Why do young people hate their jobs? I’ll give you a clue

Five young friends meet in bar. All of them had been to university. Four had graduated, and one dropped out. All are now about 23 years old, and all of them are in “good” professional jobs.

When a friend old enough to be their mother asked them about their work, in unison they replied, “we hate our jobs”.

If a mortgage is out of reach, it is a lot easier to skip jobs, notwithstanding eye-watering rents.Credit: Peter Rae

You’d be forgiven for thinking these women were slaving away in lower-skilled roles inconsistent with their education. However, respectively, they have roles as a: team leader of lawyers; administrative assistant; medical scientist; human resources manager; and marketing specialist. With the exception, of course, of human resources, not much to hate there as you might have thought.

Notwithstanding some concerns I have about the methodology, Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce Survey for 2023, reinforces the concerns about levels of job satisfaction. In Australia and New Zealand they report almost half (47 per cent) report daily stress, and 15 per cent report anger.

Actually according to Gallup, women are faring slightly better: 25 per cent as a whole are thriving at work, the rest they define as being in different volumes (quiet/loud) of quitting. Even, allowing for arguments about definitions of engagement, if you doubled the number who are thriving, it would still leave half the working population disengaged or looking to quit. Certainly, my unscientific observation of these five women points in that direction.

In doctoral research conducted by Dr Tony Borg under my supervision, Tony found that 88 per cent to 90 per cent of school-leavers who left to go to work, had experienced significant change in their career plans 18 months later.

If work cannot deliver the basic rewards of stable shelter, why be a slave to work?

Eighty-two per cent of those students who went on to university had experienced significant changes to their plans, and 73 per cent of students were not in the occupation that they planned at school.

What does all of this mean? I suspect nobody really knows for sure, and the reasons are multifarious. For instance, it is not uncommon for people in the early part of their careers to experience disillusionment with work, and also to find the transition challenging moving from a generally more supportive and gentler school environment to work.

In other words, graduates and young people are whingers, ignore them. But if that was the case, why do large organisations spend significant sums marketing to graduates to recruit the next cohort into their ranks?

Others point the finger at bad advice from career advisors, especially those advisors students encountered at school. This is generally an unfair and harsh conclusion, and it ignores the fact that people, labour markets and circumstances all change.

It is not surprising that so many students end up changing their career paths. The answer is not the cheap and nasty approach of providing students more information; they have never before in history had such easy access to so much vocational information.

Rather, there should be more emphasis on equipping students with the skills to explore, navigate and make changes that work for them at the time. Long-term career plans set in stone are as likely to be as useful as long-range economic forecasts.

Is it possible that we are beginning to see a weakening of the traditional motivation that a good job is pathway to being able to achieve home ownership?

We have now reached a position where a family home, be it a house or unit has moved from being aspirational and attainable to a pipe dream without external financial assistance from the bank of mum and dad for the privileged few.

In January this year, this masthead reported that median unit price in Melbourne was $579,506 and in Sydney it was $795,994. That suggests a bare minimum deposit of between $58,000 and $80,000 on a 10 per cent deposit or double that for a 20 per cent deposit.

Even if graduates landed a role in a big corporate law or finance company, they would be doing very well to exceed a $100,000 salary, and are far more likely to be in the $50,000 to $80,000 range. The numbers just do not stack up.

If a mortgage is out of reach, it is a lot easier to skip jobs, notwithstanding eye-watering rents. If work cannot deliver the basic rewards of stable shelter, why be a slave to work?

The way we work and why we work is being questioned more and more. The struggles of the last century to achieve improved safety, working conditions and salaries are not delivering sufficiently for workers in the 21st century.

For all the HR blather about engagement, and team-bonding and the rest of it, an increasing number of workers are not buying. It seems too many people hate their jobs like the five women I heard, and it is not clear that very much is being done to address this.

Dr Jim Bright FAPS owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy, and is director of evidence & impact at BECOME Education. Email to [e-mail]. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright

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