Make way for Gen Z: Young Australians are rewriting the rules of work

Two years after graduating from his teaching degree, Will Booker works in an abandoned school building with not a student in sight. An old classroom in Sydney’s north has been transformed into the office of his employer, a socially conscious start-up called Communiteer.

Booker’s job at the social enterprise is to connect corporate workers with skilled volunteering opportunities at charities. It’s certainly not what he expected to do when he began studying, and says his career switch can be attributed to, strangely enough, pandemic doomscrolling.

“You can ... get in these loops on social media that just keep showing you all the crap happening around the world,” Booker tells the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“So I think people are living their lives with [a desire to make the world a better place] in mind.”

The 23-year-old’s sentiments are shared by many of his Generation Z peers – loosely defined as being born between 1995 and 2009 – and will make up a third of Australia’s workforce by 2030. Determined to make a difference, they are sweeping into the workplace (real and virtual) with the expectation that employers align with their values, not the other way around.

“They are the most technologically supplied, formally educated, globally connected, and socially aware generation in history,” says demographer and social researcher Mark McCrindle.

The expectations of this group are high. McCrindle argues that what motivates this generation – which he says has grown up indignant about climate inaction, disillusioned by a culture of profit at the cost of other outcomes, and forced to start their careers in a global pandemic – is markedly different from generations past, who were more content to collect a pay cheque and call it a day.

“We’ve got a generation looking for careers and roles that are around purpose, meaning, values resonance, community connection and making a difference or having an impact,” says McCrindle, author of the 2019 report Understanding Generation Z.

These young adults walk onto the job with diversity, inclusion and social impact as priorities from day one. The result is a refreshed outlook on leadership that begins when they’re hired and comes into fullness when they step into management roles. And they certainly have career ambitions: 63 per cent said advancement opportunities were a crucial workplace attribute, second only to workplace wellbeing (72 per cent).

“They’re bringing about change in organisations because they’re asking these questions. They’re changing workplace culture,” says McCrindle. “There’s a collegiality, a flatter structure of interaction and social connection.”

Employers should take heed. “The [old] hierarchy is not a place that has a long span. This next generation is ushering this in.”

Self-empowerment is another defining characteristic of Gen Z. Unlike millennials, who came of age alongside the internet and began wielding smartphones only in their teens, Gen Z have been digital natives virtually since birth. A whopping 86 per cent of Gen Z-ers expect to be entrepreneurs of some sort in the future, either as a side-hustle or as their main job, McCrindle research shows.

Not only that, but they are conscious that they are inheriting a world economically stacked against them. McCrindle points out that some of Gen Z’s earliest experiences are of the decade-long impacts of the global financial crisis, in which flat wages growth became the norm.

Not only is Generation Z the most entrepreneurial generation of our time, but they carry a conviction of collective responsibility – and have the means to do something about it.

“They’re combining economic pragmatism ... with digital savvy and intuitive technology skills to move to this entrepreneurial mindset,” McCrindle says.

Money or motivation? Gen Z wants both

But it’s not to say this generation will sacrifice remuneration for their noble ideals. The war for talent triggered by a COVID-driven shrunken talent pool has raised salary expectations.

Grant Robson, vice president of sales at graduate recruitment company GradAustralia, says employers were in the driver’s seat four years ago amid an oversupply of graduates and interns.

Not anymore. “The ball is in [Gen Z’s] court,” he says. “This current generation has figured out … they’ve got more authority to start asking: ‘what can you do for me?’”

In 2019, salary was the sixth most important factor for graduates when considering a job offer; this year it’s second, ranking only behind the work itself.

But a good salary itself won’t be enough to make Gen Z stick around. Manon te Riele, who works in PwC Melbourne’s cybersecurity division, has seen some of her friends quit their jobs because they didn’t feel their work was contributing to the greater good.

“People are becoming a lot more picky about the work they’re doing,” she says. “They want to feel like there’s a point to it.”

Though te Riele is only 23, she’s a very active employee. Often finding herself the only woman in the room, te Riele has joined the company’s Women in Cybersecurity and Technology group. Her passion for mental health has found an outlet through PwC’s Green Light to Talk program.

“I don’t want to dial myself down for work,” she says. “I’m a mental health advocate … I’m really focused on making sure we can bring our whole selves to work.”

‘Problem solvers’ drift to new platforms

A new ecosystem of apps, communities and education providers has emerged to cater to Gen Z workers who aren’t satisfied with traditional university courses or job sites.

Jeanette Cheah runs HEX, an education technology provider that aims to be the “innovation gap year” for high school and university students. With a curriculum co-designed by Atlassian, HEX is arming students with design thinking, leadership and technical skills to work in the tech sector and for jobs that don’t yet exist.

Cheah wants to plug a hole left by idle university degrees that she believes aren’t closely aligned with industry and don’t recognise Gen Z’s strengths.

“Young people are already sophisticated digital consumers. Education often doesn’t treat them as such,” she says. Conventional careers such as medicine, law and engineering are still popular, but there’s a “big chunk” of students becoming curious about what a product manager or a UI designer is.

“There’s a really big gap in understanding what the new roles are, which is why I think school focus needs to be on capability.”

The proportion of HEX students eager to work on ethical, sustainable or socially conscious projects has risen from 10 per cent to 40 per cent, Cheah says. “They see their role as being problem solvers.”

The youngest members of Australia’s workforce are finding their next career move not so much on Seek, but through communities including the 10,000 member strong Ripple, which lists “impact opportunities” from community organisations and not-for-profits (for example, Who Gives A Crap) and start-up unicorns (Canva) to global organisations such as the UN.

In this information age, Gen Z doesn’t need help putting a resume together, says Ripple co-founder Skye Riggs.

“The challenge they’re facing is the huge sense of being overwhelmed by: how do I build out a career I love? How do I develop experience in these entry-level roles; who do I go to for advice?” she says.

“That’s where community plays a really big role.”

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