Millennials: Stop Climbing Career Ladders, Start Jumping Lily Pads

Author’s Note: I originally published this article in Quartz in October, 2016.

Five years ago, I had it all. I was making $70,000 a year at the age of 28. I worked for the federal government. I had a fancy job title, a nice apartment, heath care, generous retirement benefits, and job security in the midst of the recession. You literally can’t get fired from working for the federal government—trust me, there are people who should.

The pressure to “pay my dues” and climb a lucrative career ladder that didn’t really reflect who I was, was brutal. When I got shingles—a painful nerve disease often tied to stress, common among people over the age of 70, not twenty-somethings—I knew I had to make a change.

When I left my job, I began writing and speaking about how young professionals should pursue meaningful work. After interviewing hundreds of twenty-somethings, I learned that despite struggling with debt, recession, and the jobs crisis, Millennials (who will account for 75% of the workforce in 2025) are not motivated by money. Rather, they are driven to make the world more compassionate, innovative, and sustainable.

Deloitte’s Milllennial survey found that 75 percent of Millennials believe businesses are too focused on their own agendas, rather than improving society, and only 28 percent believe their current organization is making full use of their skills. 50 percent would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, and 90 percent want to use their skills for good. A recent Gallup report revealed that 21 percent of Millennials have switched jobs within the past year (three times the number of non-Millennials), and only 29 percent of Millennials are engaged with their jobs, making them the least engaged generation in the workplace.

Clearly, organizations not responding fast enough to this generation’s desire to align their work with purpose. Another factor contributing to widespread Millennial disengagement is that our metrics for understanding what it means to have a successful career have not caught up with today’s ever-evolving job market. Millennials don’t want to move “up” on a career ladder—they are less concerned with traditional metrics of success, like savings and home ownership—and more concerned with lives defined by meaning, community, and shared value.

So why are so many parents, colleges, and corporate HR programs, still preparing Millennials to pick a single college major, choose one career path, and climb the antiquated career ladder?

What we do (and how we do it) are constantly changing in an increasingly global, flexible, and unstable job market. When my friends and I graduated college just ten years ago, Facebook was barely a thing—today, social media impacts every facet of our lives. The US Department of Labor has noted that 65 percent of today’s grade school kids will end up in jobs that haven’t been invented yet. More than one-third of Americans are freelancers (some 53 million Americans), and by 2020, that number will be 60 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average job tenure for all employees twenty-five and over, was only five years.

In today’s job market, everyone is a job-hopper in search of meaning, not only Millennials.

We need a new career mindset that embraces instability and experimentation, and is designed for providing what the workforce of the future actually wants: making meaning, not just money. Unlike the career ladder mindset, which forces you to move in only one direction (“up”) that might not be around in five years, the lily pad career mindset visualizes your career as a pond of lily pads, a series of interconnecting leaps you’ve made between different opportunities. What’s holding everything together is the roots, or your purpose: what you care about and how you want to help the world. Your roots may be driving you to do one thing now, but that thing may change in five years.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should quit your job every six months, as this will just lead to personal frustration (and perpetual underemployment), but it does mean that you have to consistently question whether your current lily pad excites you or is making a valuable contribution to society. It also doesn’t mean you should only be a generalist, as scientific research has shown that skill mastery is a key motivation for fulfillment.

But it does mean that if you want to find meaningful work, you need to jump off the ladder that’s been laid out in front of you ever since you took AP US History class in high school, and start inventing your own path. Treat your career like a lifelong experiment. Find experiences that allow you to quickly test assumptions about your career interests. Every job, every experience, every place you travel, is a chance to learn something new about yourself, what interests you (and importantly, what doesn’t), what you’re good at, what types of people you want to surround yourself with, and what type of impact you want to have on the world.

It also means that companies need to do a better job of encouraging all of their employees to treat the office like a classroom, and see where they best fit, given their interests, skills, and purpose. If someone isn’t the right fit for an organization, that organization should quickly help them find their next lily pad.

Several years after quitting my job and jumping to a new lily pad, I’m making as much as money as I did at my previous government job. More importantly, my shingles are gone and I’m excited to wake up in the morning. I’m doing work that energizes me instead of drains me. Don’t get me wrong: I still get nervous about how I’m going to survive as a writer in the future, and what lily pad I’m going to jump to next. But, I’m happy to be building a life that reflects my own metrics of success, not one passed down to me by previous generations.

Adapted from The Quarter-Life Breakthrough: Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters by Adam Smiley Poswolsky, available October 4, 2016 from TarcherPerigee/Penguin Random House. Learn more at smileyposwolsky.com.

Author’s Note: I originally published this article in Quartz in October, 2016. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.