Gen Z has taken the workplace by storm over the past few years, upending norms and bringing with them new expectations. But the former interns are quickly climbing the corporate ladder, and one of them just may be your next boss.
The youngest generation of working adults will make up 10% of managers by 2025, according to a recent Glassdoor report, which analyzed population data and compared it with census information. “Everybody thinks of Gen Z as kids and clearly that’s not the case anymore,” Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor and author of the study, told Fortune.
Gen Z has dominated headlines over the past few years with their struggles to connect with coworkers and an aversion to corporate culture. They’re also often pegged as more interested in becoming their own boss than fitting into an office environment, and uninterested in traditional leadership positions. But this generation is actually maturing into more powerful positions at roughly the same rate as generations that preceded them; around 14% of Gen Z workers who are 27 years old are managers, which is either similar or identical to Millenials (13%), Gen X (14%) and Baby Boomers (12%) at that age.
“There’s been this narrative floating around in the last few months that Gen Z is eschewing management as a path to success. So when I looked at the data, I was surprised to see that Gen Z’s trajectory into management really doesn’t look any different from previous generations,” Zhao said.
It remains to be seen how exactly Gen Z attitudes towards work will change as they become a larger part of the managerial ranks. But they are beginning to enter the higher echelons of the corporate world just as the definition of “good management” is evolving, Zhao says. So their interests as employees in things like wellness and flexible work schedules may foreshadow what kind of standard they’ll be held to as bosses.
“We see a lot of people talk about employee well-being, respecting boundaries, and being empathetic,” says Zhao. “It is setting the bar higher for Gen Z because they are going to have to come into the ranks of management with these additional emotional intelligence skills that might not have been important or as important a decade or two ago.”
Jan. 8, 2025: A previous version of this story mispelled the last name of Daniel Zhao.
