Gen Z In The Workplace, Minus The Stereotypes

Gen Z in the workplace means employees born between the mid-1990s and about 2010.

Career advisers in Europe and the United States report that they look for visible progression, flexible working, fair pay and health cover that includes mental health.

Several of those expectations describe any early-career employee in a difficult graduate labour market.

An HR team can test which explanation fits its own people.

The answer decides whether the right response is a programme for a birth cohort or a change to how the first two years of employment work.

Evidence Behind The Claims

Claims about Gen Z at work rest on three kinds of evidence.

Each has a limit that a practitioner should know before quoting it.

• Large surveys. Run by consultancies and job platforms, with answers that shift with the wording of the question

• Official statistics. Workforce shares and unemployment rates, which describe an age band and say nothing about attitudes

• Qualitative research. Interviews with people who work with graduates, reporting what those people observe

Kochhan and Bolduan interviewed eight career advisers who lead university career services.

Four work in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and four in the United States.

The findings are therefore second-hand, drawn from what people who advise graduates every week have observed.

Even the cohort's boundaries vary by source.

Pew Research dates Gen Z from 1997 to 2012, and Kochhan and Bolduan use 1995 to 2010.

The Swiss workforce figures reported by Instenberg, Rehfeld and Pinanditya use 1996 to 2009.

A statistic about Gen Z therefore describes a slightly different group of people depending on who produced it.

In Switzerland, Gen Z made up 17.1 per cent of the workforce in 2024, already above the baby boomers at 11.6 per cent.

Generation, Life Stage And Labour Market

Lapa and Álvares, drawing on Arber and Ginn, separate three reasons why young employees might differ from older colleagues at a given moment.

• Generational effect. Values formed in youth that persist through life

• Life-cycle effect. Behaviour that changes with age and responsibilities, such as entering the job market or starting a family

• Period effect. A change that affects every generation at once, such as a pandemic or an economic crisis

Only the first justifies a strategy aimed at a birth cohort.

The other two call for policies aimed at a career stage, or at the whole workforce.

Lapa and Álvares conclude that it remains uncertain whether the practices associated with Gen Z reflect a stable generational outlook or a specific stage of life.

Job switching is the clearest case.

The career advisers in Kochhan and Bolduan's research observed that younger generations are more likely to change jobs.

Older generations, they noted, tend to stay longer with their employer.

A life-cycle effect would produce that pattern in any decade.

People early in a career usually have fewer ties, such as seniority, pension rights or a family settled in one place.

Pay expectations and job security both carry a period effect.

European advisers linked rising salary expectations to inflation and living costs, and US advisers to housing costs and student debt.

Those pressures fall on anyone starting a career now, whatever their birth year.

In July 2025 the US unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds was 10.8 per cent, against 4.3 per cent overall, according to BLS figures.

One US adviser reported that job security, long absent from students' priorities, had moved back to the top of them.

A European adviser described two possible futures.

In one, employers compete harder for graduates, and in the other, graduates struggle to find roles.

The same adviser said it was uncertain whether today's demands on employers would last.

Expectations Reported Across Countries

Across the five countries, the career advisers described a consistent set of expectations.

• A culture whose stated values, including sustainability and diversity, match what the organisation does

• A visible route to progression, shown through people who took it

• Flexible working, with guidance on when and how it applies

• Fair pay and benefits, treated as a given

• Health cover that includes mental health, especially in the United States

• Feedback given as coaching, with clear statements of what is expected

US advisers said many graduates leave once they feel they have learned what they can, often after about two years.

In their view, a credible career path keeps people longer.

Two further details bear directly on HR policy.

Graduates often say pay matters less than other factors while holding high salary expectations, and those expectations vary by subject studied.

Salary benchmarks for graduate offers therefore need to be set by discipline.

One European adviser added that women often start with lower salary expectations, and that the gap shows up in negotiation.

A published graduate pay range reduces that gap.

Graduates also want independence and guidance at the same time.

Advisers described new hires who expect flexibility but need to be told when and how it applies.

The same new hires want to know exactly what is expected of them, so that they can deliver it.

Written rules on flexible working and written performance expectations meet both needs.