Experts share concern about the future of work for Gen Z and Gen Alpha

Sponsored by

Powerfully easy HR: BambooHR helps businesses of all sizes hire, pay, manage, and support employees across the entire employee life cycle with the help of automated, unified tools. Learn more about this HRIS.

Uncertain, confused, unstable—just a couple of adjectives that describe how workers likely feel right now.

This is especially true for young workers—namely Gen Z and Gen Alpha—who’ve only ever known this whirlwind of a workplace and will, along with millennials, make up 80% of the labor market in advanced economies by 2034, according to the World Economic Forum.

The future of work will be the reality for these generations—but it doesn’t look too shiny, experts shared with HR Brew.

“There’s widespread anxiety,” Jon Carson, co-founder of the College Guidance Network that works with high school students and parents on college admissions, told HR Brew. “I heard about a parent whose kid, out of the blue, texted them, and said, ‘I’m really stressed. I don’t know how I’m going to live the kind of life that you’re living.’”

What to expect from Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Much has been said about Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s unique preferences, but generational differences aren’t new. Researchers like Sean Lyons, a leadership and management professor and associate dean of research and graduate studies at the University of Guelph in Canada, have been studying generations in the workplace since the 1990s.

“People aren’t really different. They’re just reacting to different times, and they’re reacting to those different times at a specific stage in their life,” Lyons previously told HR Brew.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have spent the majority, if not all, of their lives with smart phones and social media. This has contributed to mental health issues, which worsened during the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, Carson said, we see “downstream effects” in how they show up to work.

Experts are already observing shifts in “fundamental expectations,” Ryan Jenkins, generational expert and author of The Generation Z Guide and The Millennial Manual, told HR Brew, because “they’ve just grown up in a completely different environment.”

There are also differences in how these generations communicate and use technology, Jenkins said. They expect to use different tools (ask any high school student if they’re using ChatGPT), speak in trending colloquial phrases (some, like “6–7,” cannot be fully explained), and work at a different speed (likely a byproduct of growing up with a device always in hand).

Despite these differences, Gen Z has a strong desire for “human connection,” Jenkins said, and Gen Alpha likely will, too. “No generation is a cyborg just yet,” he said. “We’ve all got blood running through our veins, and human connection is one of our most significant needs.”

How AI is impacting younger workers. Amid a cool labor market and AI arms race, many companies have shed thousands of workers and frozen hiring efforts. There are “cracks in the entry-level ladder,” Carson said, sharing some anecdotal evidence: While attending his son’s college graduation last year, he noticed most parents he spoke with said their kids didn’t have post-grad jobs lined up.

While confidence in a college degree has been waning for several years, AI is a “looming path disruptor” making it worse, Jenkins said. In 2010, 75% of US adults said college was “very important”; in 2025, only 35% said the same, according to Gallup data from September.

AI will likely make launching a career tougher for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Jenkins said. “My heart goes out to folks in college right now that are trying to land on a degree or trying to figure out what [their] expertise is going to be,” he said. “It’s going to just change so quickly, and we have no idea how AI will disrupt the workforce.”

Not only does a college degree not guarantee a successful career, Carson said “the goal posts keep moving” when it comes to required experience.

“If you want to be the junior manager, now you have to have the skills of a senior manager,” he said. “Everything’s moving because AI basically makes everything go faster, and you need to have a higher level of capability.”

How can HR prepare? People leaders should focus on the why behind how work gets done, not the way work gets done, Jenkins advised. “Organizations…should be thinking about ways in which they can leverage the unique strengths of that generation at the same time not compromising the why,” which is the mission of the organization, he said.

HR should also remain open-minded about Gen Alpha, Lyons said, and avoid stereotyping them (“they’re lazy, and entitled, and that their work ethic is bad”).

“We need to really put ourselves in their position and say, ‘Wow, it’s a complicated world for young people,’” Lyons said. “The abundance of opportunity that used to be there is not there right now…so having compassion for that is a really critical piece to developing the workforce of the future.”