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By Dan Taylor
Workforce Development Manager for Priority One
The generational divide is less about differences in work ethic and more about workplaces failing to evolve.
One generation calls it commitment; another calls it a boundary. One sees confidence; another sees entitlement. Spend enough time in any workplace and you’ll hear some version of the generational debate.
“Young people don’t want to work.”
“Nobody wants to start at the bottom anymore.”
“Boomers don’t understand flexibility.”
“Everyone expects promotion too quickly.”
It’s an easy story to tell because it gives us someone to blame. The problem is that research increasingly suggests the story is wrong. Recent studies continue to find surprisingly few meaningful differences between generations when it comes to core workplace values such as commitment, engagement and ambition. What often appears to be a generational divide is more accurately explained by differences in life stage, career stage, experience and context. People are navigating similar challenges, just from different places on the journey.
Yet the tension is real. I see it regularly in conversations with employers, educators, students, apprentices, young professionals and experienced leaders across our region. An employer wonders why a young employee won’t answer emails after hours. A young employee wonders why staying late is considered evidence of commitment when the work was completed hours earlier. An experienced manager sees impatience. A recent graduate sees unnecessary ambiguity. Neither side is necessarily wrong. Both are operating within workplace systems designed around assumptions that are no longer universally shared.
For decades, many organisations rewarded visibility. Being seen mattered. The first one in. The last one out. The person who always said yes. Those behaviours made sense in an era when productivity was harder to measure and work was closely tied to physical presence.
Today, much of our work is digital, collaborative and outcome based. Yet many organisations still reward the signals of effort rather than the evidence of impact. The employee who is constantly available receives praise, while the employee who quietly develops a solution, improves a process or creates significant value can sometimes go unnoticed.
What if this is where the real friction lies? Not in differing work ethics, but in differing definitions of what good work looks like.
One of the most interesting shifts I see among younger workers is their desire for clarity and transparency around progression. They want to know what success looks like, what skills matter and how they can develop. Importantly, I don’t believe this comes from a desire to take shortcuts. In fact, I think it comes from the opposite.
Increasingly, candidates want evidence that an employer has thought about their future. When you search online for the best questions to ask during an interview, one that frequently appears is: “If I am successful in this role, what does year three look like?”
Some hiring managers hear that question and immediately assume the candidate is already focused on promotion. I hear something very different: “What could I become here? What opportunities will I have to learn? If I commit three years of my life to this organisation, how will I grow?”
Those are not entitlement questions, they’re design questions. They’re asking whether the organisation has intentionally thought about talent development, capability building and career pathways. The irony is that the very candidate some employers label as impatient may actually be demonstrating long-term thinking. They’re not asking how quickly they can climb the ladder, they’re asking whether there is a ladder.
Research from Deloitte supports this shift. Younger workers continue to aspire to leadership and career success, but increasingly seek sustainable growth, meaningful development, wellbeing and clear pathways alongside advancement. The ambition remains. The expectations around how that ambition is supported have evolved.
Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: can most organisations answer the candidate’s question?
Can they clearly describe what success looks like after three years, the skills someone will develop, the experiences they will gain and the responsibilities they may grow into? Or are they still relying on people to simply work hard and hope opportunities emerge?
Many younger workers have grown up in a world where information is abundant. They can access learning platforms, career pathways, salary insights and professional networks in minutes. What previous generations may have viewed as patience, younger generations may view as a lack of planning. What previous generations viewed as loyalty, younger generations may view as uncertainty.
Neither perspective is inherently right or wrong, but the gap between them reveals something important. The challenge facing many organisations is not that younger workers have changed. It’s that workplace systems haven’t changed at the same pace.
Making career growth visible
There are organisations already recognising this shift and redesigning work accordingly. Schneider Electric found that many employees leaving its organisation cited a lack of visibility around growth and development opportunities. Rather than telling people to be more patient, they redesigned the employee experience. They created an internal talent marketplace that gives employees visibility of career pathways, project opportunities, mentoring relationships and the skills required for future roles. The goal was simple: make career growth easier to see and easier to navigate. Read more here.
What stands out about this approach is that it treats career progression as an organisational responsibility rather than an individual guessing game.
Too many workplaces still expect employees to navigate their future through observation, patience and hope, yet they are surprised when younger workers ask difficult questions about growth and development.
The organisations that thrive over the next decade will not be those that choose between generations, but those that create environments where experience and fresh thinking work together. Where learning is valued alongside loyalty, outcomes matter more than appearances, and expectations are made explicit instead of being left to assumption.
The conversation we need is not about which generation is right, it’s about whether our workplaces are designed for the reality of modern work. Because the evidence increasingly suggests that the generational clash is not a people problem, it’s a design problem – and design problems can be solved.
Dan’s other research:
https://www.ipsos.com/en/stages-not-ages-what-workplaces-get-wrong-about-generations
https://blog.workday.com/en-us/debunking-generational-myths-3-surprising-workforce-trends.html
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