Gen Zs are redefining the ‘career’ - without the ladder

I spent eighteen years being reassured by my elders that jumping onto the career ladder would be the key to my happiness and security. I finished my A levels, made it to university, and from there I imagined being catapulted up a linier path through the corporate world. I would loyally ascend through the ranks of a single company or institution in the hopes of finally reaching some high paying role that I’d know would be important because it would be accompanied by an odd collaboration of letters indicating my status to the world. However, now aged 24 and past my university days, I’ve found myself working freelance, many of my peers are already about to start their sabbatical (or quarter-life crisis as I call it), and those that have a job are far more interested in their current passion project than what’s going on in the office. Its become abundantly clear that the traditional concept of the career ladder is out for us Gen Zs. What’s unclear is whether we ditched it first or whether the ladder was ever actually there for us to begin with.

The fluctuation in how my generation approaches employment has been verified by recent findings from a survey by Glassdoor. According to research, we’ve replaced the career ladder for ‘career lily pads’, a newly coined phrase that suggests we jump from opportunity to opportunity depending on what fits the moment or our current identity best. We also invest much more time and energy into passion projects than any other generation that’s come before, with six out of every ten Gen Zs having a side hustle to occupy their spare time. So, what’s sparked this transformation in our outlook on careers? Do these new findings show we’re incredibly opportunistic or just a generation paralysed by a fear of commitment? Our we actually intent on finding the perfect job that expresses our identity or just uninterested in the restrictions that come with a full-time office job. I believe the answer lies somewhere in between; we see what the world has to offer, and we want it, but we’re also terrified of committing to the wrong thing. This phobia is an inevitable product of the changing world in which we’re growing up in, a world which, if you wish to understand why us Gen Zs act the way we do, needs to be looked at more closely.

AI is an obvious factor and one that has been analysed so repeatedly and profoundly that I fear just the mention of those two letters prompts an immediate turn off. For this reason, I’ll keep my analysis on AI brief, although I fear excluding its influencer would be an injustice to my generation’s feelings towards its alarming presence. AI is ensuring instability in the nine-to-five roles, specifically those at the entry level. Yes, a product of this is the increased level of unemployment for our generation – I’m proof of that. But another and more hopefully outcome of this is that we’re utilising our time in the five-to-nine to explore passion projects that act not only as creative outlets but also emergency back-up plans. Naming my closest friends could also be accompanied by an equally long list of side hustles that fill all their out of office time. One of my friends, when she’s not in office mode, is an Instagram restaurant critic who comments informatively while also comically on everything from London’s most popular restaurants to her late-night trips to her local McDonalds (interestingly it’s the McDonalds that tends to get the best reviews). I know a boy who’s a finance bro by day and Instagram chef by night, a girl who despite her reputation in sales wants nothing more than to open her own yoga studio, and then there’s that one friend who’s so close to making a real living out of crafting intricate place cards for our friend’s dinner parties.

Then there’s the impact of the online world more generally. Like everything in this age of information we are bombarded daily with new job opportunities. Instagram shows us every corner of the world, so we struggle to commit to one location for a holiday and in the same way Linkedln shows us such an array of jobs that we fear that commitment to one is shutting off the opportunity to commit to another. And even if we do finally commit to a job, the opportunities we are shown so regularly inevitably evaporates any loyalty we might have for our employers, a loyalty which is already prone to prioritising our own happiness over anything else.

And its happiness that’s the true influencer in this transition, or at least, the pursuit of happiness. Our happiness is linked to our sense of fulfilment, and we refuse to disconnect this personal element of our lives to our professional ones. It would be wrong to say as a generation we are looking for something more than just a steady income, home ownership, and a happy family to make us feel fulfilled. We want all of these things but with the knowledge that we’ll most likely never be able to afford a home, coupled with our dating pool being so slim, we’ve come to accept our chances at finding and funding the traditional family-work-life-balance is as much a fantasy as my dream of learning how time travel. Its far more realistic to fantasise about discovering one’s purpose is making clothes or fulfilling one’s dream of becoming a podcaster who specialises in sex advice.

Instead, we prioritize joy and self-expression in the every-day. When choosing a job, we look for creativity, autonomy, flexibility and authenticity, and if the one we’ve got doesn’t offer that then we’ll stop at nothing to find it somewhere else. This should be seen as a positive thing, as long as you know what makes you happy and if your certain of your identity. The problem is all of us Gen Zs are below the age of 26, so, as would be expected, we have no idea what will bring us happiness in the future and our identity is yet to be fully formed. This means our job search is just as confused as our search for self-fulfilment meaning yes, we are inevitably indecisive, we fail to commit, and even if we do, we won’t think twice about quitting it, and, above all else, we care more for our online baking business than anything that requires signing a contract.

So yes, it’s true, we are hopping our way through life like frogs on lily pads. Is this better than the career ladder? Probably not for those older generations still holding tight to their ladders wondering why there’s no one but Chat GPT at the bottom of it. But it’s my opinion that I and the rest of my generation will get to where we want to be. Call me idealistic but I believe we’re just a few lily pads away from our dream job and consequently our dream life.