Gen Z is building careers around leverage. Every new skill, network, side project or AI capability increases their ability to negotiate, pivot or leave. By Roxanne Calder.
If you are of my generation, a Gen Xer, ambition has always been synonymous with ‘hard work’ and putting in the hours. If you weren’t chasing promotions, answering emails around the clock and making your effort visible, you were labelled unmotivated…or lazy.
Then Gen Z arrived and declined the deal. Confounding us all, the assumption was immediate: they have no work ethic, lack ambition, and are, of course, entitled. But what if they haven’t rejected ambition? What if they have simply become more economically literate than we ever were?
A different economic bargain
Despite the greatness of Gen X and those before us, including the fabulous Boomers, we were all conditioned.
Conditioned to believe that hard work got you somewhere, loyalty equalled job security and was reciprocated, authority was to be respected, home ownership was attainable, and your retirement was secured. And even when confronted with our own growing disconnect between effort and reward, we continued to believe.
Gen Z inherited an entirely different economic bargain: redundancies hit everyone, even top performers, loyalty isn’t reciprocated, organisations restructure constantly, leadership and integrity are not automatic, degrees no longer guarantee a career or income and can be outdated before you even graduate, AI is changing careers, burnout and mental health issues are widespread, side hustles can outperform salary raises and owning a home may never happen in their lifetime.
Gen Z have been questioning the status quo, deep-set conditioning and the old promises attached to work. Some might say they are onto something.
Roxanne Calder.
Managers and leaders have long understood how customers respond to incentives. Organisations redesign pricing, compensation, and capital allocation according to market conditions. However, when employees adapt their behaviour to the same changing market conditions, we refer to it as a generational problem.
We don’t risk misanalysing a customer profile; the cost could be catastrophic. Yet we misdiagnose employee behaviour with remarkable ease.
Companies behave rationally in response to economic incentives, so do employees. Now we see adapted behaviour to maximise modern-day rewards: flexibility, gig-economy jobs, mental well-being, remote working anywhere, rapid skill acquisition, etc.
“They might be the first generation to factor risk and effort correctly…
They might be the first generation to factor risk and effort correctly. They haven’t abandoned ambition. They have abandoned investments producing poor returns. They are asking if the extra hour, extra qualification or extra measure of loyalty will compound or is it a sunk cost.
Entitled or self-actualisation
They are optimising for a different return. Asking harder questions: Is this job developing skills to keep me employable? Can I learn from this manager? Do this organisation’s values align with me? Does the work fit the life I want? And what am I giving up in exchange?
It might be detached from our reality and totally alien in concept, but it’s not automatically entitlement. For some yes, but that can be said for every generation and demographic.
What we are witnessing is an intrinsic drive to realise their full potential. Declining unpaid overtime, questioning arbitrary office rules or refusing to sacrifice well-being for symbolic loyalty isn’t evidence of lower ambition. It reflects a different calculation of value, risk and return.
From loyalty to leverage
Previous generations built their careers around loyalty because loyalty increased security. And it was reciprocated. Today, investing everything in one employer becomes a concentration risk, not a virtue.
Gen Z is building careers around leverage. Every new skill, network, side project or AI capability increases their ability to negotiate, pivot or leave.
From the outside, this can look like impatience. Economically, it looks like reducing dependence on a single employer and increasing career bargaining power.
Futureproofing
The employment market today is vastly different from where it was. More than one in five jobs, 22 percent are expected to be fundamentally changed by 2030 as a result of technology change, the green transition, geoeconomic fragmentation, economic uncertainty and demographic shifts.
Geopolitical tensions are expected to continue. Add to that, inflation and cost-of-living pressures over the past few years. Understandably, future employment feels less predictable.
Diversifying income, protecting health, building transferable skills and preserving optionality begin to look less like anti-ambition and more like sharp strategy and prudent risk management.
It is the logic of a portfolio, applied to a career. The anti-ambition myth says less about Gen Z and more about the quick assumptions we make. Organisational confirmation bias is powerful and omnipresent. Measuring ambition by sacrifice rather than by strategic judgment is a mistake.
Today’s workforce isn’t necessarily lacking ambition or work ethic. Nor are they inherently entitled.
Its members are calculating the returns on their efforts differently. And if we open our eyes, we might concur (begrudgingly), that the calculation is probably sound.
The question is not simply whether Gen Z wants to work. It is whether the bargain still makes economic sense. If leaders fail to see the distinction, the future of work isn’t doomed because Gen Z lacks ambition. It is threatened because leaders are managing yesterday’s incentives in tomorrow’s economy.
Roxanne Calder, author of ‘Earning Power: Breaking Barriers and Building Wealth for Women’ (Wiley $34.95), is a career strategist and the founder and managing director of EST10 – a successful Sydney recruitment agency. www.est10.com.au.
Main image photo by Zana Latif on Unsplash
