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Lately I've been talking to several people in their 20s who started their first working experience at a big (and sometimes even small) consulting firm during the pandemic, and left after a year or less.
The narratives are incredibly similar, they all leave for the same reasons:
- after a year, nobody knows them;
- and they feel like they …
Lately I've been talking to several people in their 20s who started their first working experience at a big (and sometimes even small) consulting firm during the pandemic, and left after a year or less.
The narratives are incredibly similar, they all leave for the same reasons:
- after a year, nobody knows them;
- and they feel like they don't know nobody in the company (note: the ones I talked to were undeniably extroverted people, so I bet they really tried hard in making new acquaintances at work);
- they didn't know how to show that they are good at something (note: they were all from top-level business schools);
- they were tricked into thinking that they were destined to do great work, only to be shown otherwise ("working 9-to-midnight to build slide decks about things I didn't know anything about");
- they feel a deep disconnect from their colleagues that considers this "normal" ("they don't have any interest outside work-as-grind").
On the other side of the fence, I'm constantly hearing executives and managers complaining about employee retention: this "leaving the job after a year", even in the case of first employments, even in the case of top-recruits from elite colleges, it's more than a trend.
As I told to the latest 20-something I spoke to, I do not want a future were we have "companies of young people" vs. "companies of old people" because we couldn't find a way to "play together", but everything that's happening right now kinda push in that direction.
It's especially concerning due to the fact that, depending on the country were you live — but it's a common trait of most western countries — the number of people in the 20-40 age range has been and will be shrinking over time, and that too doesn't work in favor of having multi-generational and diverse workplaces.