Why traditional career advice is failing Gen Z

Leaving the cosy confines of college for the tundra of the job market has always been bracing. Not every graduate hears a calling to a particular profession. Many want to do good but also need to pay off debt. AI is making the transition even bumpier, automating entry-level jobs and promising to make entire careers extinct; on July 13th more than 200 economists and tech luminaries warned that AI could cause “large-scale job displacement”. Finding your life’s work has never been so hard.

As they trawl LinkedIn—firing off AI-polished applications, to be rejected by AI-powered human-resources departments—graduates may wonder why they bothered with college at all. Among recent American grads, 40% are employed in roles that do not require a bachelor’s degree, according to a recent survey by the New York Fed.

Gen Z’s career challenges have prompted a rash of advice books. Bill Gurley, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, explains “how to thrive in a career you actually love”. Jodi Kantor, a journalist who helped to expose the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, has published a concise pep-talk for students billed as “a letter from an older ally”. Benjamin Todd, founder of a non-profit called 80,000 Hours, has written a book of the same name (80,000 hours is how long you can expect to spend at work, if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years).

Parents and teachers nudged students towards subjects like computing and law. Now those fields are among the most vulnerable to disruption by AI. As Mr Gurley puts it, the reassuring conveyor-belt of college leads to a job market that feels like an eight-lane freeway.

He and Ms Kantor both encourage students to pursue their passions. “Nothing will make you more successful than loving what you do for a living,” reasons Mr Gurley, who fell for computers when he first played “Pong” on an Atari. Many graduates see a choice between work that is fulfilling and work that is well paid. In fact it can be both, argues Ms Kantor, citing lawyers she met during her #MeToo investigations. “When they call me from their vacation homes, I glimpse just how lucrative this form of feminism can be,” she drily notes.

Yet both authors demonstrate why successful people make bad career advisers. “I went into a field that everyone told me was a disaster and experienced potency, impact…and even a measure of business success,” writes Ms Kantor, whose journalistic career—the New York Times, a Pulitzer prize and a book, “She Said”, turned into a movie—is atypical. Survivorship bias runs through her and Mr Gurley’s analyses. Both feature people who have made it in the bankruptcy-prone restaurant industry, apparently through hard work and passion. Mr Gurley cites a pair of star podcasters who “figured out what they loved, then figured out a way to make money”. It is hard to think of a better example than podcasting to illustrate how doing what you love does not always lead to a viable job.

Mr Todd’s book, the most original and helpful of the three, takes the opposite approach. Drawing on 15 years of advising people at the start of their working life, “80,000 Hours” looks at the career ladder not from the top down but from the bottom up—with surprising conclusions.

First, maybe do not follow your passions. Since the bestselling “What Colour is Your Parachute?” (1970), career books have told people to consider what they enjoy, then look for jobs that match. But many people aren’t sure what they want. And even if they have one strong interest, it may not lead to a job. In a survey in 2003, almost 90% of Canadian students said they loved music, art or sport—fields which accounted for just 3% of jobs in Canada. In 2020 a personality-based quiz by Britain’s education department advised many jobseekers to become lock-keepers, just missing the canal boom of the 18th century.

“‘Follow your passion’ gets it backwards,” Mr Todd writes. Instead of looking inward, “Get good at something that helps others, and passion will follow.” Helping others increases life satisfaction. Mastering a skill is satisfying in itself. If you are good at your job you will have more leverage to do enjoyable work than if you pursue a passion and are mediocre at it (consider the musicians who end up playing to classrooms rather than arenas).

To advise on how to do good, Mr Todd draws on “effective altruism”, a utilitarian philosophy which 80,000 Hours helped launch 15 years ago. Donating is one option (giving 10% of a typical American graduate salary of $77,000 to a malaria charity will save about 20 times more lives than working full-time as a doctor, he calculates). Another is working in a do-gooding field: AI regulation and great-power conflict-avoidance are among the areas he suggests could have the most positive impact. On the earnings dilemma, Mr Todd suggests that more money is unlikely to make you a lot happier: self-reported happiness levels off after household income hits around $75,000 a year.

“80,000 Hours” also has counter-intuitive ideas about how AI may disrupt careers. Automation eventually destroys jobs. But initially it drives up demand for certain skills. Banks employed more clerks after ATMs were invented, because they made it cheaper to run branches, so more opened. Only with online banking were clerks fully replaced. “The aim isn’t to find a single job that will never be automated, but rather to ride the wave, moving into the skills that become most valuable at each time.” That could mean jobs in AI related to model-training or cyber-security, or in services where demand will rise as AI lowers costs, such as health care.

Yet the focus on maximising good implies that only one choice is ever truly right. An emergency doctor could save more lives working in pandemic prevention, which in turn could be less important than nuclear disarmament, and so on. Judging the rightness of every action by its impact on the global good could drive anyone mad—and it sometimes does. John Stuart Mill, a pioneer of utilitarianism, fell into depression. Sam Bankman-Fried, a crypto entrepreneur and effective altruism’s best-known advocate, risked and lost billions from his customers.

Jobseekers can reassure themselves that many people take a while to find their life’s work. Sir Tony Blair was a rock-music promoter before he was Britain’s prime minister. Maya Angelou was a streetcar conductor before she became a celebrated writer. Colonel Sanders founded Kentucky Fried Chicken aged 62. Getting it right takes time. Anyone fretting over how to spend their 80,000 hours might start by investing a few in Mr Todd’s book.

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