Rethink training, leadership and career progression to retain Gen Z talent. Tara Ceranic Salinas explains why younger workers value time, flexibility, mastery and meaningful impact over traditional management titles, and how organisations can create learning cultures that build skills, recognise strengths and support sustainable growth at work for everyone involved.
Every generation has their own ideas about what work should look like. Climbing the corporate ladder and reaching the pinnacles of management used to be the aim, but Gen Z has a different approach. Driven by a strong desire to create balance and boundaries, Gen Z isn’t necessarily interested in increased responsibility for the sake of a title bump or a salary increase. Instead, they are looking for meaning, flexibility, and ways to utilise their unique skills.
Taking that statistic at face value without understanding this generation is missing a lot of the story
Recent surveys show that a large proportion (40%) of Gen Z isn’t interested in obtaining management roles. The automatic assumption is often to label this approach as lazy, but taking that statistic at face value without understanding this generation is missing a lot of the story.
We are not dealing with an entire generation of individuals unwilling to work hard. Instead, we have a generation who saw how hard their parents worked; the long hours, the stress, the frustration. They simply want something different for themselves. It seems that there are three major things driving these shifts in how Gen Z wants to work.
Time over money
When Gen Z employees are asked what they want the most out of a job the answers are clear: control of their schedule, flexibility in how and where they work, and having a sense of balance in their lives. Combined, these all center on the idea of time affluence. This is the idea that you feel like there is enough time in your life to pursue things you find meaningful and that you do not have the pressure to constantly rush through your day. Feeling affluent in time has measurable benefits. It leads to higher productivity at work, reduces stress, and leads to increased overall wellbeing.
It’s also important to consider that one of the contributing factors to the preference for time over money is driven by what is currently financially achievable for Gen Z. Previous generations took homeownership as a given, but with housing prices at an all-time high, the goal of homeownership can seem unattainable. But what is attainable? An exciting vacation this year. Work that provides flexibility makes achieving these meaningful experiences, and the measurable increases in happiness that comes with them, possible.
Leadership over management
These survey results are not saying that Gen Z wants to work entry-level positions for their whole career, nor are they about rejecting positions with more responsibility. Instead, it’s a reflection of Gen Z employees’ desire to grow into roles with more responsibilities while avoiding typical hierarchical managerial ladders.
Gen Z has seen what a time sink managing people can be. Far more hours are spent in meetings than actually doing the day-to-day tasks of the job. Recent research shows managers spend somewhere around 23 hours a week in meetings and the majority of them are seen as ineffective. I don’t blame Gen Z for not wanting to jump on the management train!
Impact over titles
What these employees are looking for are ways to utilise and develop their unique skills at work. It’s more about how and where they are able to contribute rather than the titles associated with their position or rising up the ranks.
The goal is finding autonomy and reaching a level of mastery that allows them to contribute based on their strengths. This helps fuel purpose in life which is a far more salient goal than a particular title in a business hierarchy they have grown to mistrust.
Rethinking retention
When these three things aren’t happening, Gen Z moves on. In their first five years of work, the average tenure at an organisation is 1.1 years. And that’s just the people leaving. Estimates show approximately 54% of Gen Z workers are actively looking for other jobs.
All of this job hopping is bad news for companies! Employee turnover is one of the biggest expenses for organisations, so it’s important to point out that not every member of Gen Z is shunning added responsibilities at work. Sure, 40% of them may not be interested in managing people but that means the majority of them are still interested. All this to say that companies aren’t going to collapse without all of Gen Z moving into management, but their cultures are going to suffer if they don’t understand what drives their Gen Z employees.
Training for today
First, ask more questions. Find out what motivates your employees, Gen Z or otherwise.
- What excites them?
- What do they want to learn?
- What tasks do they truly excel at and enjoy doing?
- Where do they feel they need to improve?
None of this suggests that Gen Z can simply curate their learning à la carte. Certain forms of institutional knowledge are non-negotiable. What needs to change is not necessarily what organisations expect employees to learn, but how they expect that learning to occur, which is why the way training is done needs an overhaul.
Utilising training practices from even five years ago will not have the same impact on Gen Z. As someone who sees several hundred Gen Z students a year in my classes, I know this first-hand. Their status as digital natives has fundamentally shifted the way they engage with information.
Any training needs to be mobile-friendly, interactive, and task-specific. Three-hours of videos that cover multiple topics followed by a quiz is not the way to go for lasting results. Instead, focus on explaining why this training is relevant and necessary and focus on single takeaways. These sessions can build on one another and help frame training as an ongoing development process rather than a thing you do once a year and forget about.
A learning culture?
How you train employees is a reflection of your culture and understanding what skills Gen Z needs and training them in a way that acknowledges the skills they do have is key. Making light of what younger employees don’t know sends subtle but powerful cultural signals about whose knowledge is valued.
Gen Z isn’t opting out of work, responsibility, or growth. They are opting into a different vision of what a sustainable and meaningful career can look like. Organisations that recognise this have a real opportunity. By rethinking how training happens, expanding what leadership can look like, and creating roles that allow people to contribute through their strengths, companies can build cultures where Gen Z employees want to stay and grow. The payoff is a workforce that’s more engaged and better prepared to lead in ways that reflect the realities and possibilities of work today.
Tara Ceranic Salinas, PhD is a Professor of Business Ethics and the Chair of the Management department in the Knauss School of Business
