In our generation, we went to work wanting a salary. Our children now go to work wanting a salary, mental health, work-life balance, personal growth, the option of working from home, a nice boss, and work that doesn’t make them question the point of being alive. And by the way, Gen Z wants all this before lunch. For us, a job was what we did. For them, it is something they have to be. Leaving a job, therefore, becomes an attempt to change themselves.
Our
parents were lifelong Tata or Railway or Maruti men and women. Loyalty toward
their employers was fiercely ingrained. Changing jobs felt like breaking a loyalty
code—absolutely unthinkable. Employers, in turn, took care of them with perks,
promotions, bonuses, LTCs, medical benefits, provident funds, retirement
support, and sometimes even jobs for family members. What was wrong with that
system? Why did it break down? Are the younger generations unstable and
impatient, or progressive and ambitious as they claim?
What Held the Old
Compact Together—and Why It Fractured
The
old model worked in a relatively closed, slower-moving economy dominated by
public-sector undertakings and a handful of large private houses. Jobs were
scarce, alternative opportunities limited, and the social contract was clear:
stay loyal, work steadily, and the organization would provide security across a
lifetime and sometimes across generations. Productivity expectations were
different; the pace of technological change was gentler; and competition, both
domestic and global, was muted.
That
world ended with economic liberalisation, globalisation, the rise of private
and multinational capital, rapid technological disruption, and the shift from
stakeholder capitalism toward sharper quarterly performance pressures. Lifelong
employment guarantees became liabilities. Mass restructuring and layoffs moved
from exceptional responses to routine efficiency tools. Pensions and long-term
benefit structures weakened. Skills began to get obsolete faster. The mutual
expectation of loyalty eroded because the structural conditions that sustained
it disappeared. Employers could no longer (or would no longer) promise the old
security; workers rationally stopped offering the old permanence and loyalty.
Data
on tenure reflects this. Average early-career stints have shortened markedly
for younger cohorts, with some reports putting Gen Z’s average tenure in the
first five years around 1.1 years in certain markets, compared with longer
spans for earlier generations at similar life stages. Job-change intentions
remain high among Indian professionals. At the same time, careful historical
comparisons (especially from the United States) suggest that young workers have
always changed jobs more frequently than older ones; the perception of
unprecedented restlessness is sometimes amplified by visibility and weaker
traditional retention mechanisms such as defined-benefit pensions. There are
exceptions to this rule too in Japan and Korea, where workers are still
fiercely loyal to Toyota, Honda, Samsung and Hundai.
The New Expectations
Are Not Pure Whimsy
Younger
workers grew up watching the old promises break—layoffs even in “stable”
companies, stagnant real wage growth in parts of the economy, the disappearance
or reconfiguration of entry-level roles under automation and AI, and the rise
of contractual and gig arrangements. In that environment, prioritising mental
health, flexibility, purpose, continuous learning, and the option to leave is
less pure impatience and more risk management. Many surveys show Gen Z and
millennials ranking work-life balance, growth opportunities, and meaningful
work highly—sometimes above pure title progression. They treat careers more
like skill portfolios than lifelong identities with one organization or employer.
Novelty has come from
Consumer Technology to Profession
The
impatient generation often treats jobs the way it treats phones, bikes, or
watches—constant upgrades, endless consumption, and diminishing joy after each
change. Incremental switches rarely transform the fundamental experience of
work. Anticipation and waiting once formed part of pleasure and forced
accumulation of depth; constant movement can leave people permanently in the
shallow end. Money remains a means; sustained satisfaction and those infrequent
“aah” moments still require diligence, hard work, and time spent mastering
something rather than endlessly shopping for the next role.
A
perfectly good job accepted last year as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity can
feel embarrassingly obsolete today not because the job changed that
dramatically, but because the cultural expectation of perpetual novelty has
been imported from consumer technology into professional life.
Productivity,
Investment, and the Cost of Restlessness
High
attrition is not costless. Training investments are lost, institutional
knowledge walks out the door, team cohesion suffers, and managerial attention
is diverted to constant hiring and onboarding. In manufacturing and other
capital-intensive sectors, elevated early attrition has been flagged as a real
constraint on scaling and quality consistency. Employers, domestic and foreign,
notice when workforce instability raises the effective cost of operations. This
feeds into broader debates about why large-scale industrial investment
sometimes hesitates.
Labour-law
liberalisation is frequently proposed as part of the solution: greater
flexibility in hiring and separation so firms can scale without fear of
permanent rigidities, and so labour can flow more easily toward
higher-productivity uses. Evidence from Indian manufacturing and cross-country
studies is mixed and context-dependent. Excessive rigidity can discourage formal
employment and firm growth; excessive precariousness can reduce incentives for
firm-specific training and raise turnover costs. Balanced reform that improves
both flexibility and basic security (while encouraging formalisation) is more
promising than pure deregulation. But laws alone will not restore mutual
commitment if the deeper cultural shift toward short-termism continues
unchecked on both sides.
Neither Pure Nostalgia
nor Uncritical Celebration
The
old system had real strengths—stability, intergenerational continuity, and a
sense that work was embedded in a longer life narrative. But it also tolerated
stagnation, limited mobility, and sometimes nepotistic or low-accountability
arrangements. The new ethos has strengths—greater agency, insistence on humane
conditions, faster skill acquisition, and reduced tolerance for toxic
environments. But it risks producing chronic restlessness, shallow expertise,
and a workplace in which neither side feels secure enough to invest deeply.
Lasting
joy and competence still tend to come from how we experience and master work
over time, not from the next acquisition. Getting good jobs is becoming harder
in a competitive, skills- and AI-disrupted market; executing them with
diligence is harder still when the cultural default is perpetual readiness to
leave. Employers who offer genuine growth, fair treatment, and some
predictability will retain more talent. Workers who cultivate patience, depth,
and the capacity to create their own “aah” moments will extract more meaning—and
often more long-term reward—than those who treat every role as a temporary
upgrade.
The
real task is not to romanticise the Railway or Tata man of the past, nor to
celebrate endless job-hopping as pure progress. It is to rebuild a workable
social contract for work in which loyalty is earned rather than assumed,
patience is valued without becoming stagnation, and the job remains a
significant part of life without having to be the entirety of the self. That
balance is harder than either generation’s preferred story admits—but it is the
only one that sustains both productivity and human satisfaction.
