If there’s one idea in the ether for high school, college, and trade school graduates these days, it’s that the job market is different — and more challenging — than it was a generation or even a half decade ago, and that what Gen Z wants from their careers is shifting, too.
With lots of factors aswirl, from “experience inflation” to the rise of AI to evolving values young people have when it comes to our work life, we decided to start a column called Next-Gen Jobs. The monthly series will bring you into some of the most popular and unusual careers that people our age are considering, offering a behind-the-scenes look at different ways of making a living, plus analysis of the challenges and opportunities students wanting to enter those fields will face. You can read the first edition, about the high-flying world of finance, here.
But before that, we’re also taking a 60,000-foot view, asking the questions: What do we know about this shifting job market our generation is entering? And what do we want from jobs?
Here’s one thing we know: It’s tough out there for recent grads, and things are changing rapidly. For one, teenage and early-20s youth unemployment has recently been at its highest point in nearly four years, with the seasonal rate for those aged 16-19 nearing 10.8% in the spring and summer of 2025 and the annual rate for graduates ages 22 to 27 at 5.6% as of the end of last year. These are lower than the numbers seen during the pandemic and Great Recession, but they’ve been ticking up, and are intersecting with other challenging market forces.
Over the past 18 months, entry-level openings across all industries have fallen 35%, and junior-level job postings dropped 7% year-over-year on Indeed in 2025, even as more senior roles held steady or even edged up.
What’s more, “An entry-level job is never really an entry-level job anymore,” as a job-seeker named Jennifer put it in a 2026 New York Times Focus Group article. This phenomenon is what Gen Z calls “experience inflation”: A trend where roughly 35% of positions tagged as “entry-level” on platforms like LinkedIn actually demand three or more years of prior relevant work experience. This has made it harder for some job seekers, like Jeremy Robin, a 2025 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, to find a job. His relentless applications and double major in physics and computer science only got him a handful of interviews; he did eventually accept an offer from a research lab in Los Angeles.
Diminished prospects for entry-level openings are worse in some fields as artificial intelligence begins to automate some junior positions. An analysis by Revelio Labs and Bloomberg found that within the top five industries that hire recent college graduates, including tech, highly AI-exposed entry-level role postings have declined by over 40% from 2023 to 2025 — larger than the 33% decline for entry-level roles that don’t have as high a share of automatable responsibilities. And then there are ghost jobs: Roles posted on websites like Indeed or LinkedIn only for the purpose of collecting data.
Economists also note that AI isn’t the primary culprit. According to analysis by The New York Times, the true driver is a “low hire, low fire” dynamic in the labor field. A broad stasis in hiring and a significant drop in employee churn — the rate at which workers leave a company and need to be replaced — means that job openings continuously trend downwards.
Amidst these challenges, Gen Z has been forced to rely on old-school networking to get their foot in the door, according to Rachel Janfaza, founder of The Up and Up, a qualitative research firm focused on analyzing Gen Z trends and behaviors. “We’re hearing from young people that connections within an industry to get jobs are critical,” she said. “It’s the only way to get a real human being to look at your application in an era where there are a lot of these AI portals where it’s a video interview that’s going into some sort of black hole.”
To say that many Gen Z graduates are frustrated would be a massive understatement, Robin said. But they are also clear-eyed and pragmatic, demanding work-life balance from their careers while also searching for long-term financial stability, according to Janfaza. “No matter what, young people’s relationship to work-life balance will be a priority for our generation moving forward,” she said.
This search for stability is actively reshaping where this generation is looking for work. A 2023 survey by Axios and Generation Lab showed that Gen Z is falling back on traditional roles to promise long-term dependability — the top three being businessperson, doctor and engineer. Technical majors, for instance, still command high starting salaries — computer science graduates average $81,535 as starting pay. A survey last year by CFA Institute found that finance, another traditional and lucrative route, was the top career choice for 37 percent of recent grads across 11 countries.
Meanwhile, research this year by a resume-assistance company found that 60% of Gen Zers are very likely or somewhat likely to pursue a career in a blue-collar field, as routes like welding and HVAC, in combination with trade school, begin to look to some like better ROI than a four-year-degree plus a white-collar path.
This job market may be trickier than in the past, but it also offers opportunity, according to Janfaza. “There’s no one way to navigate the job market,” she said. “Everyone has their own path, and there’s no prescription. That’s really challenging, but it also creates a lot of opportunity and agency for young people to take it into their own hands and chart their own path.”
