iGen

by Jean M. Twenge

Income Insecurity: Working to Earn—but Not to Shop

  Darnell, 20, chuckles a little when I ask him if he will need to find a job that will help him pay off his college student loans. “Absolutely,” he says with a laugh that reminds me of Eddie Murphy’s, friendly and ironic at the same time. Darnell is a junior majoring in business at a state university near Atlanta. He grew up in a midsize town near the Georgia-Florida line and attended a private high school that gave him the opportunity to get an internship at a bank. When I ask him how he decided to major in business, he says, “I felt like I’d be able to find a job. I didn’t want to major in something and then not get a job in the field that I studied.” I ask if he always wanted to go into business. “At one point I did want to be an actor, but that’s a really competitive field and it’s not a guarantee that you’ll get a job. So I had to put that away,” he said.

  When I meet 18-year-old Haley for lunch in San Diego, one of the first things she tells me is that she is an artist and an actress, rattling off the titles of the plays and musicals she has performed in community theater and in high school. She and a friend have been working on writing a video game for two years. Creative endeavors are clearly her passion. “Are you going to pursue art or acting as a career?” I ask. “No,” she says. “I wanted to go to art school to learn animation, but my parents were like, ‘Mmm, you should probably pick something a little more practical.’ And I get it, it’s very, very competitive, and if you’re not incredible and amazing and already know people, then you’re not going to be successful. So I decided, second best thing, I want to be a forensic psychologist.” She’s still working on her video game and still draws, but these things will be hobbies instead of a career.

  Nineteen-year-old college sophomore Ahmed, who’s from Cincinnati, Ohio, decided to major in accounting and can tell you exactly why. “Job security is really good for accountants,” he says. “You are almost never the one on the cutting block in downsizing or restructuring, [because] you are more privy to key operational data that cannot be easily replaced.”

  iGen’ers are practical, forward looking, and safe, a far cry from the “You can be anything” and “Follow your dreams” Millennials. With managers focusing on Millennial employees in the last decades, little time has been spent understanding what might motivate iGen’ers in their careers. That will soon change: iGen’ers already make up the majority of traditional-age college graduates and will soon dominate the pool of entry-level talent. Given the key differences between iGen’ers and Millennials, the strategies that leaders have been using to recruit and retain young employees may no longer work. The same is true for marketing to iGen’ers—with a decidedly different psychological profile, selling to iGen’ers varies considerably from selling to Millennials. Businesses and managers need to take note: a new generation is arriving on your doorstep, and its members might not be what you expect.

  The Best Part of the Job

  It’s the day after New Year’s when I arrive at my friend’s house just outside Los Angeles. Her parents are visiting for the holidays, and they clatter pots and pans in the kitchen while my friend and I sit in the living room with her son Leo, 14, and daughter Julia, 16. Julia and Leo attend a private high school a fair distance from their house, and Julia uses her newly acquired driver’s license to drive them back and forth to school. They’re both quiet and introspective, but I finally get them talking when I ask what they want out of a job when they get older. “A job where I can make money—enough money, it doesn’t have to be too much,” Julia says. “I’d like to enjoy my job,” Leo says. “I’d like to just not hate it,” counters Julia. “I’d like to have a job that wouldn’t take over my life and would pay enough money. I wouldn’t want a job where I’d have to work so many hours—like a lawyer,” she continues. They both say they would rank money first for what they wanted out of a job.

  It’s a different view than the common perceptions of young workers. The current trope is that Millennials want jobs that are interesting and inherently rewarding. Today’s young employees, it’s assumed, will leave unless they get a lot of enjoyment out of their jobs.

  The data over time, however, paint a much more practical picture of iGen’ers—and even of Millennials. Compared to previous generations at the same age, slightly fewer iGen’ers and late Millennials are focused on intrinsic rewards, such as a job that is interesting, where you can learn new things, and where you can see the results of what you do (see Figure 7.1). Like Julia, many iGen’ers just want not to hate their jobs.

  Figure 7.1. Job attributes judged as very important by 12th graders. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

  The other big story is the decline in the importance of the social attributes of a job, such as making friends at work and having a job where you can interact with lots of people. iGen’ers are less focused on this; just as they interact less with their friends in person during their leisure time, they are less interested in face-to-face social interaction at work. This is likely a surprise to many generational consultants who draw from one-time studies, who assume that Millennials and iGen’ers are more interested in the social aspects of work. However, young employees’ interest in social activities might be more a function of their age than their generation: unmarried and without children, young people have more time and more need for social activities. But when compared to previous generations at the same age, iGen’ers are less interested in making friends at work.

  Overall, the things that many Boomers and GenX’ers enjoy the most about their jobs—interesting work, friends—are just not as important to iGen’ers. They just want the job. “We should all be less interested in jobs that are interesting or encourage creativity because they don’t pay anything. That’s why you see so many people my age 100k in debt and working at a Starbucks,” wrote Jordan, 23.

  iGen’s practical focus also appears in work-life balance—the idea that work should not crowd out the rest of life. When my colleagues and I analyzed these data back in 2006, the importance of leisure values was the largest generational difference: Millennials were significantly more likely than Boomers to say they wanted jobs that provided more vacation time, an easy pace, and little supervision and that left a lot of time for other things in their lives. iGen’ers have backed off those requests somewhat, returning the desire for work-life balance to where it was in the early 1990s. Perhaps because they grew up during the Great Recession, iGen’ers are more realistic about work and its demands.

  iGen’ers might also be reversing one of the most striking trends in young people’s work attitudes—their declining belief that work will be central to their lives. Millennials just didn’t believe work was going to be as important to them as Boomers did; they wanted to focus more on other things in their lives. iGen’ers have turned that around, returning work centrality to the levels of GenX’ers in the 1990s—though that’s still considerably lower than Boomers’ work centrality in the 1970s (see Figure 7.2). Disagreeing that “Work is nothing more than making a living” shows a similar trend, though here iGen’ers have arrested the downward trend but not improved it. Like Julia, many iGen’ers don’t want to have jobs that “take over my life.”

  Figure 7.2. 12th graders’ work centrality. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

  What about work ethic? Boomer managers often complain that their Millennial employees aren’t as focused on work as they were. But maybe managers have always thought that about their young charges—after all, just about every manager wants his or her employees to focus more on work, and just about every older adult has exaggerated the virtues of their younger selves. In 2016, an article in Forbes made the bold statement that there was no evidence for generational differences in work ethic. However, it named only a few smaller studies, including one that could not separate age from generation, another with no generational comparison group at all, and one about the hours business students expect to work—not about the hours they would like to work. Those are not great data to determine whether t
here is a generational difference in work ethic.

  In fact, there is clear evidence for a generational shift in work ethic, and it validates managers’ perceptions. The Millennials’ work ethic was lower than Boomers’ and GenX’ers’ was at the same age—fewer were willing to work overtime, fewer wanted to work if they had enough money, and more said that “not wanting to work hard” might prevent them from getting the job they want (see Figure 7.3). Remember: this is based on what young people say about themselves, not others’ judgments. As high school seniors in the 2000s, nearly 40% of Millennials said they didn’t want to work that hard (an opinion embraced by only 25% of Boomers), and fewer than half definitely agreed that they would be willing to work overtime to do a good job.

  Figure 7.3. 12th graders’ work ethic. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

  But there might be relief around the corner for managers: the iGen’ers just arriving on their doorstep have a more substantial work ethic. Fifty-five percent of 2015 high school seniors agree that they are willing to work overtime, up from 44% in 2004. Fewer iGen’ers said they would want to stop working if they had enough money. However, iGen’ers have continued the Millennials’ trend toward saying they don’t want to work hard. Apparently, iGen’ers know that they may have to work overtime, but they believe that many of the jobs they’d want would require too much effort. It’s just too hard to succeed today, they seem to be saying.

  This attitude may begin with the pressure iGen’ers feel to get a college degree. When I asked my students at SDSU how their lives differed from their parents’, most mentioned the necessity of a college degree. Many of their parents were immigrants who had worked at low-level jobs but had still been able to buy houses and provide for their families. Today, my students say, they have to get a college education to get the same things that their parents got with a high school diploma or less. “My generation is stressed beyond belief because of college! When you graduate [from] high school, you are pushed to then go into college, get your masters then have this awesome job,” wrote Jasmine, 21. “My father’s generation was different. He was born in the 70’s and despite never going to college he has a great paying job. That is not a reality for my generation. You are not even guaranteed a job after going to college! And once we graduate we are in debt up to our ears!”

  It’s true that Jasmine’s statements have a tinge of entitlement (“What do you mean, I’m not guaranteed a job?”). But her comments also reveal an underlying exhaustion; she feels she needs to run twice as fast to get half as much. My students seemed envious of their uneducated parents, who could get good jobs without having to slog through four (or more) expensive years of college.

  They have a point: the wages of Americans with just a high school education declined by 13% between 1990 and 2013, making a college education more crucial for staying middle class. At the same time, college has become more expensive: due to cutbacks in state funds for education and other factors, college tuition has skyrocketed, forcing many students to take out loans. The average student graduating in 2016 carried $37,173 in debt upon graduation, up from $22,575 in 2005 and $9,727 in 1993. iGen’ers are caught in a bind: they need to get a college education to get ahead, but they have to take out hefty student loans to pay for it. No wonder they are exhausted and just want a job—any job that can pay off their loans.

  A Place to Work

  Some observers have suggested that companies might have a hard time recruiting iGen and young Millennial employees because they all want to be their own bosses and start their own companies. A report by the advertising firm Sparks & Honey concluded that “entrepreneurship is in [iGen’s] DNA” because it found that more high school students (as opposed to college students) wanted to start a business someday. But this could be a function of age; high school students may have always been more optimistic about owning their own businesses than college students are (not to mention that some of the true entrepreneurs might have left college). Nevertheless, many experts believe that the same entrepreneurial spirit is ascendant among Millennials. “Millennials are realizing that starting a company, even if it crashes and burns, teaches them more in two years than sitting in a cubicle for 20 years,” the management professor Fred Tuffile told Forbes. “While they know their chances of creating another Facebook are low, they do think it’s fairly easy to create a cool startup.” Tuffile based his comments on a Bentley University survey finding that 67% of young people want to start their own business. But notice that that survey sampled only one generation at one time; there is no comparison group. Maybe Boomers and GenX’ers were just as likely, or even more likely, to want to be entrepreneurs when they were young.

  As it turns out, iGen’ers are actually less likely to want to own their own business than Boomers and GenX’ers were at the same age, continuing a trend started by Millennials (see Figure 7.4). Just as they are cautious about driving, drinking, and dating, iGen’ers are cautious about going into business for themselves.

  Figure 7.4. Percentage of 12th graders who believe that certain work settings are “desirable” places to work. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

  Entering college students show the same trend: in 2016, only 37% said that “becoming successful in a business of my own” was important, down from 50% in 1984 (adjusted for relative centrality). So, compared to GenX college students, iGen’ers are less likely to be drawn to entrepreneurship.

  These beliefs are affecting actual behavior. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data found that only 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned at least part of a private company in 2013, down from 10.6% in 1989. All the talk about the young generation being attracted to entrepreneurship turns out to be just that—talk.

  Why the decline in entrepreneurship? Starting your own business is inherently risky, and, as we saw in chapter 6, risk is an iGen no-no. “A stable job means secure income, being able to buy the things we want, and feeling safe,” says Kayla, 22, who is a week from graduating with her degree in nursing. To her, stability does not include starting your own business. “We saw lots of businesses failing in the last decade or so,” she says. “I don’t want to be living out on the streets. And neither does anyone else.”

  iGen’ers are also less drawn to having jobs in large corporations but more interested than Millennials were in industries they might perceive as more stable, particularly the military (the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have something to do with that). They also express more interest in joining the police force. Even though those are potentially physically dangerous jobs, they provide a steady paycheck, with few layoffs. Overall, iGen’ers take a more neutral stance on various workplaces, rating well-liked industries lower than Boomers did and rating less popular industries higher than Boomers did. Apparently, iGen’ers see these very different work settings as more similar than previous generations did; they are less likely to rate them high but also less likely to rate them low. They don’t seem to care as much about where they will work; they just want . . . a job.

  At least, some of them do.

  Working Is for Old People

  “Every time I see it, that number blows my mind,” University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst said in 2016. The number he was referring to was the percentage of non-college-educated young men in their twenties who had not worked at all in the past year: about one out of four, according to his calculations of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. For nearly all of the twentieth century, men in their twenties were the most reliably employed of all demographic groups, with nearly 85% in the workforce. Not anymore.

  I wondered if the trend extended to all men regardless of their education. It did: the employment rate of men in their early twenties reached all-time lows in the 2010s; by 2016, one out of four men in their early twenties was not working. The recent drop wasn’t due to more men going to college; the number of men enrolling in college was fairly steady, yet fewer young men were working. (Hurst also concluded that school enroll
ment was not responsible for the decrease in employment.) It’s also not solely due to the Great Recession; the decline in young men’s employment began before the recession (around 2000) and has continued after it, with employment rates in 2016 (73%) still several percentage points below the rate in 2007 (79%). Those are years with similar low unemployment rates, but the unemployment rate does not include those who are not even looking for a job.

  It’s usually more difficult to compare the employment over time of men and women combined, because in past decades many young women were home with young children, and now that’s less common. That’s probably why the percentage of men and women (combined) who were employed increased steadily between the 1960s and 2000. But around 2000, that trend began to shift (see Figure 7.5). In the decade and a half between 2000 and 2016, fewer and fewer young people held jobs. The slide follows a near-perfect progression by age, with young teens showing the biggest declines, followed by older teens, followed by those in their early twenties. Americans over 25, on the other hand, were working in 2016 at about the same rate as they did before the Great Recession, missing their prerecession employment rates by just a few percentage points. This graph bears a remarkable resemblance to the chapter 1 graph on alcohol use: the declines are the largest for the youngest groups and get progressively less steep, suggesting a postponement of the activity until older ages. Working, like drinking, is now for people over 21—and maybe over 25.

  Figure 7.5. Percentage of Americans employed, by age group. Current Population Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1948–2016.

  Like the trends for men only, this does not appear to be due to college enrollment, which increased substantially in the 1980s and 1990s but then leveled off after the mid-2000s. College enrollment also can’t explain the drop in the employment of 16- to 17-year-olds, which was the largest.