Why Generation Z Is Rewriting the Rules of Work

Artificial Intelligence is changing how we work. Generation Z is changing why we work.

One is transforming the tools. The other is questioning the rules. And I think that second shift is the one getting the least attention.

Part of why I say that is personal. Six years in my career. Six different roles. Five companies. That is the pattern for my generation, and the data backs it up, as I will show further down.

I studied Industrial Engineering. The best in my class, the ones who got the top grades, landed great jobs fast. The old formula (effort, merit, a bit of luck) still works for that 1 or 2% chasing absolute excellence.

For everyone else, for those of us who got good grades without chasing perfection, that same formula barely guarantees anything anymore. Not professionally, not personally.

I remember a professor who, after an exam, mentioned almost in passing that degrees keep asking for less effort, that students keep committing less to their coursework. It surprised me, because my degree never felt easy.

Thinking about it afterward, I believe the responsibility falls on both sides. On young people, who sometimes do not keep pace with what previous generations set. And on the education system, which has not kept up with how fast the world has changed over the last thirty or forty years.

The result is that a good degree is no longer enough on its own. You have to keep learning as a habit, and being self-taught went from a nerdy trait to one of the most valuable skills you can have. In practice it is simpler than it sounds: reading about the same topic from more than one source, not settling for the first version you find, drawing your own conclusions before repeating someone else's, and being willing to question what seems obvious.

This idea of being self-taught takes on another meaning once you connect it to what is happening at a generational level. If Artificial Intelligence is the technology forcing us to rethink how we do things fastest, Generation Z might be its human equivalent: the generation forcing us to rethink why we do them, fastest of all.

Flaws and all, because we have them, we are shifting entire industries and ways of living that used to seem fixed.

The formula that no longer holds

To see how fast this has changed, I think of a story like Emi Nietfeld's.

At fourteen she was hospitalized for an eating disorder. She later went through the foster care system, and as a teenager she wrote her college application essays with no fixed roof over her head, sitting in her old Toyota Corolla.

She set out to do what anyone trying to escape that would: get the best grades, get into a great university, land a great job. She did it. She got into Harvard, graduated in 2015, and had a job offer from Google waiting for her.

It is the formula we were taught: effort plus merit plus a bit of luck equals mobility. It worked, at least for her.

What is interesting is that her own book, Acceptance, is not the typical phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes story. Nietfeld uses it to question why we need these stories so badly to prove the system works, when it worked that way ten or fifteen years ago, and less and less today.

In July 2026, Nietfeld published a piece about exactly this. I recommend reading it in full: Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them. If you would rather keep reading here first, let's continue.

Mental health as a condition

Nietfeld spends a good part of that piece explaining why, for this generation, mental health matters more than ever. She uses an example I find perfect: elite athletes.

Their professional shelf life runs somewhere between 15 and 25 years, depending on how physically demanding the sport is. That is short compared to the 45 years of a typical working life. Every year an athlete retires early or takes a break, part of that window of opportunity, both financial and developmental, goes with it.

Even so, there are Gen Z athletes who chose to stop. Alysa Liu left figure skating because she stopped enjoying it, came back on her own terms, and won gold. Naomi Osaka refused to talk to the press when she felt it was hurting her. Simone Biles pulled out of several finals at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics: the team final, the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars, and floor, returning only for the balance beam final, where she won bronze.

Nietfeld sums it up with a line I find key: there is a limit to the personal cost of success.

In July 2026, in the middle of the World Cup, Ferran Torres said something similar in his own words: "when you're mentally well, you're well at everything else" (Infobae). The footballer had gone through a serious rough patch in his career, sought professional help, and since then keeps Ferran, the footballer, separate from Ferran, the person.

I think we are looking at a generation that is after self-knowledge, real skill-building, becoming someone of real value. More than fame or admiration.

One year, one job

This connects to another data point I found on Xataka, one of the tech and economy outlets I follow most closely.

According to the Randstad report they cite, Generation Z stays an average of 1.1 years in each job. Millennials, 1.8. Gen X and baby boomers, between 2.8 and 2.9. In my case, it checks out almost exactly.

The reasons the report gives line up with what I felt myself. The main driver is the search for growth and learning. 40% of Gen Z say they always keep their career goals in mind when changing jobs, the highest share of any generation.

68% say they feel committed to their job, but many feel their values do not match the company's, or that the company is not investing in their development.

In my five job changes, it was almost always about finding more room to learn. The one that does not fit that pattern was about a mismatch in values.

There is something the report does not mention but that I see all the time: switching jobs is still, in practice, the fastest way to grow your salary. If a company trusts (and pays) someone coming from outside more than the person already inside, it turns into a place people pass through, not a place with a future. And that says a lot about how little trust companies sometimes put in their own people.

Something similar happens to people who move abroad for work and come back, usually after four or five years. It is fair to value resilience and the ability to adapt to new cultures. But if staying in your own country ends up read as a synonym for standing still, that is worth examining.

The fact that young people rotate the most does not mean everyone else does not do it too, they just do it with more room between jumps. This pushes companies to compete harder for talent, but it also makes it much harder to build a real sense of belonging to the brand you work for. Branding and internal culture should be in higher demand than ever.

Saying what we think

There is another thing that changed, and it shows up less in the data: the courage to say what you actually think. About a job, about how a team is led, about a team that is not working.

Assertively, with empathy, but saying it out loud. Previous generations often made up for it with more hours and more quiet effort. Generation Z is willing to say it out loud instead.

The more of us who do that, always looking to improve rather than just complain, the better off we will all be.

Critical thinking, not just information

Something that shows up less, but that I feel in my own generation, is that we know how to think critically. Not all of us equally, and not always at one hundred percent, because we are still learning. But we are capable of forming our own opinions about things. And in the age of AI, that matters more than ever.

I find it curious that it is only now that figures like Bill Gates talk about the dangers of misinformation. In the Netflix docuseries What's Next? The Future with Bill Gates (2024), he went as far as saying he had "handed the problem" of misinformation to the younger generation.

Meanwhile, there is already testimony showing that the same platforms we use every day were shaped by interests that had nothing to do with the truth. Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing to the US Congress, in a letter from August 2024 addressed to lawmaker Jim Jordan, that in 2021 the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor content about COVID, including humor and satire. He said giving in to that pressure was wrong, three years after it happened.

If even the people who build these platforms admit the information that circulated was shaped by outside pressure, it makes sense to read with your own judgment, compare sources, and not hand off the job of thinking to anyone else, not to an algorithm, not to an authority.

I think we are moving, like in Simon Sinek's golden circle, from what we do to how we do it, and from how we do it, more and more, to why we do what we do. That is where things really start to make sense.

The truth is that the more ownership we take of our own decisions and our own learning, the more real value we can bring. And that is learned by reading, trying, asking new questions and, above all, doing.

That is why I want to leave you a link to try Claude Code free for a week (referral link) and build or create whatever comes to mind, whether it is a website or an app. If you are just starting out, I would recommend trying Lovable first, it is simpler. The idea does not need to be worth millions. As long as you learn something along the way, it is already worth it.

Artificial Intelligence is changing how we work. Generation Z is changing why we work. Learning to take ownership of both questions is, perhaps, what falls on us now.