Dive Brief:
- Members of Generation Z are attracted mostly to tech careers that have a high degree of job security, according to a new report by Indeed. On the whole, the youngest U.S. generation is also attracted to fair and inclusive employers offering purposeful work.
- Indeed polled Gen Zers on their career preferences and found that nearly half of the top 15 job choices are in the tech industry; four of the top five alone were tech jobs, including iOS developer, computer vision engineer, machine learning engineer and audio engineer. Indeed concluded that Gen Zers are naturally drawn to such careers, having grown up during both the Great Recession and the post-iPhone tech wave.
- Alongside careers requiring high education investment like dentist and anesthesiologist, respondents were also interested in taking service-oriented jobs that don't require additional years of school and can be filled immediately, including daycare assistant, bridal consultant and "game master" (the title of those who operate escape room facilities).
Dive Insight:
It is perhaps good news that the youngest entrants into college and the workforce may focus their studies and job hunts on tech careers. Skills gaps have hit the tech industry particularly hard amid high demand, with growth in IT jobs alone being eight times that of other job categories, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of British Columbia study. Gen Zers, defined by statisticians at Pew Research Center as having been born after 1996, have lived through unprecedented technological change and as a result might challenge the perceived "digital native" status that is often conferred on millennials.
Non-tech jobs were also high on Gen Zers' list of preferences, but most jobs today and in the future will require some technological knowledge and skills, a Brookings Institution study found. To succeed in their chosen professions, Gen Zers will likely need to learn new technical skills, even for non-tech professions. Colleges are responding by adding technical training programs in emerging fields, in-person and online.
Colleges will also need to help prepare students to join a five-generation workforce. Research shows that members of multigenerational workforces find it difficult to communicate with co-workers of different age groups. Communication skills among recent graduates were called out as lacking in a recent report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities on the results of parallel surveys of hiring managers and executives.
