Generation Z (Gen-Z) is composed of those born in the late 1990’s or after. The first cohorts of Gen-Z students gradually started to enter colleges after 2013. Gen-Z students are very different than millennials in almost all aspects. They are more likely to reject the traditional and conventional teaching methods that lack active learning components. A shift towards modern and interactive student-centered methods is being implemented by a new generation of instructors to better serve Gen-Z needs. However, this transition from passive lecture-based instruction to active learning methods is hindered by a gap that we call “the missing step”. This missing step in the transition phase refers to training and preparing future faculty to adopt research-based instructional strategies. My fellow aspiring professors and I were mostly educated via old-school methods. Without proper training on STEM teaching, we were likely to approach our teaching by modeling what we saw. If granted the opportunity to teach engineering in a faculty role, we would have come into it lacking teaching theory and instructional strategies rooted in engineering education. If a new instructor is not familiar with subjects such as “active learning”, “backward design”, “evidence-based instructional strategies”, “flipped classroom”, and “Bloom’s revised taxonomy”, or is not acquainted with importance of modern classroom assessment techniques, rubrics, and motivation strategies, the result will be an unfillable gap between the instructor and the Gen-Z students. I was in the first cohort of Ph.D. students who completed the College of Engineering’s graduate teaching fellowship program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This one-year, well-structured, peer-observation program gave me invaluable knowledge about teaching following the research, helped me in designing a course in Canvas system, taught me how to write my teaching philosophy properly, and prepared me to achieve the CIRTL associate status. Starting such a program in every school for interested graduate students can make a significant difference. I will present my perspectives on the program and its impact.