‘Won’t be able to work full-time’: How Gen Alpha will change our workforce forever

Gen Alpha are about to enter the workforce and they are going to make Gen Z seem like a breeze. Here’s why...

The eldest of Gen Alpha are 14, and they will be entering the workforce in a few years time. Picture: Getty

The lingering damage of Covid lockdowns is helping to shape a generation of workers who are “unlike any other that has come before them”.

Generation Alpha – the first to be raised with smart phones and also the first in 100 years to live through a life-changing pandemic – will start to enter the workplace in the next few years, with the oldest turning 15 this year.

But with new figures showing that 466,916 children are failing to attend school full-time in Australia, suffering the debilitating social impacts of anxiety, experts are worried about the future.

Richard Crawshaw is one of those. A former teacher who is now one of the country’s leading voices on school refusal, he warns that the rise of the part-time pupil in Australia will have a grave impact on the future workforce.

“We have around half a million children who aren’t in school full-time,” he explained. “Unless there’s more done to combat school refusal and attendance rates, the next generation to hit the workforce won’t be able to work full-time.”

Concerningly, Crawshaw, who currently helps education departments and schools across Australia with his Can’t Face School organisation, says the rise of high school dropouts, with one in five failing to finish year 12, will cost the economy $12.6bn a year.

It comes as The Advertiser looks at the long-term impact of placing the nation’s children in lockdown during the pandemic, with its new four-part documentary Lockdown Kids: How to Break a Generation.

This week, we revealed that a staggering half a million students failed to attend school full-time in 2024 and in the video above, you can watch parents share their story about school refusal.

A Victoria University study by professors Stephen Lamb and Shuyan Hou looked into the long-term cost of early leavers, revealing that each student who dropped out before Year 12 had a combined cost to taxpayers of $950,800 during their lifetime.

This included lost tax payments, increased expenditure on health and support programs, and welfare. The social cost is a loss of earnings, reduced quality of life and private health costs. The pair stated this was a “conservative” estimation, not taking into consideration future housing.

“Kids don’t just vanish,” Mr Crawshaw explained. “If they don’t go into further education, they don’t get jobs, it costs us in the long-term.”

But perhaps the future is AI? Demographer Mark McCrindle – a leading voice on Gen Alpha – has a lot of optimism for the highly educated, technologically savvy and globally connected workers in an AI-driven business landscape.

McCrindle said resilience and adaptability could be forged by living through oppressive lockdowns and social isolation, but there were also “challenges” for the mental and emotional health of Covid’s “missing cohort”, who dropped out of school and social activities and never went back.

Mark McCrindle says Generation Alpha could forge resilience from their time in lockdowns and isolation but faced challenges to their mental health and social skills. Picture: Glenn Campbell

He said that was already being felt, with the first members of Gen Alpha turning 15 and starting part-time jobs and young, Covid-affected Gen Z workers entering a cutthroat work environment driven by profits and selecting the best.

“What we already hear from employers is that it’s not that independence of thought and productivity or initiative that employers do expect and, indeed, need where they set goals for increased productivity,” Mr McCrindle said.

“Compared to the previous generations, they are shaped in a world where they are given a lot more support and feedback and so they’re not as directive in approach or assertive in manner or extroverted in their social comfort zone.

“They are different because of the times, because of technology, because of events that have shaped them and because of the expectations that society has. All of that has created quite a unique generation entering the workforce.”

Originally published as ‘Won’t be able to work full-time’: How Gen Alpha will change our workforce forever