Gen Z is headed for a career calamity
The generative-AI boom has become a boon for companies that want to automate away spreadsheet building, generic copywriting, and other monotonous tasks in the name of becoming more "efficient." The technology has seized the fascination of CEOs and the workplace industrial complex, leading many companies to give AI a whirl (with mixed results). While executives and the managerial class are all in on AI, there's been less consideration for the people this new tech will actually affect.
The mundane tasks that have so far been targeted for replacement are generally handled by entry-level workers. Managers give these tasks to new hires with the expectation that they'd be done quickly, done right, and done without anyone needing to really explain how to do them. This work was portrayed as a critical part of their development — a way to "earn your stripes" in the workplace.
While tackling grunt work and hoping to learn a job via osmosis isn't a great way to start a career, corporate America has left young workers with few other options. Over the past several decades, many companies have gutted training programs, neglected mentorship, and taken no responsibility for fostering workers' development. Now, with the advent of generative AI, organizations are starting to automate many "junior" tasks — stripping away their dubious last attempt to "teach" young employees. It's no wonder that several surveys have found that members of Gen Z are particularly concerned about AI's effect on their careers; in a recent survey by the job-posting site ZipRecruiter, 76% of Gen Zers indicated they were worried about losing their jobs to ChatGPT.
America's young workers are headed toward a career calamity. They may be more comfortable using ChatGPT and other AI technology than their older coworkers, but the managerial obsession with artificial intelligence threatens to undermine their ability to launch a career. Management spent decades disconnecting themselves from the younger workers who are the backbone of their businesses. And if these executives already won't train their junior employees, it's no surprise they're ready to get rid of them altogether.
Nobody wants to teach anymore
Even before the rise of AI, young people were facing an early-career crisis. Sure, on the surface it seems like Gen Z is entering the workforce at a great time. Finding a job is much easier than it used to be, thanks to historically low unemployment, and wages for young workers have been growing at a strong pace. But if you look deeper, a growing number of signs suggest young Americans are going to have a much tougher time actually building a career.
Gen Z is behind the eight ball even before their first day on the job. As the cost of college has soared, many of them are coming into their first job with a large student-debt burden. A 2022 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that Gen Zers were more likely than millennials were at their age to hold student debt, that Gen Zers' average debt load was 13% higher than millennials' was, and that roughly the same percentage of Gen Zers and millennials had $50,000 or more worth of outstanding student debt.
Don't want to go to college? Tough luck. Despite a recent pushback, the number of jobs requiring a college degree has been growing for decades. Even searching for a first job can leave Gen Zers scratching their heads. A LinkedIn analysis of 3.8 million job postings from 2017 to 2021 found that 35% of entry-level jobs required at least three years of experience. And if you try to go the internship route to get that experience? Good luck. A 2021 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers suggested that over 40% of internships were unpaid and that the average hourly wage for paid interns was just $20.76 in 2020 — a tight budget in many major metropolitan areas.
Once young workers do finally break into the corporate world, they face another brutal reality: Companies have no interest in helping them move up the career ladder. Many companies have shown absolutely no consideration for fostering and developing workers' abilities, leaving young workers to largely fend for themselves as they attempt to establish a career path. A 2014 study by Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, found that in 1979 "young workers received on average about 2.5 weeks of training per year" but that by 1995 it had fallen to just under 11 hours annually. Capelli also found scant evidence that things had improved in the years since.
The US Department of Labor found in 2014 that while 70% of firms offered "some type of training to employees," it was mainly for "management and mid-level workers." This statistic is particularly worrying, partly because "some type of training" is extremely vague and could refer to something as simple as reading the HR handbook, and partly because 30% of firms didn't offer any training at all. More recently, in a survey conducted in 2020 by Paul Osterman, a professor at MIT, slightly less than 50% of employees said they'd received no formal job training from their employer over the past year. Osterman also argued in a discussion of the survey that companies were failing to provide employees with the types of training that would help boost their skills or advance their careers.
You might assume organizations would try to foster mentorship in the workforce as a way to make up for the lack of rigorous training. Not so fast. While mentorship is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that only 44% of Americans workers had one. And while formal mentorship programs exist, they're often voluntary. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that voluntary mentorship programs led to worse outcomes than mandatory ones and that those who most needed the help of a mentor were less likely to join these types of programs.
This may be because workplace cultures often alienate those who ask for help (despite the benefits of doing so), creating a pervasive feeling that organizations don't really care about their employees. In a regular Gallup poll of US workers, only 24% of workers surveyed this May strongly agreed that their organizations cared about their well-being, down from 33% in May 2021 and a remarkable 49% in May 2020. This lack of care is clearly weighing on the young workers who need career development the most. Workplace Intelligence, an HR-research firm, said that in a survey it conducted with Amazon in 2022, 74% of Gen Zers and millennials indicated they were considering leaving their job "due to subpar skills-building support or a lack of career mobility options."
Why train when you can just plug it in?
With no training and no real professional development, young workers in recent years have been left with only one way to learn the ropes on the job: grunt work. In theory, these small jobs were meant to allow young workers to familiarize themselves with simpler processes and prove themselves competent enough to take on more challenging work. But they often resulted in young workers feeling a lack of purpose at work because the work didn't feel like a meaningful contribution to the company or a way to actually progress to the next level. But with the advent of generative AI in the workplace, the jig is up.
AI has already begun to take jobs from workers of all ages, but corporate America's particular disdain for its young means it will hit entry-level workers hardest. It takes a lot of work to "train" a large language model, the type of AI that powers ChatGPT and other similar products. But once that work is done, it's a lot cheaper for businesses to buy some new tech tools than train a real person — consequences be damned. For a managerial class that has all but rejected any responsibility for helping foster workers' growth, all that will matter is whether something is cheap and easy.
The solace for these young workers, the managerial argument goes, is that the most tech-savvy among them will become the minders of these new machines. In reality, this means young people will find themselves cleaning up the deluge of errors these faceless AI tools will spit out, knowing they'll receive less credit because the "work" came from a machine. This has the potential to create a career crisis for young people: If even the faintest amount of freedom is wiped from their work lives, they'll have fewer ways to prove themselves capable of taking on more meaningful work. Promotions will become even more of a game of favorites, with the best "real" tasks reserved for diplomats rather than hard workers. A new AI-powered model benefits established players and empowers America's weak, disconnected management culture that doesn't evaluate actual outputs or creations.
It's no wonder CEOs and higher-ups are much more enthusiastic about integrating AI into the workplace than average employees are. The data company Qualtrics said that in a survey it conducted in May and June, 64% of executives suggested they found the "potential impact of AI" on their workplace exciting. Only 39% of frontline workers said the same, with 46% describing the tech as "scary." Another survey from Boston Consulting Group registered a similar divide: 62% of execs and leaders were enthused about the prospect of using AI at work, compared with 42% of frontline employees. While AI optimists may predict that jobs we can't imagine right now will exist in 10 years, it's hard to imagine, given the ways corporations have deployed new technology, that automation will lead to a society where more people have more economic opportunities.
Train the children — they're our only hope
What's left for America's young workforce? What does a young person do in an office where they're not trained, mentored, or given "real" work? What happens when early-career jobs like data entry and document filing are automated by artificial intelligence?
The irony is that corporate responsibility for employees is actually better for the business. Studies suggest that companies that invest in job training and skill development are more efficient and reap higher profit margins. Despite this evidence, companies have a hard time grasping the value of the investment in their employees. As Ulrich Atz and Tensie Whelan from New York University's Stern Center for Sustainable Business wrote recently in Fortune, corporations often don't have methods to measure the value of human capital beyond simple labor costs, meaning organizations consider humans in the same way they might consider the cost of their water or electric bills. America's rot economy — one where, to quote Atz and Whelan, "companies are pressured to reduce costs in order to return more money to shareholders" — sees immediate revenue growth as the only valuable metric to consider, more important than the long-term value of growing an employee.
There's a better way to work, but I fear the only way for companies to learn the dangers of automation will be through a painful public example of a company that relied too much on AI, like Knight Capital's trading glitch that cost it $440 million. Humans can be enhanced by AI, helped by AI, but replacing them with AI is a shortsighted decision made by myopic bean counters who can't see the value in a person. It's worth considering whether investments in AI should instead be replaced with actual training and mentorship programs with financial rewards.
Young people are facing a reckoning — one where the ballooning costs of college and a lack of future opportunities will run headlong into a corporate America that doesn't recognize the value of investing in real human beings. The result will be a weaker economy with fewer people ready to take on the real challenges posed by new technology. It's a lose-lose proposition for everybody involved.
Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter Where's Your Ed At.