Working part-time was once considered a sign of poor financial planning and meant admitting that your current salary wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Or maybe it was and has just been wasted on boring things. The second job is considered to be equivalent to the professional standard of an elementary school cram school.
But that’s not the case for Gen Z, for whom side hustles are not only common, but coveted. According to a survey, 40% of Generation Z (the oldest of whom are now 26 years old) said they make money through jobs and side hustles. poll From consulting firm Ernst & Young.It’s both the norm and the cool factor, says Marcie Merriman, EY Americas corporate culture insights and client strategy leader wealthGen Z is pushing to rethink workplace norms and not dedicate themselves entirely to their careers, while also dealing with a cutthroat job market that has them worried about their financial future.
If nothing else, side hustles are a way for Gen Z to make extra money during these economic turmoils.In another as-yet-unpublished survey EY shared with us wealth, 73% of Gen Z said they have a side hustle to “make more money.” Merriman said it’s a way to hedge against the financial turmoil that could occur when the economy downturns and companies lay off workers. Generation Z is raised by parents They lived through the worst of the 2008 financial crisis. They watched as Millennials graduated from college and entered the job market at the nadir of the Great Recession.They themselves have grown up during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought the economy to a standstill and led to record layoffs March and April 2020.
“If nothing else, what they’re seeing is that organizations are going to cut expenses, take steps to stay profitable,” Merriman said. “They see this happening to their parents, they see this happening It’s happening to millennials, and many of them have experienced this themselves over the past few years.”
Witnessing the reality of the economic downturn firsthand caused them to reexamine their priorities and develop a new pragmatism about financial stability, the EY report said. 52% said they were worried about not having enough money, and 39% said they experienced significant stress from making poor choices about money. The tumult of the past decade has left such a lasting impression, in the same unpublished survey, 15% of Gen Z said they started a side hustle to save for retirement—considering the respondents were all under 10 In their late teens and early 20s, the numbers are staggering.
Side hustles are seen as “a pragmatic decision and a symbol of independence. It’s not necessarily out of necessity or passion, it’s seen as a smart move,” the report said.
Gen Z is open to side hustles because their identities are not tied to their careers
Gen Z is also rethinking how much of themselves they want to give to their employers. While they want to do their jobs well, they are wary of tying their identities to their jobs and their workload. The popularity and acceptance of side hustles stems from the notion that Gen Z doesn’t derive its self-worth entirely from job performance, as many previous generations of professionals did.
Baby boomers view bleary-eyed late nights at the office and skipping family events as they work their way up the corporate ladder as a cost of doing business. Millennials have begun to shift attitudes toward work-life balance and gig work, albeit primarily to make ends meet. Gen Z goes a step further, arguing that they clearly have no intention of tying their identity to a career, making them more willing to try a side hustle. For them, “personal sacrifice does not equal professional value,” Merriman said.
“Personal sacrifice is more of an industrial age measure of when you clock in and how much time you put in,” she adds. “We are not in that era. We are in the digital era.”
Gen Z is open to side hustles, their ability to shed any stigma, and their lack of interest in proving themselves through sacrifice—which they see as unnecessary and unrewarding—is also because they have seemingly viable offices Work substitutes. Merriman said the Internet has removed many of the barriers to getting a side hustle. E-commerce and social media suddenly provided a marketplace for aspiring creatives to sell their work; for Gen Z, who tend to be more Type A, it provided opportunities for networking around the world, and suddenly, waterroom conversations It seems irrelevant. “Their digital growth has really opened doors that previous generations didn’t,” Merriman said.
This has changed the way Gen Z aspires to make money, even though like other generations, they may still fantasize about making easy money. “For Generation X, being in a rock band or a garage band was your dream to make money,” Merriman said. “It’s an influencer for this generation and has more followers than anyone else.”
Employers shouldn’t resist Gen Z’s love of side hustles
They see no need to work long hours and get promoted to prove their success. They don’t think a “day job” is the only way to get rich. In fact, they are not interested in getting rich at all. The Ernst & Young report compares a 2006 Pew Research Center study of Millennials (when most were the same age as Gen Z in Ernst & Young’s survey), which showed that eight in 10 said getting rich was the first or second priority in their lives. Two important goals. In the EY study, less than a third of Gen Z said this was the case.
Like most generations, especially those keen to change entrenched norms, Gen Z has a reputation for being lazy. EY research warns employers against such thinking. (After all, about 40% of Gen Zers work two jobs.) Employers should “understand that while they will never have 100% of Gen Zers’ dedicated time, these early-career employees are perfectly capable of devoting their full-time Give 100% effort at work”. % of their efforts while also managing their side hustles,” the report said.
Merriman doesn’t think it’s a cause for concern for employers, either. This is not a deterioration of the collective work ethic, she said, but simply an evolution of the current state of the profession. Millennials coined terms like the “gig economy” and “side hustle” and made working part-time no longer taboo, a phenomenon that reaches its peak in Gen Z. “Gen Z is normalizing side hustles,” she said.
The report is more clear than Merriman’s in showing that Gen Z is bringing about a permanent shift in the workplace. “Not long ago, working professionals questioned women’s ability to do their jobs effectively after getting married or having children, and some were even fired for doing so,” the Ernst & Young report reads. “In the coming years, today’s focus on what employees have in addition to their employers will The restrictive view of multiple sources of income will be considered equally outdated.”
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