Products Of Their Environment: Why Older and Younger Generations Look at Work Differently

A perfect storm of demographic and workforce trends is coming for the labor market before the end of the decade. Population and labor force growth in the US are not keeping pace, and this is creating a deficit of millions of workers. 

Yesterday, Lightcast released a new report all about the disruption ahead, called The Rising Storm: Building a Future-Ready Workforce to Withstand the Looming Labor Shortage. It uses the metaphor of a hurricane to understand what’s been happening and what will happen—the super-hot labor market and worker shortages of 2022 and 2023 were the “outer bands” of the storm, and landfall will happen in about three or four years, as retirements accelerate and a declining birth rate catches up with us. The whole report is long, but it’s worth a read. 

When meteorologists study an actual hurricane, they look at the conditions that form it. And in the case of The Rising Storm, those conditions were established in the 1970s through the early 2000s, when Baby Boomers dominated the labor market. That’s worth spending some time on here: why do Baby Boomers look at the job market the way that they do? And why do younger generations look at it differently? 

Survival of the Fittest

There’s never been a generation like the Baby Boomers, simply because there are so many of them. Between 1946 and 1964, 76 million people were born, and then they all entered the workforce at roughly the same time. This coincided with women’s entry into the job market, too—so not only were there more men joining the workforce than ever before, the total number of people jumped up even higher as women joined them.

Millions of young workers. A job market that has never had to accommodate so many people before. What’s the result? Incredibly high competition. 

When the first Boomers turned 20 years old, in 1965, unemployment in the US reached 9%. It would go as high as 10.8% in 1982. If you’re looking for a job in this kind of environment, you know the stakes are high, and you can’t afford to turn your nose up at any opportunity—because if you don’t take it, a dozen of your peers would be happy to. 

Workers really, really wanted to make themselves valuable to employers. They went to college to set themselves apart. They moved across the country if they needed to. They showed up early to work and stayed late (the US divorce rate skyrocketed from 1960 to 1980). Politically, their highest priorities were creating jobs and opposing immigration, all to reduce the high-pressure competition that plagued the largest generation in history. 

But Now, The Rules Have Changed

The most recent data has the unemployment rate at 4.2% (and from January 2022 to May 2024, it was never above 4%), but unemployment was never below 5% from 1973 to 1997. Younger generations are smaller than the Boomer generation was, and competition just doesn’t look the same. This is especially true because businesses got used to a worker surplus, and so they made space for a really large workforce. Now, Boomers are retiring, and younger generations don’t have the numbers nor the motivation to fill all the gaps. 

So instead of a market where a college degree sets you apart, we have a market where the greatest needs are for non-degreed occupations. Instead of a mobile workforce, a tight housing market is keeping people more or less where they already live. Work-life balance is a growing priority. Immigration is not a threat to American jobs; it’s the only thing keeping the US economy afloat.

What The Rising Storm really emphasizes is that the Boomers’ perspective was not a bad one. These are not incorrect ideas, in and of themselves. If your only experience was a high-competition environment, your perspective will likely reflect that; in fact, it probably should. But that doesn’t mean you should hold the same views if conditions change. 

Thanks for reading On The Job. This is just a small sample of the data and insight available in The Rising Storm, which is out now and free to download. Be sure to catch up on our past issues of On The Job (including “Skipping School: Teachers are Leaving The Classroom,” which is referenced in The Rising Storm!) and you can also subscribe here. We’ll see you next time.