The Ladder Nobody Wants to Climb
Picture a 23-year-old today. She has a degree, a decent resume, and a LinkedIn profile full of buzzwords. Two years ago, she would have been racing for a graduate scheme at a consultancy or a marketing rotation at a big consumer brand. Today, she's looking up apprenticeships. Not as a backup. As the plan.
She isn't alone. Labour-market data circulating this week shows that nearly one in four Gen Z workers are now seriously considering walking away from desk jobs in favour of skilled trades — plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, HVAC. Three-quarters of them associate white-collar work, the term for office-based knowledge jobs, with burnout. And April's jobs report didn't help: while the broader economy kept adding workers, office hiring stayed compressed as companies leaned harder on AI to do the entry-level tasks new graduates used to cut their teeth on.
For decades, the deal was simple. Sit at a desk for forty years, climb a ladder, retire comfortable. That deal is visibly breaking — and a generation is doing the maths in public.
