Apparently, this is how it works these days when a company is desperate to fill a vacancy: A young university graduate comes along, deeply relaxed, he sits down for the interview and starts by listing all the things he can’t do with him. Overtime? phew Short-term extra work at the expense of friends and hobbies? Difficult to imagine. Availability after work? Immediately reported to the nearest police station. Instead, the young applicant wants a four-day week and regular time off. The older baby boomers are retiring in droves, the offspring is scarce, they know about their market power – and play it mercilessly.
At least that’s how the cliché of Generation Z goes: With the 16 to 28-year-olds, a cohort is said to be entering the job market who no longer want to sacrifice themselves for the job and have internally resigned before the first day of work and adopt the so-called quiet quitting as a way of life celebrated. But is that true?
New numbers that are available to the SZ in advance paint a different picture. On behalf of the LinkedIn careers network, the opinion research institute Yougov surveyed around 2,500 people aged 16 to 28. 60 percent of them say they want to make a career quickly and earn a lot of money. 52 percent would accept sacrifices for the job, i.e. would work overtime or move for the employer. 81 percent are willing to do a lot if they see meaning in their work.
Apparently the young generation thinks quite traditionally. For Generation Z, too, the most important criterion when deciding on a job is salary. Half of those surveyed attach importance to fair payment; a good work-life balance is particularly relevant for just over a third. A diverse work environment or a company whose values you can share are far behind criteria.
Younger employees also do not seem to have the feeling that they can dictate their conditions to companies. Only 16 percent of the 16 to 28-year-olds surveyed stated that they would benefit from the shortage of skilled workers on the labor market. From the point of view of the younger generation, it is obviously more the companies that make the specifications. For example, 58 percent of those surveyed still have the impression that employers formulate unrealistic requirements in job advertisements.
In many questions, the generations hardly differ
In any case, researchers warn against the generation label in the professional world: there is often little behind it. The Leipziger Work psychologist Hannes Zacher complained aboutthat the postulated labels could hardly be supported by empirical studies – often for methodological reasons alone: one would have to observe the members of a generation for several decades in order to find out with certainty whether their values and expectations actually deviate from those of previous birth cohorts. Maybe the members of Generation Z only see things differently because they are younger – and at some point they will tick like the baby boomers when they get to their age.
The Marburg sociologist Martin Schröder has in a major investigation compared the attitudes of all post-war generations during similar periods of life. His result: In their youth, the different generations actually thought surprisingly the same on many points. Self-realization was just as important to the young baby boomer as it was to the child of the 80s in his youth. And those who were born in the 1980s were just as interested in professional success as young people as the young people of 1968 before them. Neither were some particularly lazy, nor were the others conspicuously willing to perform, the generations were largely similar.
That caution should be exercised when speaking of Generation Z is also evident when you look back a few years and a letter in the alphabet. When Generation Z was still in school, HR managers had lively discussions about Generation Y, who behaved very differently on the labor market: who no longer wanted to sacrifice themselves for their job and who did not put their career first. Again, these attributions sound fairly familiar.