Sean McKeon was 11 years old when the 2008 financial crisis shot anxiety through his life in Hudson, Ohio. He remembers his father coming home stressed after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over the bank where he worked. A teacher asked classmates if their parents cut back that Christmas. They all said yes.
That unsettling time shaped the job plans he hatched in high school. “I needed to work really hard and find a career that’s recession-proof,” says Mr. McKeon, now 21. He set his sights on a Big Four accounting firm. He interned at EY in Cleveland and will become an auditor there after graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, next year.
About 17 million members of Generation Z are now adults and starting to enter the U.S. workforce, and employers haven’t seen a generation like this since the Great Depression. They came of age during recessions, financial crises, war, terror threats, school shootings and under the constant glare of technology and social media. The broad result is a scarred generation, cautious and hardened by economic and social turbulence.
Gen Z totals about 67 million, including those born roughly beginning in 1997 up until a few years ago. Its members are more eager to get rich than the past three generations but are less interested in owning their own businesses, according to surveys. As teenagers many postponed risk-taking rites of passage such as sex, drinking and getting driver’s licenses. Now they are eschewing student debt, having seen prior generations drive it to records, and trying to forge careers that can withstand economic crisis.
Early signs suggest Gen Z workers are more competitive and pragmatic, but also more anxious and reserved, than millennials, the generation of 72 million born from 1981 to 1996, according to executives, managers, generational consultants and multidecade studies of young people. Gen Zers are also the most racially diverse generation in American history: Almost half are a race other than non-Hispanic white.
With the generation of baby boomers retiring and unemployment at historic lows, Gen Z is filling immense gaps in the workforce. Employers, plagued by worker shortages, are trying to adapt.
LinkedIn Corp. and Intuit Inc. have eased requirements that certain hires hold bachelor’s degrees to reach young adults who couldn’t afford college. At campus recruiting events, EY is raffling off computer tablets because competition for top talent is intense.
Companies are reworking training so it replicates YouTube-style videos that appeal to Gen Z workers reared on smartphones.
“They learn new information much more quickly than their predecessors,” says Ray Blanchette, CEO of Ruby Tuesday Inc., which introduced phone videos to teach young workers to grill burgers and slow-cook ribs. Growing up immersed in mobile technology also means “it’s not natural or comfortable for them necessarily to interact one-on-one,” he says.
Demographers see parallels with the Silent Generation, a parsimonious batch born between 1928 and 1945 that carried the economic scars of the Great Depression and World War II into adulthood while reaping the rewards of a booming postwar economy in the 1950s and 1960s. Gen Z is setting out in the workplace at one of the most opportune times in decades, with an unemployment rate of 4%.
