Employers have just started to wrap their heads around Millennials—now enter the next set of employees: Gen Z! How will the up-and-coming “iGeneration” affect the future of work? For a preview of how those born between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s will want to experience the workplace, just look to what higher education is doing.
Like the war for talent raging in the corporate world, college and university leaders are facing their own battle to recruit and retain prize students. Glossy catalogues featuring dreamy campuses remain a key tactic. However, more than just an attractive picture, higher ed leaders are finding that it’s the experience that counts.
As Gen Z starts their final years of education, colleges and universities are striving to deliver campus experiences that inspire and support their unique learning styles because, as you may suspect, Generation Z will be one for the workplace history books.
Enter the true digital natives
Millennials may have grown up with technology, but the iGen cannot remember a world without the Internet. They are the true digital natives, which makes connectivity not a must, but a given.
They are independent and entrepreneurial. Having grown up through times of economic, social and political turmoil, they tend to be less idealistic and even more pragmatic than Millennials. Despite that, they also expect certain amenities that in previous generations would have been considered privileges.
And they appear ready to work on their own to ensure they get what they want. One survey found that nearly 70 percent of Gen Z teens are “self-employed”—that is, teaching piano lessons or selling things online—compared with only 12 percent who are holding down “traditional teen jobs” like waiting tables. And another poll found that 42 percent of today’s teens expect to work for themselves one day—far more than the 1-in-10 that are actually self-employed today.