Young people still keen to job-hop as they build careers

Canberra move to skills passport could boost the ‘Great Resignation’ according to research

So many workers thinking about a job change. Picture: iStock

The federal government’s white paper on work could lead to more and more Australians embracing the “Great Resignation” trend of recent years and job-hopping with abandon.

That’s the view of Kade Brown, a researcher from RMIT Online who says the government’s commitment to a National Skills Passport for workers, which will list all their credentials. will allow people to become even more mobile.

“I think government is potentially playing a role in enabling this career mobility by putting together this translatable record of skills,” he says. “It takes it away from looking at a resume, which is a very antiquated way of gauging talent and skills and looking at the individual skill level. A younger workforce, which is more minded towards frequent career switching, is going to see this as a way to take the skills they’ve got, prove them and use them as currency to sell themselves into their next role or next promotion.

“We’ve had a vacuum of leadership in getting a common language around this stuff over the years and industry has been crying out for it. Now, government is leading the way on a consistent language and mechanism for measuring skills.”

Mobility is top of mind for many, according to Brown, who is the workforce solutions director at RMIT Online, with a survey revealing one in four workers under the age of 30 is contemplating an imminent career change. That translates to almost 700,000 employees, and Brown argues employers need to understand the trend if they want to retain talent.

Some job-hoppers are driven by salary (47 per cent), but cultural issues such as having great colleagues (60 per cent) and feeling valued (55 per cent) are more important.

He says the broader social culture lends itself to career mobility among the youngest workers in the workforce, and it’s a trend that goes well beyond external stimulus like the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s an entrenched cultural norm now: early career workers thinking very flexibly about their career and their career pathways and looking at ways to execute on that,” he says.

As well, there are fewer barriers to switching jobs than 20 or 30 years ago.

“Historically, particularly in the white-collar context, the idea of executing a career pivot or a career switch meant investing years and tens of thousands of dollars in going back usually to university to do another degree.,” he says.

“(Now) it’s really driven by access to really good, high-quality, bite-sized upskilling solutions that are focused on job-ready skills that can allow people intending on that career switch to get really pointy with the specific skills they need, to do it at the right time and to do it in an affordable way.

“So there’s an enablement piece that was missing in decades gone by that is now there, that is powering this cultural trend towards career-switching.”

Brown says early career professionals’ expectations of their employers are “expanding and growing”.

“And so it’s not just ‘you will treat me as an economic unit that gives you some kind of productivity and you will compensate me for that’,” he says. “It is ‘you will partner with me on my career journey, and you will invest in developing me on a personalised career journey, and we’re in it for the ride together’. There’s a sense of a distributed partnership.”

The partnership has emerged, Brown says, because “the idea of a single entrenched career path that is fit for at least a half a career, if not a whole career, has eroded over many ­decades”.

As well, the tightness of the labour market has encouraged leading employers to lean into this space and position themselves as partners as part of their “employer value ­proposition”.

Brown suggests that the “best in breed” employers need to drive upskilling and career development for their staff.

“There are real commercial outcomes that you can drive through (this),” he says. “We know it’s much more expensive to replace a vacant role from the external talent market than it is to reposition or redeploy from within the existing workforce. We know also if you have a dynamic workforce that you can rescale in a targeted way towards your evolving business priorities, you’ve actually got the ability to really shape that workforce in real time. The employers who are getting it right will see employees sticking around for longer because they see multiple careers for themselves within one organisation. There’s also something to be said around the sentiment of feeling valued as a driver of retention, and that comes through in our research, as well as the people who are feeling dissatisfied with their work. The number one reason is not feeling valued. The signalling that comes with investment in career development from an employer is really powerful in terms of driving satisfaction, and therefore retention.”

Brown says a “best in breed” boss is “really proactive in defining the future skills architecture inside their organisation, is using data to identify where their skills gaps are and who is their highest potential talent to upskill”.

He says: “They’re using skills as the language or the currency within which to do that. So they’re not putting people in boxes based on the org chart, but they’re actually getting a granular view of the unique set of skills that each employee brings. And they’re able to pull together those skills around different business priorities.”

He says that while there was no specific gender lens applied to the research, it suggested that the sense of not feeling valued, including in terms of compensation, as a driver of dissatisfaction was much more prevalent in the female workforce than among men.

The survey found that while 26 per cent of people younger than 30 were considering a career change, only 17 per cent of those over 50 contemplated a change. Level of job satisfaction also varied by industry, ranging from consulting and strategy (87 per cent) to science and technology (60 per cent). In other sectors: healthcare and medical: 86 per cent; engineering: 83 per cent; retail and consumer products: 77 per cent; construction: 77 per cent; banking and financial services: 76 per cent; accounting: 74 per cent; education and training: 74 per cent; manufacturing: 74 per cent; government and defence: 73 per cent; information and communications technology: 73 per cent.

The survey found more than half of younger respondents, 56 per cent, plan to ask their employer for external training or upskilling in the coming months. “Training is viewed as particularly important for young workers, as three in 10 are concerned they do not have the skills to perform in their current role,” it says.

For young workers who report feeling dissatisfied with their current job, not feeling valued was cited as the top reason: 60 per cent. This was closely followed by not having an adequate salary for their role or level of responsibility, and not having clarity about career progression: both 55 per cent.

The survey was produced by RMIT Online in partnership with the market research company Honeycomb. The research team interviewed 1000 Australian workers from July 19 to 28. Working professionals in positions classified as junior, mid-level, senior and owners/CEOs were interviewed, aged 19 to 67.