Strategies for Helping Gen Z Pursue Jobs that Help Others
By Richard Weissbourd, Milena Batanova, Kiran Bhai, Srushti Jayaramu and Michael McLaughlin
Making Caring Common, in collaboration with Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, recently released the report, Gen Z Wants to Do Good: How Helping Others Supports Meaning and Wellbeing. Based on a national survey, the report explores what Gen Zers prioritize in work, where they find meaning and purpose, and factors influencing their mental health.
The survey revealed 79% of Gen Z respondents (those born between 1997 and 2012) want a job in the future that is “mainly focused” on helping others or making a positive difference in others’ lives, which the report notes may be crucial to the mental health and well-being of Gen Zers, as well as “vital for our country’s moral and civic life.”
Yet there are significant barriers to Gen Z pursuing helping jobs, the survey finds. While Gen Z aspires to do good in their careers, other factors appear to be more important, including financial security and work-life balance.
As we state in the foreword of the report, motivating and enabling far more Gen Zers to pursue careers that benefit others and have positive social impact is, of course, no simple challenge, and a full exploration of strategies that could meet this challenge is well beyond the scope of the foreword and the report. But our data point to several strategies that may move the needle.
Increasing pay and decreasing financial pressure
About half of our respondents cited low pay as a barrier to seeking these jobs. Given the state of funding and political will in the country, efforts to increase pay are certainly uphill. But it’s important to keep trying to find new and creative ways to move the needle on pay, including pay for frontline workers — whether teachers, crossing guards, nurses, or home health aides — and entry-level nonprofit staff. City and county governments might, for example, provide wage supplements or tax credits for those willing to work in areas with provider shortages. It will also help to increase young people’s awareness of helping jobs that offer higher salaries, such as education and health technology companies, corporate philanthropy, and foundations. Loan forgiveness and scholarship programs targeted to helping professions, including forgiveness for several years of service in high‑need areas, can be pivotal. So can rent subsidies and housing and relocation bonuses for those willing to work in under-resourced communities.
Reducing the emotional toll of helping jobs
Yet money is certainly not the only issue– half of our survey respondents did not identify money as a barrier to pursuing these jobs– and concerns about the emotional toll of helping professions were just as common, concerns that are often squarely based in reality. Reducing this emotional toll will require, among other strategies, careful attention to work conditions, which, like increasing pay, is no simple challenge. Yet here, too, it’s vital to keep seeking ways to lower caseloads and class sizes and to provide sane work hours, and to assure that frontline providers have the resources and skills to be effective in their jobs. Supporting frontline workers may also mean making available various forms of mental health support, particularly for those care providers in highly fraught, demanding roles such as child protective service work.
Helping jobs such as teaching and child care work can also often be isolating and feel repetitive over time (Cumming, 2017; Jerrim & Sims, 2021). To attract and retain more people in these professions, it’s hard to understate the importance of creating workplace cultures where staff feel connected and part of a common project, have regular opportunities for learning and growth, have input on key decisions, and can move up a career ladder, taking on different and higher-level responsibilities. These career paths, and how to navigate them, ought to be visible to potential employees.
Changing the narrative about meaningful work
Thoughtfully constructed public and private campaigns that change the narratives about these professions may make these jobs feel worth the stress, including campaigns and stories that convey how deeply meaningful these jobs can be and how important that meaning can be, as our data suggests, in countering stress and protecting mental health. Many teens and young adults are clearly affected by how helping jobs are portrayed in the media and understood by their peers, and these campaigns can seek to elevate the status of these jobs, including challenging the idea that these jobs don’t require high-level skills. Too often, child care workers, teachers, social workers, and many other providers are portrayed as soft and their jobs depicted as simple. Yet these workers and others routinely navigate highly complex human challenges and often have to make daily, nuanced decisions that profoundly influence people's well-being and safety. Consider the challenges of a social worker with a large caseload of families, each with their own, often hard-to-decipher, dynamics and challenges, sometimes with multiple family members facing emotional and physical risks. Or the challenges of teaching, without adequate resources, a preschool class composed of children with widely varying needs, levels of academic readiness, and learning styles. These campaigns might also focus on the specific, concrete impact of these jobs, avoiding murky calls for “making a difference,” and celebrate high-impact organizations and individuals.
Many other types of strategies can make a difference. For example, many high school students never entertain the idea of pursuing these careers or have little understanding of what makes these careers meaningful. Well-structured, credit-bearing volunteering, service learning, and internships in high school and college — whether tutoring, supporting a non-profit focused on the environment, or assisting in an emergency room — can make these jobs more palpable and enticing. So can guest speakers, such as young social workers and nurses, who are authentic and candid about what is both meaningful and challenging about their work. Courses that encourage students to reflect on what it means to be of service, or on care and ethics in human relationships, can make this work more intellectually exciting.
Creating new pathways and Harnessing Gen Z’s aspirations
Finally, attracting more young people to helping professions will require public and private efforts to create pathways to these jobs that are rigorous but shorter and less expensive. That may mean, for instance, alternative forms of certification, online programs that don’t require young people to pay full tuition or to relocate, combined degree and certification programs that shorten the time to careers, and paid residencies and internships that count toward licensure.
There is much else that might strengthen GenZ’s resolve in seeking and keeping these jobs. Yet perhaps what’s most important is not that we pursue any particular strategy, but that we avoid what so many generations have done before us. There is risk in negatively stereotyping a whole generation, our future citizens and leaders, including underestimating what they are capable of. And as AI transforms the economy and perhaps much else about our lives, we may need young people who not only have strong interpersonal and caring skills, but who can respond — and at times resist — these changes with ethical clarity and their full humanity. Instead of criticizing Gen Z, we should think hard about who they are and what they value, how we can develop their interpersonal and ethical capacities, and how their aspirations might be harnessed in jobs that work for them and create a better world.
References
Cumming. T. (2017). Early childhood educators’ well-being: An updated review of the literature. Early Childhood Education Journal, 45(5), 583–593.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-016-0818-6