Elegant businessman with briefcase jumping against jalousie
They’ve already changed job three, four, five times and they’re not even thirty years old, yet they are hoping to keep on doing this until they get old. And just like that, the Millennial generation, that of those born after 1982, is storing their parents’ dream of having a permanent job up in the attic. Job hopping is a peculiar characteristic observed in those who are at the beginning of their professional career and are still looking for their ideal role. Here, however, we are talking about graduated and employed 30-year-olds from over 29 different countries that, while continuously jumping from one job to another, are still aiming at top roles, improving their range of competences and skills in order to achieve senior positions.
Deloitte has interviewed 7500 of them for the fifth edition of the Global Millennium survey, discovering that they have no interest whatsoever in working a lifetime for the same company: two-thirds of them hopes to change occupation within the next 5 years. Professional longevity is considered a failure. Just like their parents, they dream of settling down, building a family and a home. Yet they don’t want nothing to do with permanent jobs and one person out of four is ready to quit the company they work for and take up another role as soon as they have the chance. A trend born from the belief that a good career can only be achieved by changing often and overcoming new challenges, rather than by staying within the same company.
According to the survey published exclusively on Bloomberg news, the percentage of those who are currently covering managing roles – such as Head of Department or Board of Directors Member – planning to change job before 2020 is an astonishing 57%. These are people who had hit the market in a time of biting recession, surrounded by hyper-competitiveness: to survive they have learnt that their individual professionalism doesn’t rhyme with company loyalty.
If we take into consideration that in the US the vast majority of employed people belongs to the Millennials’ age-range, the employment sector is most likely to experience in the next few years a powerful push towards dynamism and mobility. Frequent changes in the workforce can be a burden for a company, often inefficient and costly. It’s easy to predict that these new dynamics are most likely to affect work relations and companies will have to adapt in order to prevent their most talented employees from leaving, developing projects aiming at professional growth and engagement strategies that will discourage these rampant Millennials from moving on to another firm.