Even before Molly Johnson-Jones graduated from Oxford University in 2015, she felt professional pressure to land a ‘prestigious’ job in a high-powered industry. She says she and her university friends felt there were sectors that carried cachet – particularly the rigorous fields of finance, consulting, medicine and law. That’s why Johnson-Jones ended up in investment banking for two years once she graduated, even though didn’t feel like quite the right fit.
These kinds of “very traditional industries” have indeed carried prestige, says Jonah Stillman, co-founder of GenGuru, a consulting firm that focuses on different generations in the workplace. Stillman, a Gen Zer, says this sentiment is present in higher-education settings, but he adds many people across generations have felt pressure well before university to pursue these paths, including from family members or high-school counsellors.
“We’ve just grown up with this expectation,” says Andrew Roth, 24, who graduated from Tennessee, US-based Vanderbilt University in 2021. “When I got to Vanderbilt, I was pretty quickly drawn into the ‘all roads lead to finance and consulting path’. It just feels very easy to go that way … everyone's going that way.” Roth says he internalized pressure to pursue this path from the atmosphere of his competitive university, his contemporaries and alumni in powerful positions in these industries.
When now 24-year-old Andrew Roth got to university, he said he felt pressure to go into a traditional path (Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Roth)
As Gen Z joins the workforce, however, experts and younger workers say what’s considered a high-status job may be expanding – and even becoming less relevant overall. Some younger workers do still report making money is prestigious, especially as cost of living skyrockets; and working for certain firms or in specific industries can make a career. But many are also emphasising other elements, such as corporate values, flexibility, autonomy and freedom from the long-hours, high-octane grind.
2020 graduate Danielle Farage, 24, says she also felt there was a narrow definition of a prestige job while she was at the University of Southern California, and pronounced pressure to land an elite job, especially from her peers. “It’s very much there, and it’s so intense because everyone posts about their jobs,” says the Gen Zer, based in Brooklyn, New York.
Plenty of Gen Zers – especially those who attend elite universities – still opt for high-profile industries. Farage agrees that many new grads still “want to go the straight-and narrow path”: she knows several contemporaries who are still “very much into the prestige, because everyone around you is like, oh, I need to get a big-five consulting job … I'm going to go intern for this big bank next summer”.
But Farage has also seen many Gen Zers re-define a prestige job as one that enhances their own life. This may include a position that enables a worker to live the lifestyle they want – whether that’s being an entrepreneur, working in an industry that aligns with their values and passion or securing a job that enables them to build their personal brand on the side. Farage is an example; while holding a full-time job as a director of growth and marketing at a start-up, she’s also focusing on building a side business as a work futurist, focusing on the experiences of Gen Z.
Danielle Farage, 24, says values, passion and entrepreneurship are becoming core parts of important jobs (Credit: Courtesy of Danielle Farage)
To be able to “gain in skills in an area of business and build … your passion – to me, that's prestige”, she says.
Roth, too, found himself drawn away from his expected path of finance and consulting, particularly when Covid-19 hit during a semester studying abroad. Throughout the pandemic, he says, it became “very obvious to me that a lot of organizations were having a hard time listening and understanding the needs of young people”. After graduation, he pivoted his plans to entrepreneurship and started dcdx, a Gen Z research and strategy firm.
“It's like our association with prestige has changed,” says New York-based Roth. “Prestige has its association with … following the traditional ways. And I think there's a whole rejection around that, especially for this kind of progressive generation.”
Some data indicates that Gen Z are indeed shifting towards more meaningful work. April 2023 data from LinkedIn of more than 7,000 global workers, reviewed by BBC Worklife, shows 64% of Gen Zers in the UK, France, Germany and Ireland now consider it important to work for companies that are aligned with their values. The data also shows these young workers highlight work-life balance and career growth as top draws for potential workplaces.
Along with Gen Z’s shifting attitudes, embrace of entrepreneurship and emphasis on values, this mindset shift may be in part because mechanisms behind finding jobs and seeing potential alternative career paths are changing, says Josh Graff, managing director of EMEA and LATAM at LinkedIn. With a greater number of jobs being posted online, “people have so much more access to information today than we did when we were applying for a job 20-plus years ago … This allows you to have much better visibility into a wealth of roles”, he says. “That shift in the workplace, in the workforce … is leading people to understand there's a broader array of options out there.”
Molly Johnson-Jones, 30, says millennials are also starting to re-think what it means to work in prestigious jobs (Credit: Courtesy of Molly Johnson-Jones)
Johnson-Jones, now 30, says the changing definition of prestigious work is also trickling up to older generations, including millennials, like herself.
She moved out of investment banking “for her health”, and eventually started her own company: Flexa Careers, a global directory of flexible-work companies. She believes older workers are expressing sentiments similar to Gen Z’s, also having a reckoning with what defines an elite job; they’re similarly re-defining the term as careers that enable better lifestyles.
But the difference, says Johnson-Jones, is that many millennials are re-imagining this definition out of necessity, often having been ground down by the very competitive, long-hours industries they felt they ‘had’ to enter out of university. “We don't need to be working 60 hours a week in an office just for a title or decent pay,” she says. “Because how many people have time to spend the money, anyway?”
For his part, Roth believes many of his friends who did go the traditional prestige route are also re-thinking their choices. “I think a lot of them are actually looking at me with a little bit of envy and saying, ‘hey, I wish I would have done something similar to you did’. People are coming around to that mindset.”