designed it herself on the spot: coach before the meeting, let her run it alone, debrief honestly afterward. Coaching in advance and correction after. Not correction during.

The Fastest Way to Lose Her Respect: Refusing to keep up with technology. She watched colleagues at a previous job decline to learn new systems, which pushed the work onto the junior staff who had. Her framing on AI specifically echoed a line from the main episode: the technology is not taking your job, the person who knows how to use it well might.

Key Takeaway: Run the “would they want your job” test on every management layer in your event team this quarter. Then check what your most junior employees are posting on LinkedIn, because that is what your next hire is reading instead of your careers page. And if you manage someone early in their career, move your intervention from during the meeting to before and after it.

Final Word

Seventeen stats went into this conversation. Most survived. The ones that did not all broke the same way: they measured an observed behavior and then quietly assumed a preference underneath it.

Sixty percent avoid networking, so Gen Z must dislike networking. Seven percent will sit through an hour-long session, so Gen Z must be incapable of sustained attention. Both conclusions are convenient, because both let organizers redesign around the generation instead of examining the product. Shorten the sessions. Add a digital lounge. Move on.

Sierra’s answers point somewhere less comfortable. She wants the hour-long session if it is worth an hour. She wants to network and does not know how. She wants a chart instead of a tote bag. She wants a manager who coaches her before the meeting rather than rescuing her during it. None of that is a generational accommodation. It is what a well-designed event and a well-run team should have been delivering to everyone, and Gen Z is simply the first cohort unwilling to pretend otherwise.

She was also asked whether the events industry felt like a real career option after five days of drinking from a fire hose. She said yes, one hundred percent, and that she would start at the very bottom because there was that much to learn. Then she named planning as the most interesting job she saw.

The research says this generation is hard to reach. One of them just told us exactly what she wants, in plain language, for an hour. The reach problem may be more of a listening problem.

Listen to the full Aftershow of Event About It: EventAboutItPodcast.com

For the main episode this Aftershow pairs with, covering the Cvent rebrand and the billion-dollar bet behind it, read: Trust Is Broken. Cvent Just Bet a Billion It Isn’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Gen Z really avoid networking at B2B events? The widely cited stat is that 60% of Gen Z workers actively avoid in-person networking opportunities while 86% say networking is vital for career growth. The gap between those two figures is better explained by skill than by preference. Only 25% of Gen Z professionals say they know how to network, and much of this cohort lost the informal social development years of college to the pandemic. When asked directly, Sierra Siebulrud disagreed that Gen Z avoids in-person networking, arguing that older generations pushed digital-first defaults onto her generation and are now reading the result as a preference. The practical implication for organizers: treat networking as a skill to teach at your event rather than an amenity to schedule.

Will Gen Z sit through an hour-long conference session? Survey data says only 7% of Gen Z are willing to sit through an hour-long session. In practice, attention appears to be contextual rather than generational. A first-time Gen Z attendee at Cvent CONNECT 2026 disagreed with the stat, explaining that at home a screen competes with every other screen, but in a physical room she made a decision to be there and behaved accordingly. The stat she did agree with is that 61.4% of Gen Z lose interest in sessions that feel dull or irrelevant, which is true of every generation. Shortening a weak session produces a shorter weak session. Improving session quality is the fix with actual upside.

What actually attracts Gen Z attendees to a trade show booth? Not swag. When asked what would draw her to a booth for a company with nothing glamorous to offer, such as an insurance or financial services firm, Sierra Siebulrud described wanting a visible data comparison showing how the product performs against competitors at different levels. The one activation that worked on her at Cvent CONNECT 2026 was Visit Dallas, which succeeded because the hands-on activity previewed the destination rather than because it handed out merchandise. Her assessment of swag generally: most of it gets thrown out or donated. The measurement implication is that a swag-driven booth visit and a genuinely interested booth visit look identical in a lead scan report but are not the same behavioral intent signal.

How does Gen Z decide whether to accept a LinkedIn request after a conference? The test is whether the conversation was notable. If a Gen Z attendee remembers the specific conversation, they accept. If they do not, they decline rather than ignore, which closes the door permanently. This makes high-volume post-event follow-up actively counterproductive with this cohort. The practical fix is to reference the specific thing you discussed in the first line of the connection request, and to design events for fewer, better conversations rather than maximum badge scans.

Where does Gen Z look for advice before attending their first conference? TikTok first, YouTube second, Instagram occasionally, and Google effectively not at all. Notably, Gen Z also draws a line at AI for this specific use case: an AI tool is acceptable for drafting a follow-up message after the event, but rejected for learning how to network in person, which they want delivered by a human. For event organizers, this means short-form pre-event video content aimed at first-timers, covering practical questions like what to wear, what badge colors mean, and how to start a conversation, reaches attendees in the window where they are actually preparing.

What is edutainment in event strategy? Edutainment is content designed to educate and entertain simultaneously, on the principle that information people enjoy receiving is information they retain and repeat. Applied to event strategy by Megan Martin of M Squared Dynamics, it means designing sessions that earn attention through delivery rather than assuming attention based on an agenda slot. The practical test comes from this episode: days after Cvent CONNECT 2026, a first-time attendee could recall a speaker who opened by joking that he could not touch his toes, and could not recall the content of sessions whose slides she had photographed. Memorability was a function of delivery, not runtime.

How do you design a conference experience for first-time attendees? Four changes cover most of the gap. Pair every first-timer with a returning attendee, because human guides outperform apps and signage. Publish a plain-language glossary of badge colors and industry acronyms, since unexplained shorthand is a confidence tax on newcomers. Build ten minutes of structured end-of-day reflection into the schedule, because photographed slides get reviewed far less often than written notes. And run a facilitated networking skills session rather than assuming attendees know how to work a room. A first-time Gen Z attendee at Cvent CONNECT 2026 named a mentor pairing as the single thing she would have most wanted.

What makes Gen Z employees stay at a company? The clearest diagnostic from this conversation is a single sentence: “I want to want my boss’s job.” If a junior employee does not want the role directly above them, that is an attrition forecast. Growth here means room to contribute ideas rather than title inflation. Gen Z also verifies culture claims independently, ignoring careers pages in favor of reading the LinkedIn posts of a company’s most junior employees, and screening those posts for whether they read as authentic or AI-generated. On management style, the preferred model is coaching before a difficult meeting and honest debriefing afterward, with autonomy in between. Intervening during the meeting reads as micromanagement even when it is intended as protection.

About the Guest

Sierra Siebulrud is 27 and currently exploring what’s next, evaluating different industries before landing on her next opportunity. She attended Cvent CONNECT 2026 as her first industry conference and her first major conference of any kind, joining Megan Martin through the Cvent creator program across five days of content capture, podcast interviews, partner receptions, and client meetings. She left considering event planning as a career. Her background is in client-facing financial services, and she is based in Montana.

About the Author

Megan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She’s the host and executive producer of Event About It and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.

Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics

Keep the Conversation Going

If this resonates, sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup for more on event experience design, edutainment, and what the research about your attendees is quietly getting wrong. And if you want to hear it in conversation, the Event About It Aftershow with Sierra Siebulrud is the closest companion piece to this post. Listen at EventAboutItPodcast.com.

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