What risky behavior are young people engaging in that their parents likely didn't? Switching jobs, and quitting a career without a firm backup plan.
The US Department of Labor reported people born in the early 1980s have held an average of 6.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 26. Unlike their parents, young workers are increasingly likely to freelance in a market that values immediate results over long-term commitments.
Writing in The New York Times, Hannah Seligsen noted that the new wave of young workers pursues jobs with a fearlessness — some would say recklessness — that their parents did not, or could not.
These days, many people in their 20s and 30s are eager to push themselves into entirely different careers, whether because the economy is telling them to do so, their ambitions are signaling that it's time for a change, or they've been laid off. And if they are childless, this may be a good time to take the financial risk of not working for a while. A result of all this is that career gaps can be an acceptable option for my generation.
Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that US unemployment fell to 5.9 percent in October, while 214,000 jobs were added. While the overall economy may appear to be humming along, not everyone is feeling the benefit.
"It's difficult to find work in an economy that is growing in uneven ways," Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn said on Boston Public Radio. "There is lots of macro growth, but (...) it's rewarding people very unevenly."
Koehn said the notion of a career is being quickly redefined, which has produced uncertainty for new job-seekers looking for a foothold. "What the future highway is for work and careers for people now in their 20s and early 30s [is changing], and there is a lot of hand-wringing."
Koehn also said the days of having one job for an entire career may be over. "In a job environment in which the social contract of working for one company for a long time — and collecting retirement — is over and broken and not yet replaced by something that has any resemblance to that, we're all going to have to do a lot of reinvention."
But while it's daunting to polish up a resumé or enroll in continuing education classes, career reinvention is hardly a new notion. "At the beginning of industrialization in the late 19th century, all kinds of people started on the farm, took a career gap to move to the city — started in stenography pools and worked their way up, often, or started on the floor of Marshall Field's selling scarves and hats to Chicago women, and worked their way up to be department head," Koehn said.
"The more common equilibrium is of people constantly reinventing themselves over a lifetime. Less about career, more about lots of different jobs. The exception is, actually, what we have known over the last 60 years," Koehn said.
In Koehn's view, what workers in their 20s and 30s are experiencing may just be a return, at last, to normalcy.
>> To hear the entire Koehn interview, click the audio above.
