How Millennials and Post-Millennials are Redefining Success

Even before the game-changer of COVID-19, millennials and post-millennials (or Generation Z) were in the process of radically transforming the landscape of success in America by choosing not to buy a home or car. Burdened with debt from student loans, many millennials were famously shunning ownership of these large-ticket items that previous generations were eager to acquire as the primary symbols of professional success.

The destabilization of the workplace caused by the pandemic is yet more justification for millennials and post-millennials to avoid investing in a home or car. There is thus even less of an incentive for them to commit to a traditional career path offering regular salaries that have been in the past used to pay off the debt that comes with investing in those two pricy possessions. (The emergence of Uber and Lyft has also made owning a car less necessary and desirable.)

Historically steeped in a decades-long career in which one stayed at a particular company as long as possible to reap the financial benefits in order to become debt-free, our concept of professional success appears to be on the cusp of tremendous change. More life options open up without having the burden of a monthly mortgage or car loan, something of which millennials and Generation Zers are keenly aware as they embrace a different, more flexible approach to work.

Like other mainstays of the 20th century, the nine-to-five-based job in which workers sought long-term careers from employers is already becoming a memory. In its place is the freelance or “gig”-based economy, a reinterpretation of work that is reshaping business and the lives of millions of people across the world as well as what conveys success. Younger people in particular are attracted to this new version of work, less interested in adopting the rigid, single-employer model of their parents and grandparents. “The watchword of the new global economy is fluidity, thanks to the rise of freelance work,” Faisal Hoque wrote for fastcompany.com, raising the possibility that our current definition of employment will be “scarcely recognizable” in most of our lifetimes.

COVID-19 is only accelerating the breakdown of traditional employment by taking time and space out of the equation. For many jobs, traveling to and being in a particular place for certain hours of the day is largely unnecessary, we now know, and emerging technologies are altering the very notion of what constitutes “work” and who are considered to be successful people.

Already, Hoque points out, freelancers comprise more than one-third of the workforce in the United States, with the trend towards self-employment and entrepreneurship clearly evident in other countries. What is driving this transformation of work? Digital technology, of course, as the ways in which we interact with others without regard to the physical laws of the universe continue to be re-conceived. For workers, economic fluidity means greater control and autonomy in their lives—an asset cherished by many millennials and post-millennials.

Flexibility is the key reason employers are increasingly attracted to taking on giggers versus full-timers, knowing they can more easily hire and fire as they see fit. Whether independent contractors, moonlighters, temps, or those working a variety of jobs for a variety of employers, freelancers can fit into the organizational structure of virtually any business, explaining why they have become the poster children for the workforce of the 21st century.

Considering the trajectory of a world consisting of “super-temps” leads to nothing short of a revolution in the concepts of both work and success. In the next couple of decades, predicts a report issued by the Roosevelt Institute and the Kauffman Foundation, one’s career is likely to be made up of a long string of short-term projects rather than doing the same old grind. “By 2040, the job market will consist of part-time assignments, portfolio careers, and entrepreneurialism,” according to Slava Solodkiy of medium.com, with a host of implications spinning out of that scenario.

What can each of us do to maximize our chances for professional success in the decades ahead? The ways in which we prepare for a career will have to be re-imagined, for one thing, with the traditional path grounded in formal education no longer the route to necessarily follow. “To be successful,” Solidkiy posited, “individuals will have to be more entrepreneurial in thinking and planning their lives, meaning constantly selling themselves, defining one’s own work, and educating themselves for future assignments.”