Gen Z is often derided as a lazy, unambitious generation of workers uninterested in climbing the corporate ladder. But contrary to popular belief, they’re just as determined as millennials or Gen Xers to get their careers off the ground, despite the odds seemingly stacked against them. From AI agents taking over entry-level roles to employers padding their reputations with “ghost” jobs, the labor market has become the Wild West. Even educators are waving the red flag.
“There are many graduates now that are coming out of universities, which means that there are more people that are graduating necessarily for the jobs that are there,” Rob Breare, CEO of independent U.K. school system Malvern College International, recently said onstage at Fortune’s Global Forum conference.
“I saw a rather shocking statistic in the U.K. earlier this week,” Breare continued, referencing an Institute of Student Employers (ISE) statistic that 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 U.K. graduate roles in 2023/2024. The depressing figure, he said, “starts to give you the idea of just how competitive that market has become.”
Comparatively, 559,959 applicants were interviewed for graduate roles in 2021/2022, with U.K. employers hiring 19,646 of them. The slightly older cohort of Gen Zers enjoyed thousands more open roles and half the competition that their peers face today.
Last year marked the highest number of applications per job ever recorded since the ISE started tracking the data in 1991. And it perfectly encapsulates the dreary state of job hunting: thousands of applicants submitted for a single role, candidates spending years trawling employment sites, and fresh-faced graduates shut out of entry-level gigs. And the U.S. is feeling it, too.
Colleges have an AI problem—and graduates are taking the heat
Job prospects are so bleak that Gen Z is going straight from tossing their graduation caps to years of doom with zero luck. As of this July, 58% of students who wrapped up college in the past year were still trying to find stable work, compared to 25% of millennials and Gen Xers who faced the same predicament. And a fifth of job seekers on the hunt have been looking for a year.
Gen Z’s chances at landing work in the U.S.’s most promising, high-growth cities and industries don’t look any better. One of America’s largest and bustling employment hubs, New York City, added fewer than 1,000 private sector jobs in the first half of this year. Before the pandemic, the Big Apple was adding roughly 100,000 roles annually. The U.S.’s highly lucrative tech sector—encompassing trillion-dollar behemoths like Meta and Nvidia—is pushing Gen Z to the side, too. The proportion of workers aged 21 to 25 has halved at public tech companies since 2023, dropping from 15% to 6.8% by August of this year.
Struggling with a lack of career opportunities, Gen Z is second-guessing the worth of pricey college degrees, which once promised them six-figure jobs. CEOs and experts have criticized universities for failing to keep up with the times; now that AI is here to stay, students had better be prepared to leverage it in their roles. Most colleges have struggled to keep up with the whiplash pace of AI innovation, but the CEO of Malvern College said schools are finally waking up.
“With AI, many of those graduate jobs are changing or are more difficult for people to get into,” Breare continued. “So what we’re starting to see with that is that they are looking to their universities and to their educational program to really give them that fast start to thrive as they come out and go into life.”
