“It’s so unfortunate. You’re one of the most resilient and adaptable people I know, you’re in the thick of it right now but I know you’ll look back and think what was all of this teaching you?”
This text from my friend followed some disappointing professional news. Something I had been working towards for almost a year was, overnight, no longer viable. It was obviously coronavirus related. What work activities have not been impacted negatively by the pandemic?
Nonetheless, resilient and adaptable are two words not often used to describe my generation, even though we have already had to develop those qualities when navigating the world of work.
Before the coronavirus crisis, things were already far from ideal for those of us trying to make a go of our careers. Younger workers have been faced with stark realities that did not affect previous generations. We don’t have access to secure final-salary pension schemes. We do have student loan debt, rising living costs and wage stagnation.
As much as we’ve been told that our love for avocados and brunch is to blame for our inability to buy a home, it is simply not true. I find this an insult to how hard many of us had to work to adapt to tough conditions following the 2008 financial crash.
We’ve been playing catch-up ever since. The popularity of side hustles — projects and small businesses set up alongside our main jobs — is not just because they are a “nice to have” creative outlet. They are a response to an economic climate where, if we were even to dream of owning a flat, we had to make extra money outside our nine to five. I came to recognise this reality just a few months into my first job after graduating, and later set up a side-hustle, Slay in Your Lane, with my best friend.
Similarly, workers in our 20s and 30s have job-hopped more than our parents did, not because we are fickle and lack loyalty — as the headlines sometimes suggest — but because staying in one company for too long can mean sticking with a salary that is not going to increase much, even with a promotion. Seeking opportunity elsewhere often is our way of getting around this — it is our hack.
We have been adept at finding ways to hack the system — and the fallout from Covid-19 means we will need to adapt even more. No wonder many of us feel frustrated. That generational angst was summed up brilliantly in a tweet by @JayElHarris (with nearly 250,000 likes): “Almost every late 20s/early 30s millennial I know was finally getting their shit together. I could cry if I wasn’t so angry.”
As I scrolled through the replies and across my peers’ social media over the past few weeks, the collective sentiment is “will I ever recover from this? I was finally doing the right things in my career, things were beginning to work out.” Not surprisingly, a study by Vice showed that millennials, in the prime of their careers, are more worried about the economic impact of Covid-19, than those who are older.
Amid the Tik Tok dance routines and the endless baking of banana bread that now fills our timelines, there is a real sense of looming anxiety about what is next. With words like “unprecedented” and “uncertainty” used repeatedly to describe a working world out of our control, trying to navigate and plan for this new normal — and predict the impact it will have on our careers — can be overwhelming.
Maintaining perspective amid the chaos is a job in itself. I have been oscillating between work feeling a bit meaningless and then having a sudden panic to be productive — to “make the most of it”, as my inner voice says. I read practical advice on things that are in my control, such as updating my portfolio and reaching out to industry contacts. Podcasts such as The Manifesto Read help to explain the economic situation plainly.
Reading the career aspirations I set for 2020, it feels like they were written in a parallel universe. But despite the uncertainty ahead, I take comfort in the fact that millennials are a resilient and adaptable generation because we’ve always had to be and this setback will be no different.
The writer is co-author of ‘Slay in Your Lane’
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April 30, 2020 at 01:04AM
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When it come to careers, millennials are resilient - Financial Times
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