Why your kids and mine won’t follow in Traditional Career Paths
A recent article highlighted the fact that Gen Z and Millennials are extremely unlikely to follow a traditional career path, something I had already surmised and have witnessed firsthand. To put it in short (in a longwinded roundabout way), they have seen how your life has turned out, and they have ‘opted out’. Your way of life has been effectively ‘cancelled”.
More than any other generation that came before them, this generation is ten times more likely to be their own boss. To branch out into entrepreneurship. To chart their own path. Technology and the free world have shown them the tools that they require and provided them with the opportunities to get the job done.
Even back in the 1980’s, market research, funding, testing, accounting, business classes, product launches, and technology would have taken countless hours of preparation, study, and learning BEFORE you even thought about entering the market and starting a business. Today, you have Google, Shopify, Intuit, crowdfunding social media, TidyCal, DocuSign, Microsoft, cryptocurrencies, PayPal, Dell, Apple, and AI as your “Business Partners”. All the information you once needed to research is available at the click of a mouse. Start-up costs and start-up times are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago, and you are one click away from ‘expert advice’ or the latest online seminar to overcome any obstacle. Let’s face it – our kids are far more comfortable users and beneficiaries of today’s technology than Gen X or Boomers (although we can still kick their asses in a few things, and we are more likely to own the platforms).
Staying at a job or with one or two employers for 30 or more years so you can have a solid pension isn’t appealing to them. After all, they’ve witnessed your stresses, your health issues, your vacant stares into the abyss of hopeless moments, and your longing to get out, and they have voiced a clear, ‘No, thank you.’ And they have the support systems in place to confidently go for it.
Let me close by voicing the collective feeling of Gen X and Boomers: We want them to go for it. We want them to have a better life. We want all of their dreams to come true. We wish them only the best. But most of all, we will hide our collective envy, because we had responsibilities, so they can have choices.
