by John Hall | Link
How to Help Gen Z Early-Career Professionals Navigate Their Careers
Helping Gen Z workers find fulfillment at work to attract and retain this generation involves creating a positive company culture and taking a human-centered approach.

IN BRIEF:
  • Helping Gen Z workers find fulfillment at work to attract and retain this generation involves creating a positive company culture and taking a human-centered approach.
  • Asking questions about how to best support Gen Z early-career professionals and encouraging them to define what success looks like to them are key.
  • In the end, Gen Z workers should take responsibility for their personal and professional growth and understand that they are in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing their career.

Who Are the Early-Career Professionals?

Early career typically refers to the initial stage of a person’s professional journey after completing their education or training. It is this phase when individuals are in the early stages of building their work experience and establishing themselves in their chosen fields. While there is not a universally defined time frame, early career generally encompasses the first few years of professional work.
Understanding Generation Z Is A Leadership Imperative
Born between 1997 and 2012, the generational cohort with the highest percentage of early-career professionals is Generation Z.
According to public relations and communications firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe, Generation Z is the largest generation in the world, and by 2025, they will make up 27% of the global workforce. Leaders cannot afford to be reactive; rather, they must take a proactive approach to attract and retain talent coming from this generational cohort.

Nowadays, it will take more than a competitive compensation package to retain Gen Z workers; this cohort is also looking for an emotional paycheck. In the article “WTF is an emotional paycheck?” author Hailey Mensik states, “Traditional salary packages are no longer enough to retain talented professionals today. Instead, there’s a growing insistence on emotional fulfillment—a currency long overlooked in the employer-employee exchange.”[i]

Simply put, the global workforce is changing, and so are the expectations of early-career professionals. Leaders will need a new set of skills to effectively influence and impact this up-and-coming cohort. To begin to understand Generation Z, it is important to first understand some of the challenges that they have faced.
Challenges Faced by Generation Z
Many Gen Z workers started their careers during the tumultuous times of the Covid-19 pandemic. While previous generational cohorts had the benefit of beginning their careers with in-person support, collaboration among team members, and overall consistent onboarding processes, the Gen Z worker onboarding experience was starkly different.

As new entrants in the workforce, Generation Z workers were forced to work remotely, and they experienced pandemic-induced roadblocks to collaboration and new onboarding processes that were being created on the fly. To make matters worse, many of these workers experienced being furloughed or fired before they could establish themselves during the infancy of their careers. As a result, Gen Z workers formed a distrust of the establishment and had legitimate concerns about job security and career advancement.

What Practical Steps Can Leaders Take to Support Early-Career Professionals?
  1. Prioritize helping Gen Z workers succeed and find fulfilment at work
As mentioned previously, compensation alone is not enough to attract or retain talent.
Today’s leaders must be cognizant that company culture will either make or break the relationship between their organization and its Gen Z talent.

Leaders can start by demonstrating an authentic desire to help Gen Z early-career professionals flourish and find a sense of satisfaction and happiness while at work. This requires taking a human-centered approach.
2.Prioritize helping Gen Z workers succeed and find fulfilment at work
Leaders would benefit by taking a proactive approach to asking how to best support Gen Z early-career professionals. Gen Z is very pragmatic and will seek concrete examples, directions, and advice to help them navigate their career journey. Unfortunately, sage advice is not always readily available. Given the manner in which these early-career professionals were onboarded during the pandemic, it has been difficult to build developmental networks.
As Harvard Professor Linda Hill stated in her seminal article “The Three Networks You Need,” “Your developmental network is the collection of individuals whom you trust and to whom you can turn for a sympathetic ear, advice (depending on their experience), and a place to discuss and explore professional options.”[ii] Assuming that these types of networks would form organically would be a mistake. Leaders can help connect Gen Z workers to more-experienced colleagues who can help provide guidance in addition to the support the leaders provide themselves.
Take the guesswork out of how to support Gen Z workers by simply asking them how to best support them as their leader.
3. Ask them “What does success look like?”
Successful projects are predicated on taking time out to define what success looks like and identifying the indicators of that success; planning a career is no different. Ask Gen Z early-career professionals to describe their ideal state as it relates to the first years of their career.
This thought-provoking question can act as a catalyst for a deep conversation about their aspirations, thoughts, and ideas as they relate to their career.
The benefit of describing an ideal state is that leaders can help early-career professionals begin identifying the gaps between the current state and the desired state and help them map out the required steps to get there.

Having a conversation about a Gen Z early-career professional’s definition of success will help leaders provide perspective that will help those professionals correct course if their current path is not aligned with their desired future state. Without taking these steps, success will feel nebulous and measuring progress will be difficult.
4. Help Gen Z Professionals take responsibility for their personal and professional growth
While leaders can encourage, build accountability, and monitor progress, it is the Gen Z early-career professional’s job to own their experience which is all about taking responsibility for their personal and professional growth and development. Gen Z workers must be able to see that they are firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing their career.
It implies taking responsibility for their actions, decisions, and outcomes. Real career growth happens when Gen Z early-career professionals can learn from their experiences, whether positive or negative, and recognize and take ownership of mistakes.

Leaders who will be successful in helping Gen Z early-career professionals navigate their careers will make a meaningful and positive impact. Helping Gen Z early career professionals pays dividends to the employee and the organization alike. There is a growing need for organizations to take a human-centered approach.
Helping each employee succeed and find fulfillment at work does not happen by chance; it takes intentionality.

Learn More
To learn how to develop human-centered leaders who drive employee fulfillment, download our report “Fulfillment at Work Requires Real Human-Centered Leadership.”
[i] Hailey Mensik, “WTF is an emotional paycheck?” worklife.news, April 2024.
[ii] https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-three-networks-you-need”>Linda Hill and Kent Lineback, “The Three Networks You Need,” HBR.org, March 2011.