Gen Z is changing the rules of work, and the results are redefining what professional success looks like in 2025. According to a new Glassdoor report, “career minimalism” is at the heart of this shift: Younger workers see their jobs as a means to financial stability, saving real passion and ambition for hours off the clock and increasingly lucrative side hustles.
Forget the corner office. Glassdoor’s latest survey, canvassing more than 1,000 professionals in the U.S., revealed that the younger cohort of workers is skeptical of the concept of management. A striking 68% of Gen Z respondents said they wouldn’t pursue management if it weren’t for paycheck or title. To be sure, more money and a higher title have always been powerful draws for workers to go into management, but this still signals a rejection of the traditional corporate climb favored by boomers and millennials and a sentiment that management is seen as something of a poisoned chalice. Gen Z, after all, is the generation that brought the concepts of “quiet quitting” and “conscious unbossing” into the zeitgeist.
“We’ve traded the rigid career ladder for the career lily pad,” said Morgan Sanner, Glassdoor’s Gen Z career expert and founder of Resume Official, calling it “a path where we can jump to whatever opportunity fits best at the moment. In the long run, that kind of flexibility is more sustainable, more realistic, and better suited to today’s workplace realities.”
Gen Z isn’t actually avoiding management
The survey, however, is somewhat at odds with other data collected by Glassdoor. Daniel Zhao, chief economist for the company, told Fortune in a late July interview that Glassdoor’s biannual Worklife Trends report had found Gen Z to be entering the ranks of management at the same rates that millennials and other generations did.
Zhao referenced the idea of “conscious unbossing” and younger generations eschewing management because they don’t view it as a good path anymore, adding that “you don’t really see any evidence of that” in the data. The report, which found that millennials had become the majority of managers for the first time ever, also found Gen Z accounting for roughly 10% of managers. “Management is not for everybody, and that’s okay,” Zhao told Fortune in late July, “but it is still seen as the best path for climbing the career ladder.”
Zhao told Fortune in a more recent interview that it’s important not to generalize about whole generations or cohorts of people, but at the same time, “many younger workers and Gen Z feel like the job market isn’t working for them, so some of these more traditional paths to success feel like they aren’t open in the same way that they might have been 10 to 20 years ago.”
What the new survey suggests, however, is that management is now overwhelmingly seen as a career-ladder move, not something intrinsically good in its own right. This tallies with other surveys of Gen Z from two members of the Big Four consulting firms. EY found that Gen Z is notably “pragmatic,” and they approach life’s traditional milestones with a kind of “reasoned skepticism.”
KPMG, meanwhile, surveyed its own Gen Z employees on attitudes about work, and found that they are hungry for mentorship and welcome in-office collaboration yet also desire the death of the nine-to-five mentality and embrace flexibility. Overall, they have a bit of a “show me” mentality, Derek Thomas, national partner in charge of university talent acquisition, told Fortune. It amounts to, “Okay, you’re telling me it’s going to be good for me, but is it really?”
‘A true side hustle generation’
If Gen Z isn’t less ambitious but also isn’t thrilled about corporate management, where’s that energy going? The report cited Harris Poll findings that 57% of Gen Z currently have a side hustle compared to 48% of millennials, 31% of Gen Xers, and 21% of boomers and said Gen Z is a “true side hustle generation where work identity lives outside of traditional employment.”
Side hustles aren’t viewed as distractions or fallback options; they are central to Gen Z’s identity, offering creative, entrepreneurial, or activist outlets that main jobs cannot supply. For many, the “day job” simply finances the “passion project”—as one Glassdoor community member, an Iowa high school teacher, put it: “I always joke that I don’t dream of labor…If people were truly passionate about their job, it wouldn’t pay anything. Passion is for your five-nine after the nine-five.”
A research analyst offered, “While having a job that you’re passionate about is really cool, it’s important to have other interests that are not tied to your work life.”
And what kind of side hustles do Gen Zers actually want? The Glassdoor report doesn’t dive into that, but FlexJobs tackled the topic in January, finding that nurse practitioner was the top remote side hustle for 2024, pulling down $56 an hour. Another popular side hustle is therapist, making roughly $30 an hour. In the $20-per-hour range were translator ($24/hour), accountant ($23/hour), content writer ($22/hour), and graphic designer ($20/hour). Remote work listings are very popular, as evidenced by 2024 data from LinkedIn, which found that only 10% of open job positions were remote as of December 2023, but they received 46% of all applications.
Management looks different from a Gen Z perspective
When Gen Zers do move into management, Glassdoor finds that they’re rewriting the traditional playbook. Work-life balance is nonnegotiable, not a perk: 58% reportedly dial down work in the summer, compared to 39% of older peers, while 31% expect flexible hours from Gen Z managers.
“Gen Z is reconsidering what it means to be successful at work in this moment,” Zhao said in the report. He added, “They’re not rejecting ambition—they’re redirecting it toward sustainable career paths that prioritize both financial security and personal fulfillment.”
In conversation with Fortune, Zhao said there is ample evidence of workers feeling anxious, overworked, and burned out. “This is not because of laziness,” he said. What the data suggests, he added, is that Gen Z is making a rational turn away from a job market that hasn’t treated them well. “It’s not because people aren’t capable. It’s because in this current moment, many workers feel like they aren’t being rewarded for the level of effort and performance that they’re putting out there.”
While critics accuse Gen Z of laziness or entitlement, Glassdoor’s findings paint a more nuanced picture. Gen Zers are setting boundaries, diversifying their professional portfolios, and putting mental health ahead of relentless advancement. They view AI as both a pathway and a potential threat, adapting to rapid disruption with agility and skepticism.
The Glassdoor report suggests that older generations have more than a few things to learn from Gen Z and this trend toward “career minimalism,” writing that it “isn’t about doing less work. It’s about being strategic about where you invest your energy.” In other words, this could be a preview of the future for everyone.
The future of work
Gen Z’s approach offers a new answer to the question: “What if there’s a better way?” Their formula is simple: stable jobs for security, side hustles for passion, and strict boundaries for sustainability. Professional success no longer demands that work eclipse every other aspect of life.
As the workplace continues to change, the rise of career minimalism—fueled by Gen Z’s values—will reshape not only how people define success, but also how they experience fulfillment. The future of work, it seems, may belong not to the climbers, but to those content to hop from interest to interest with purpose and self-awareness.
